Of course, we can't study alien intelligence directly, because we haven't found any yet. But we can work from the principle that life on other planets will be subject to natural selection like on Earth, and this will constrain the kind of communication that aliens might use.

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Maybe they won't use sound like we do, but they will need to exchange information with other individuals, so they will likely be a cooperative species. There may also be fundamental constraints on the nature of language that means that aliens may have more in common with us than we think.

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Click here for more information on the recent Decoding Alien Intelligences workshop at the SETI Institute.