You remember it better than I do!

Sure, but I do think, there's quite a number of animals with some form of vocabulary, like songbirds, whales, dolphins. To some degree, we do understand these, but there's still huge amounts of vocabulary we haven't deciphered, nor can actually respond to/with.

And even if those are basic exchanges, I feel like we could learn a ton about the different forms of communications and where our limitations are. Like, ants communicate with pheromones and bees with dances. Ultimately, we'd likely still send out EM-waves, simply because they travel quite well through space, but maybe a bee/alien would think our attempt at an obvious encoding is just background noise.

Yeah, I guess, I was also specifically complaining that they're not put into the limelight as much, so that folks from outside the field (like me) hear much about it. It always feels like I have to actively research to know what state-of-the-art is. Meanwhile, this news outlet is apparently doing an alien week.

I guess, I'm mostly just tired from how much limelight aliens are getting. But I also guess, broadcasting is basically the only useful thing we can do with potential aliens, so maybe this is the wrong tree to be barking up...

This is actually what this community is about. And, so far as I can tell, it really depends on how you define language. Possibly the most decoded natural animal language so far is that of prairie dogs. They have managed to identify sounds that represent nouns, verbs, and adjectives. When you change the color of the shirt of an approaching person, a predictable unit of the prairie dog call changes. They have even found that they have unique sounds for abstract shapes like rectangle and circle, which is especially intriguing since these are the sorts of things that they wouldn't often come across in nature.

It is true, however, that prairie dogs are doing little more than just labeling. For the more advanced cognitive stuff we need to look at examples such as Koko the gorilla, while we were not able to decode much of a natural gorilla language, Koko did show that she was able to use English at the level of a small child. What she was capable of was way beyond simply labeling. For example, Koko used English sign language to blame a human assistant for breaking the sink in living quarters. She also was able to tell jokes and laugh about them, indicating that she understood what a sense of humor is.

We are probably still a long way from decoding the most advanced non-human communication systems on the planet. The ways that some dolphins combine uniquely identifiable syllables would put the most advanced human beatbocers to shame. While humans generally combine syllables one after the other, dolphins do this while simultaneously combining syllables on top of each other. They have demonstrated abilities as advanced as devising and coordinating a unique, non-rehearsed action between two dolphins after being asked to do so by a human. They both received the command from the human, went underwater, and then returned to perform an agreed upon action together, one which they had neither ever done before.

With advances in machine learning, we may just be very surprised by what we discover is being communicated between the other animals we share the planet with.

Whales definitely do. They even have regional accents. It probably isn't as complex as ours, but we can't even understand that.

No, my point is that we're struggling with simplistic communication with readily available creatures. Maybe we should practise more with those, before we try to communicate arbitrarily complex ideas with creatures no one has ever seen.

Good lord I love that book.

I really like that he recognized that you'll have 2 beings both motivated to understand each other. The back and forth communication, along with some coding skills, made good progress pretty quick.