And it's not just intelligent life, either, when you think about it; it requires intelligible life. It doesn't matter how clever the individual is; without a re

And it's not just intelligent life, either, when you think about it; it requires intelligible life. It doesn't matter how clever the individual is; without a relatively efficient means of bundling up abstractions and hypotheticals and so on and transferring them from one individual to another, progress is slow, limited and contextually bound. There is something special about language - a serialization scheme for thought - that sets it apart from mere communication, and there is no reason to assume that it's an inevitable natural consequence of individual intelligence. Call it another term in the Drake equation.