Imagine using a version of Google translate that can only translate every seventh or eighth word without context or tone. Would it be useful at all?
When my cat wants to play he faces me directly, at my level if possible, and leans forward, whiskers relaxed, before screeching at me at loud volume.
When he wants food he doesn’t bother with being level with me. He assumes an aggressive posture, follows me around and tries to get in my path, all before screeching at me at loud volume.
When yums are impending, he also screeches at loud volume, but his face and body language take on an anticipatory posture, and his tail pops straight up.
When he’s not feeling well, he screeches at loud volume and assumes a hunched stance, whiskers pulled back, ears at different angles, often with his tail wrapped protectively around his little body in a sort of uncomfortable version of the classic loaf.
The common element is the loud screeching. An AI-powered app would have a very difficult time telling the difference between a “Feed me now, human!” screech and a “I want to play wand toy hunting games now, human!” screech, and probably wouldn’t fare much better with the “I don’t feel so good” screech. (MeowTalk did, after all, try to convince me that Buddy was serenading me with sweet nothings when he was demanding food.)
Years ago I was bullish about AI’s ability to translate meows. Given enough data, I reasoned, AI could crack the code. But that was a human way of thinking, anthropomorphizing my Bud into a furry little human whose “language” was limited to vocalizations.
It’s not.
No cat limits their communication to meows, trills and chirps, not even a vocal little dude like my Buddy.
Cat communication is multi-modal, consisting of general body language, whisker position, ear position, tail position and movement, pupil expression, fur rigidity, gait, scent-marking, scent-sharing, and for our exclusive benefit, meows. The latter are essentially a second language to them, adopted out of necessity because they realize we respond to vocalizations but are mostly oblivious to everything their tails, whiskers, fur, ears, tails, pheromones and eyes are telling us.
Now who’s supposed to be the intelligent species?
“Dude, why are you so dense? I’m shouting at you with my whiskers, my tail and my meows!”
The fact that feline communication is inherently multi-modal is the reason why talking boards and AI meow translation apps do not work. It’s like using a version of Google translate that only interprets every seventh or eighth word, stripped of all context and tone. Actually, it’s worse than that.
If you’ve spent any time on Facebook, TikTok or Youtube, chances are you’ve come across cat talking boards. They’re even more useless than the AI apps that claim to translate meows because they not only assume feline communication is a single-channel affair, they also place additional burdens on felines, like understanding human language syntax (something no animal has ever been able to do) and highly abstract concepts.
How does a cat know a question is a request for information?
How does a cat understand temporal concepts represented as abstract sounds with nothing that ties those sounds – and the buttons that correspond to them – to concepts like “yesterday,” “tomorrow” and “later”?
Hmmm, something’s off here…
In one video I viewed, a woman convinced herself that her cat’s random slapping of talking board buttons meant he wanted to discuss an animal he’d possibly seen outside a window the night before. The number of assumptions and logical leaps required to arrive at that kind of conclusion is staggering.
I want to be clear that I’m not saying studying animal communication is a futile effort. On the contrary, everything we’ve learned indicates animals – especially our domesticated companion animals and the most cognitively gifted wild species – are not only conscious and cognitive, but have rich inner lives with their own thought processes, opinions, emotions, likes and dislikes.
But cracking those codes is a serious effort that will involve a concerted effort to negate our human bias as much as possible, attempts to see the world from an animal’s perspective, and multi-modal analysis that doesn’t just consider what we can see, hear and smell, but what our pals’ sensoriums can detect.
After all, we know that cats can hear in frequencies we cannot, that they possess a sense of smell as much as 20 times more sensitive than ours. There’s ongoing research into whether animals can detect magnetic fields, and differences in vision — such as perceiving different color tones and a drastically increased sensitivity to motion — mean a very intentional means of communicating by our cat may require the equivalent of a bullhorn for us to pick up on what they’re “saying.”
One day we may learn that they consider us the dim-witted ones who cannot see, hear or smell the obvious. We may get to that point, but not through half-hearted, unscientific efforts like labeled buttons and simple algorithms.
Kittens remind us what it feels like to experience pure joy in discovering the world.
July 10 is National Kitten Day, and what better way to inspire people to adopt and help relieve pressure on shelters than by showing photos of kitten Bud to prove how cute these little guys can be?
Even as a kitten, Buddy was dashingly handsome and had huge muscles! Top image: My mom holds Bud and my niece, who were both babies at the time.
Hiding in my sneakers. Jumping on my head and biting my feet while I’m trying to sleep. Zooms at every ungodly hour imaginable. Boxing his own reflection in the mirror. Inexplicably destroying large objects around the house despite his tiny size and weight. “Fighting” enemies on the screen while I’m trying to play video games. Being obsessed with nursing from my right earlobe.
Those are just some of Bud’s charming behaviors from kittenhood. I miss those days of curiosity, extreme playfulness and adventure.
While I would like to adopt an overlooked adult cat in the future because it’s much more difficult for them to find homes, I would not trade my experience with Kitten Bud for anything.
Perhaps best of all is seeing the pure joy and wonder expressed by a kitten who plays in snow for the first time, discovers the fun of playing with guitar strings or figures out how much fun it is to startle his human by sneaking up ninja-like and giving him a horror movie jump scare.
Everything is new and exciting to a kitten, and it’s an amazing thing to see and participate in. Kitten energy is happy energy.
That’s easy: first contact with an alien civilization.
I’m a space and science fiction fanatic. I mainline science fiction novels, keep tabs on the latest discoveries via the JWST, and I think about what’s out there probably more than I should.
There’s a burning desire in our hearts — for some of us, at least — to know for sure that we’re not the only ones, that humanity is not alone in a cold, lonely and infinite universe.
The events of 2026 are testament to that desire to know. Between the government release of UFO-related documents, former government employees coming forward with tall tales of crashed ships of non-terrestrial origin, and the return of Steven Spielberg to the director’s chair for another film speculating about what’s Out There, we’ve been thinking about aliens quite a bit collectively.
As for that central question, I’m not talking about simple cellular life. I don’t think you can find an astrophysicist, astrobiologist, astronomer, evolutionary biologist or anyone in a tangentially related field who honestly thinks life is unique to our planet.
The more relevant question is whether we are the sole sapient species, the lone civilization in our galaxy.
Credit: CaptainFrank/Pexels
Think about the numbers: There are an estimated 300 billion star systems and trillions of planets in the Milky Way! Life has had a lot of places to evolve.
The Fermi paradox
That was the point the physicist Enrico Fermi made in 1950, when he had a now-famous lunchtime conversation with fellow scientists at Los Alamos. Probability alone indicates the galaxy should be teeming with life.
So, he asked his colleagues, where is everyone?
It’s now known as the Fermi paradox, and it’s guaranteed to come up in almost every conversation about the possibility of intelligent aliens. With so many star systems, planets and moons, surely some other species took an evolutionary path toward intelligence.
It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course. In a universe that is 13.7 billion years old, there has been enough time for innumerable species to evolve and fade, for countless empires to rise and fall. That means the question is “When is everyone?” just as much as it’s “Where is everyone?”
The truth is we’ve only been looking in earnest for about half a century. It’s only in the last four or five decades that we’ve had telescopes like the Hubble, Spitzer, Kepler and James Webb, which have revolutionized astronomy by giving us views we could previously only dream of.
It was only in the 90s that astronomers pointed the venerable Hubble at a black, seemingly empty patch of space, took a two week exposure and changed our understanding of the cosmos forever when the resulting image showed some 10,000 galaxies that were too faint to see before.
That patch covered only 2.6 arc minutes, or 1/24 millionth of the sky!
A partial image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Credit: NASA
Despite what we’ve learned, we’ve barely begun the search for other intelligent civilizations.
Drawing any conclusions from our efforts so far would be like organizing a manhunt, then calling it off five seconds later because the suspect hasn’t been caught yet. Fifty years is nothing when scouring the cosmos. It’s less than an eyeblink of an eyeblink on a galactic scale.
Looking in the wrong place
As for the idea that aliens have visited us, that they crossed the interstellar void to etch patterns in our crops, delight stoners with light shows and evade every camera on the planet except for low resolution bricks from the dawn of the cell phone era, I’m not buying it. Neither should anyone else. Likewise for the claim by the JD Vances of the world insisting alleged UFOs are “demons” sent to torment us.
As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is abundantly clear that the UFO enthusiast community can only offer blurry images not because of a lack of high resolution cameras, but because high res photos of the “phenomena” reveal they are mundane objects. They only become strange spacecraft when you blur them and squint.
Bird. Insect close to the camera. Exhaust plume. Debris. Visual artefact. Maybe. Proof of aliens? Absolutely not.
But there’s another, more important reason why aliens are not joyriding through our skies: if aliens are out there, there simply has not been enough time for them to become aware of our existence, let alone travel here.
Even light is “slow” on a galactic scale
As most of us know, when we look at the stars we’re seeing them as they were in the past, not as they are now. That’s because the distances between stars are so mind-bogglingly great that even light, which moves faster than anything in our universe, takes ages to cross the void.
The same limitation applies for anyone who might be looking in our direction from somewhere else in the galaxy. They see our star system as it was, not as it is. They see a silent star system without signs of an intelligent civilization.
Starliners and generation ships are popular concepts in science fiction for interstellar journeys that can take decades, centuries or longer.
Our galaxy is more than 100,000 light years across, so let’s say an intelligent alien race exists relatively close by in galactic terms, at “only” 500 light years away.
We have been a technological civilization for only a short time and didn’t create signals powerful enough to reach beyond our star system until the 1970s, according to SETI. That means there weren’t technosignatures hinting at our presence until about 50 years ago.
As a result, the soonest our hypothetical aliens could become aware we exist is about 450 years from now. That is how long it will take light carrying information about our technosignatures to reach them.
If our hypothetical alien friends are looking in our direction (a massive if in a galaxy with 300 billion stars to analyze), and if they have highly advanced telescopes, they might detect us. If we imagine they’re friendly and they send a message saying “Howdy, neighbors! You’re not alone! There are wonders to discover and many civilizations to meet out here!” it would take another 500 years for the message to reach us.
That means we wouldn’t know anything until around the year 3,000, if we survive that long without blowing ourselves up. (That’s a real possibility, and things aren’t looking very promising right now.)
And again, that’s if hypothetical intelligent aliens exist in our immediate galactic neighborhood. If there’s an intelligent civilization that exists, say, 4,000 light years away — which is still not very far in galactic terms — the soonest we could hear from them is about 8,000 years from now. (Four thousand for them to detect our technosignatures, four thousand for their message to reach us.)
The point is, space is big. Ridiculously, incomprehensibly, stupidly vast. More than 99.995 percent of the galaxy cannot be aware of our existence yet, let alone travel here, because of the reasons explained above.
The distances between stars are so great that we cannot comprehend them as they are, because nothing in human experience compares. We can only understand them in the abstract. As terrestrial animals with short lives, we are simply not equipped to live or think on galactic timescales.
The sun’s location within the Milky Way galaxy. Not to scale.
To put this in context another way, our closest stellar neighbor, a volatile triple star system, is 4.3 light years away. Yet even with the most advanced propulsion systems currently available to us, it would take us more than 70,000 years to get there!
If we manage to crack fusion and humanity’s most brilliant engineers are able to fit a starship with a compact fusion reactor, the travel time to the nearest star becomes “only” about 7,000 years.
Understanding just how big space is, and how long it takes to travel between stars, goes a long way to explaining why we’re wasting our time and resources with a fruitless search for alleged alien craft in our skies.
Light moves at 186,282 miles per second. Credit: Ehsan Ahmadnejad/Pexels
So where does that leave us?
I believe that one day we will learn we’re not alone. By we, I mean our species. I really hope it happens in my lifetime, but for all the reasons explained above, that’s wishfull thinking. The universe doesn’t care what we want, and it certainly doesn’t change the geometry of space-time to accommodate the wishes of dreamers on Earth.
Alien: Friend or foe?
I don’t think we’ll have to worry about belligerence. If a civilization is capable of sending ships to us, there’s literally nothing in our inventory of meager, planet-based resources that could interest a species that advanced. They wouldn’t want to eat us, because our biology would not be compatible. The amount of energy our entire civilization can muster would be laughable to an interstellar species.
And as the physicist Michio Kaku has argued, there’s a very strong argument to be made that if a species is advanced enough that interstellar travel is relatively trivial, it would have long ago shed any tendencies toward tribalism, sectarian violence or inventing gods of the gaps. You simply cannot reach that stage of advancement if you’re wasting resources and your most brilliant minds on war and petty divisions. (Kaku knows that better than anyone. His mentor was Edward Teller of Manhattan Project fame.)
The more significant danger, as Kaku likes to say, is that we may be beneath their notice and we’ll get “paved over.” A civilization capable of building cosmic megastructures, for example, wouldn’t consult us any more than we’d consult ants before laying a six lane super highway over their ant hill.
Still, there’s always a chance we’ll encounter something like MorningLightMountain, the nightmare alien intelligence from Peter F. Hamilton’s incomparable novel Pandora’s Star. The problem with MorningLightMountain wasn’t that diplomacy failed. There was no disagreement over resources or territory. Humans didn’t threaten it.
Rather, the alien’s psychology was so different from ours that it could not understand the concept of allowing other life to exist in the galaxy. No amount of discussion or attempts to persuade it would have made a difference, so immediately upon learning of our existence it launched a genocidal war that forms the bulk of Pandora’s Star and its sequel, Judas Unchained, two of the most beloved books in the modern science fiction canon.
Still, I’d like to think there is a galactic fraternity out there, an informal alliance of intelligent species united by curiosity and the effort to understand our universe. Whatever’s out there is likely to take forms we can never imagine and think in ways that never occurred to us.
If one day we do make first contact, I hope the best of humanity will be our representatives. And on that day, I hope humanity will be awestruck by the wonder of the universe, realize that slaughtering each other over land or beliefs is insane, and finally become united as a species.
Or even better, finally united as the children of Earth. After all, Buddy has made it abundantly clear that if I come into possession of a starship, he gets the most comfortable seat on board and gets to drive. The latter ain’t happening, but as for the former, I’d be thrilled to explore the cosmos with my little pal.
The species has webbed feet and lives in some of the most remote regions in the world.
The flat-headed cat is one of the most elusive and rare felines in the world, and for three decades conservationists thought it had died out in Thailand, leaving only a handful of places where the species still eked out an existence.
Now there’s good news: the tiny feline, which weighs about half as much as a house cat, has been spotted in a remote region of the country.
Camera traps set up for an ecological survey starting last year detected flat-headed cats 29 times in Thailand’s Princess Sirindhorn Wildlife Sanctuary, according to the country’s Department of Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation. One of the sightings was a female and her cub, an encouraging sign that shows the local population is breeding.
Credit: Jim Sanderson/Wikimedia Commons
The sanctuary covers five square kilometers of rainforest and peat swamps. Along with the flat-headed cat and several unique species of birds, it’s also home to the endangered hairy-nosed otter.
Conservationists believe about 2,500 flat-headed cats remain in the wild. The species is mostly nocturnal and has webbed feet, helping the tiny wildcats navigate mangrove swamps and rivers in its rainforest habitat. Known as Prionailurus planiceps in scientific nomenclature, the flat-headed cat is most closely related to the fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus), which also has webbed feet, and the leopard cat.
Finding evidence of the endangered feline in Thailand is “exciting, yet concerning at the same time,” said Kaset Sutasha of Kasetsart University.
That’s because it means the surviving population is severely fragmented, which makes it more difficult for the cats to breed and could lead to genetic bottlenecks.
But Atthapol Charoenchansa, director general of Thailand’s parks department, also called it a “significant win” for conservation efforts. Knowledge of its presence in Thailand provides more opportunity to study the rare felines to better understand their behavior and protect them from extinction.
Jaguars, pumas, ocelots and margays are able to thrive in the same jungles, a unique arrangement that sheds light on how each species lives.
The jungles of Guatemala are teeming with life.
The guttural calls of howler monkeys haunt the rainforest from above, where scarlet macaws hop branches in flashes of red, yellow and blue.
On the forest floor opossums, peccaries, and oversize rodents called pacas move through dense brush, occasionally picked out by the few shafts of light able to break through the canopy. Ocellated turkeys plumed in iridescent copper and emerald advertise themselves to potential mates with thumping sounds, while spider monkeys perch on the weathered stones of long-forgotten Mayan cities that were swallowed by the jungle centuries ago.
As in most tropics, the apex predators are cats — four different species, to be exact. Jaguars sit at the top, unchallenged. Pumas, close in size if not ferocity, also find sustenance in the rainforest alongside ocelots and margays.
Margays are smaller than house cats and resemble tiny ocelots. They’re outstanding climbers, expert hunters, and spend most of their time in trees. Unlike most cat species, which are crepuscular, margays are nocturnal. Credit: Clement Bardot/Wikimedia Commons
How do four medium carnivorous species exist side by side?
By dividing time, space and items on the menu, according to a new study.
Ocelots are extremely adaptable: they’re excellent climbers and swimmers, and can thrive in various environments. Credit: Victor Landaeta/Pexels
The felids hunt at different levels of the jungle at different times of day, and while there’s overlap between prey, each species has its own distinct diet, according to a research team from Oregon State University. Their paper, Niche partitioning among neotropical felids, was published earlier this month in the Journal of Animal Ecology.
As the big kids on the block, jaguars primarily eat peccaries (pig-like ungulates that weigh up to 88 pounds), armadillos, deer and, sadly, ocelots. Apparently membership in Club Felid does not grant the smaller wildcats a pass. Ocelots top out at about 35 pounds, while the largest jaguars weigh in at about 350 pounds, making the smaller cats easy prey.
Pumas opportunistically prey on peccaries and brocket deer, but the majority of their diet is composed of monkeys, both spider and howler. Ocelots and margays naturally go for smaller prey, sticking mostly to rodents and opossums.
As the largest and most powerful cats in the western hemisphere, jaguars are the apex predators of their environment. Credit: Atlantic Ambience/Pexels
While jaguars hunt on the ground and have a well-documented habit of slipping into the water to prey on caiman and crocodiles, pumas, ocelots and margays take advantage of their climbing abilities and lighter frames to reach arboreal prey. That allows pumas, for example, to snag monkeys and arboreal opossum species from the canopy, so they don’t have to compete with jaguars.
The team verified the “spatial, temporal, and dietary niche partitioning” within the Maya Biosphere Reserve by using ground camera traps, arboreal camera traps and fecal samples, which allowed them to confirm the prey each species has been consuming.
Interestingly, margays are the pickiest — or perhaps most limited — of the bunch, preying on only seven species, while the other three cats regularly hunt between 20 and 27 different kinds of animals.
The information gleaned from the study not only helps researchers understand how these species interact with their environment, but also can help guide conservation decisions to safeguard them against extinction.
Pumas, also known as cougars and mountain lions, are adaptable and elusive. Credit: Catherine Harding Wiltshire/Pexels
Pain In The Bud 