And it&#x27;s not just <i>intelligent life</i>, either, when you think about it; it requires <i>intelligible life</i>. It doesn&#x27;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 <i>is</i> 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&#x27;s an inevitable natural consequence of individual intelligence. Call it another term in the Drake equation.