2024-01-02 17:15:37
If one day humanity encounters intelligent beings from another world, one of the main challenges our civilization will face will be to understand these entities. Therefore, it seems sensible to start now by trying to communicate with non-human beings from our same planet who, although they are less intelligent than us, are sufficiently intelligent to possess something vaguely qualifiable as language. Among the animals with which we could potentially communicate by knowing their language, are whales.
The relevance of whales for communication with extraterrestrial intelligences is a topic already touched on by science fiction, for example in the film “Star Trek IV, Mission: Save the Earth” (1986).
Deciphering how whales communicate with each other in order to be able to dialogue with them is a very ambitious goal. An important initiative in this regard, connected to the aforementioned need to acquire experience that helps to be successful in a hypothetical future communication with extraterrestrial intelligences, is the one carried out by scientists from the SETI Institute, the University of California at Davis and the Foundation for the Alaskan Whales, in the United States all these entities. SETI is the acronym for “search for extraterrestrial intelligence.”
The line of research followed by these entities focuses on studying the sounds emitted by certain whales and aims to develop strategies that help capture language signals from an apparently chaotic set of data.
The team, including Brenda McCowan, from the University of California, Davis, and Laurance Doyle, from the SETI Institute, recently managed to communicate with a non-human intelligent living being, specifically a whale named Twain, of the species Megaptera novaeangliae. , a species popularly known as humpback whale and humpback whale.
In response to a “contact” call recorded and played at sea via an underwater speaker, a humpback whale named Twain approached and began swimming around the team’s boat, while responding in a conversational style to the “contact signal.” greeting”. During the conversation, which lasted about 20 minutes, Twain responded each time he was spoken to, and met communication patterns observed in whales of his species.
“We believe this is the first communicative exchange of its kind between humans and humpback whales in their ‘language,'” says McCowan.
Brenda McCowan and Fred Sharpe of the research team working aboard the Blue Pearl. (Photo: Jodi Frediani)
An important assumption in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which has not been verified due to current limitations of technology, is that extraterrestrials will be interested in establishing contact with civilizations on other worlds and will therefore end up sending signals captureable from Earth or its surroundings, and will scan the cosmos in search of such signals. Doyle argues that the behavior of humpback whales supports this hypothesis.
Just as studying Antarctica as a substitute for Mars helps to better prepare its exploration, studying the communication of whales as a substitute for the communication of extraterrestrial entities helps the team to better know how to approach the study of a hypothetical extraterrestrial language.
McCowan and his colleagues present the technical details of their latest successful extrahuman communication experiment in the academic journal PeerJ, under the title “Interactive bioacoustic playback as a tool for detecting and exploring nonhuman intelligence: ‘conversing’ with an Alaskan humpback whale.” (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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