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The language of humpback whales may be as alien to us as that of an alien race from another planet.
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So learning how to chat with whales could help us communicate with intelligent extraterrestrials.
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To that end, the scientists had a brand new 20-minute conversation with a humpback whale named Twain.
What do whale experts and alien hunters have in common? More than you might expect.
Recently study published in the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ, scientists from UC Davis, the Alaska Whale Foundation, and SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) came together.
Their mission: Communicate with whales. And they did exactly that.
In a remarkable experiment, the team had a 20-minute conversation with a humpback whale named Twain in its own language.
Twain and the scientists didn’t talk about the weather or the latest fish stories – we’re still a long way from that level of understanding.
What happened, however, was significant.
Talking to whales
The scientists launched a boat off the coast of Alaska and played what is called a “contact call” into the ocean to see if any whales would respond.
Contact calls are like a human greeting. Whales use them to call other whales or let each other know where they are, lead author Brenda McCowan, a professor at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, told Business Insider.
“They are one of the most common signals within the social sound repertoire of humpback whales,” Fred Sharpe, co-author and principal investigator with the Alaska Whale Foundation, told Business Insider.
Sure enough, Twain swam up to the boat and circled it. For the next 20 minutes, the scientists transmitted the same contact call 36 different times at different intervals, and Twain answered the call each time, even closely matching the intervals.
That means, if the scientists waited 10 seconds before playing a call back to Twain, she would wait 10 seconds before answering, McCowan said. This kind of interval matching suggests that Twain was making a deliberate exchange, she said.
“It definitely felt like we were heard,” Sharpe told BI, stressing that their work is done with permission from the National Marine Fisheries Service and readers shouldn’t try this at home (or at sea). “And we hope she felt the same way, too.”
“We believe this is the first such communicative exchange between humans and humpback whales in ‘language,'” McCowan said. statement.
The humpback whale calls that the researchers had recorded came from a small group of whales just the day before their encounter. Twain was included in the group, so it is possible that Twain was responding to his own signal.
“We might have been playing back to God for yourself,” said Sharpe.
So what does this have to do to talk to aliens?
As it turns out, Twain’s behavior may be similar to how intelligent alien races might seek out humanity, said Laurance Doyle, principal investigator at the SETI Institute and co-author of the paper.
Communicate with extraterrestrials
“An important assumption of the search for extraterrestrial information is that extraterrestrials will be interested in contact and therefore target human receivers,” similar to how Twain responded to the contact call from the scientists, Doyle said in a statement.
Doyle and his colleagues at SETI are working with whale and animal experts at UC Davis and the Alaska Whale Foundation to create smart filters to help them in their search for extraterrestrial information.
If extraterrestrials are out there, sending us signals, trying to communicate, we might miss them if we don’t know what to look for, Doyle told BI.
By completing these smart filters, scientists could use them to identify intelligent signals from space in an attempt to make first contact with an alien race.
“There are different intelligences on this planet, and by studying them, we can better understand what alien intelligence would be like, because they won’t be exactly like our own,” said McCowan.
The research is also testing the idea of whether or not intelligent alien life might be looking for us, Doyle told BI.
“Whale research has shown that if you’re smart, curiosity comes with that, and you want to connect,” Doyle said.
The scientists said they hope similar work can be done with other intelligent animals on Earth, including other cetaceans like dolphins, carnivores that work together to hunt, and other highly social species like meerkats and elephants.
Read the original article on Business Insider
