A team of researchers looking to communicate with terrestrial whales as a method of developing techniques that might be used to contact extraterrestrial intelligences managed to hold a twenty-minute conversation with a humpback whale in the waters off of Alaska—a conversation that may open the door to better communication between ourselves and non-human intelligences, both terrestrial and otherwise.
Calling themselves Whale-SETI, the team is made up of an amalgamation of members from the Alaska Whale Foundation and the University of California Davis’ SETI Institute; their goal is to develop machine-learning programs and techniques that will be used to search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence by developing ways to communicate with non-human intelligences here on Earth that are just as familiar to us as they are alien, such as humpback whales.
On August 19, 2021, the team had a chance encounter near Five Fingers in Frederick Sound, Alaska, with a female humpback whale nicknamed ‘Twain’ that appeared near their research vessel Glacier Seal. After hearing a recording of a whale call known to be a greeting that was broadcast from the boat’s underwater speakers, Twain approached the ship and began what amounted to a conversation with the human researchers that lasted for twenty minutes.
“We believe this is the first such communicative exchange between humans and humpback whales in the humpback ‘language,’” claimed lead study author Dr. Brenda McCowan, a professor at University of California, Davis.
Although Twain responded to the pre-recorded calls as if she were conversing with her human visitors, the conversation was somewhat one-sided, as the meaning behind the vocalizations, body movements and timed blows at the surface are still mostly a mystery to the researchers; however, they have been able to determine that these elements are key to the exchange of information between whales, and are using AI to try to decode what these communications might mean.
Despite the fact that both humans and humpback whales are both intelligent mammals, it might be hard to find two reasonably intelligent species that are more alien from one-another: modern-day cetaceans are the descendants of a land-based ungulate that first dipped its hooves in the water roughly 50 million years ago, at a time when the species that would eventually evolve into humans was still a tiny, rodent-like creature. The common ancestor between our respective species existed much earlier than this, meaning that humpback whales are more closely related to modern day hippopotamuses than they are humans.
This example of parallel evolution involving what appears to be two distinct, yet somehow compatible, intelligences may offer us a way of developing communication methods with extraterrestrial intelligences that may have developed under evolutionary conditions similar to ours—hence the interest of a SETI organization in communicating with a more readily-accessible intelligence such as humpback whales—especially in regards to the exchange of information that may extend beyond methods that we might take for granted.
“Because of current limitations on technology, an important assumption of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that extraterrestrials will be interested in making contact and so target human receivers,” noted Dr. Laurance Doyle, a research team member from the SETI Institute, referring to the possibility that because many human-made noises have only appeared very recently in the evolutionary path of terrestrial cetaceans, they may seem to be too alien to properly register in the minds of some species; this suggests that due to the differences in how our respective minds might work, someone from another world may be trying to communicate in a way we mightn’t recognize as such, and vice-versa.
“This important assumption is certainly supported by the behavior of humpback whales,” Doyle notes.
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