If movies are anything to go by, meeting aliens rarely goes well for humanity. To stop us making a faux pas of cosmic proportions, scientists have been practicing by trying to chat to whales in their own language – and judging by the early results, we should probably beef up security around the Eiffel Tower and the White House.
Communication between humans speaking different languages is tricky enough, and that’s with us all using the same biological hardware. Alien life could not just have their own language but completely different modes of communication – they might banter by breakdancing, or convey an entire emotional spectrum through the volume, frequency, tone, smell, flavor and density of passing gas.
So how could we even begin to prepare for what might be the most important meeting in human history? Scientists at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute have started by looking much closer to home, exploring how we can chat to the intelligent life we already share the planet with.
Whales are a great starting point – they’re very brainy, and have complex social communication systems that could potentially be deciphered through context. As an added bonus, if we offend them the only casualties might be a few more yachts rather than world landmarks.
In August 2021, a team of scientists from SETI, UC Davis and the Alaska Whale Foundation set out to make contact with “non-human intelligence.” They recorded calls from a pod of whales, and then the next day broadcast a “whup/throp” – a type of greeting call – out through an underwater speaker to see if anyone would whup or throp back.
And someone did. A 38-year-old female humpback whale named Twain approached the boat, and over the course of 20 minutes had what the researchers describe as a casual conversation with them. The team says it was interactive, because they would play back the recorded call at different intervals and heard Twain respond with the same rhythm.
“We believe this is the first such communicative exchange between humans and humpback whales in the humpback ‘language,’” said Dr. Brenda McCowan, lead author of the study.
Intriguing as it is, it doesn’t sound like the conversation was particularly exciting. The team only had the one call on hand, and all they could change was when they played it, not the tone or pitch or anything else. As such, they noted the chat went through three phases – Engagement, when Twain first heard the call and was responding quickly and enthusiastically; Agitation, when she was breaching the surface a lot and letting out “wheezy blows” that can express either excitement or frustration; and finally Disengagement, when Twain swam off to presumably find someone who could hold a better conversation than just saying “hey” over and over again.
It might sound like a bust, but the team says experiments like this could help us figure out how to talk to aliens. They recommended that future tests be a bit more interactive, changing the sounds broadcast in response to the animals’ calls. If we do that, eventually scientists could develop filters that we can apply to any extraterrestrial signals we might pick up, using the mathematics of information theory to spot rule structures that could help us translate the message.
Hopefully, with the help of whales we might be able to make our first Close Encounters of the Third Kind more like Arrival and less like Mars Attacks.
The research was published in the journal Peer J.
Source: SETI Institute
