Researchers hoping to find signs of extraterrestrials talk to humpback whales using the latter's language in the hope that it will help in their search for aliens.
Talking To Humpback Whales Using Humpback Language
A team of scientists from the SETI Institute, the University of California, Davis, and the Alaska Whale Foundation came across an underwater "greeting signal" from a whale named Twain while researching humpback whale communication off the coast of Alaska.
Whales communicate with one another by making noises underwater. Scientists believe that animals utilize their noises, even though humans are unsure of their exact meaning, to communicate with one another, navigate, locate food, and fend off predators.
Twain approached the boat when the scientists used an underwater speaker to play a previously recorded humpback whale contact cry. He circled the boat a little before answering. The whale responded to each recording with noises, and the conversation lasted about 20 minutes.
The team members had been observing these whales to hone the software and create intelligence filters that might one day be utilized to communicate with extraterrestrials. The SETI Institute is primarily focused on finding evidence of extraterrestrial life. The group is concentrating on creating the filter to interpret any received signals.
Likewise, research on Antarctica has helped scientists learn more about Mars. According to lead author Brenda McCowan of U.C. Davis, this is the first communication in the "humpback language" between humans and humpback whales.
"Humpback whales are extremely intelligent, have complex social systems, make tools-nets out of bubbles to catch fish-and communicate extensively with both songs and social calls," said study co-author Fred Sharpe of the Alaska Whale Foundation.
Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute, a paper co-author, added that the extraterrestrials may be interested in making contact with Earth and targeting human receivers. The assumption is reportedly significant and is supported by the behavior of humpback whales in their experiment.
The team plans to publish a second paper focusing on the non-audio communicative behavior of humpback whales, like bubble rings, which they make when they are near humans.
AI To Understand Alien Language
If SETI's search is successful, we may use artificial intelligence (AI) to help us understand the extraterrestrials' language and perhaps even speak back to them. Popular culture frequently depicts aliens speaking English or being quickly understood by a miraculous global translator. However, in reality, it will likely be more challenging.
Information theory can be used to condense the information included in any given communication. Any type of information transmission, including human language, chemical exhalations from plants that entice predators to eat caterpillars on their leaves, and data transmission down fiber optic cables, can be divided into discrete units, or bits, according to Claude Shannon, a mathematician and cryptographer who worked at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey in the late 1940s.
They can be considered the "quanta" of communication, like the alphabet's letters or the different whistles that dolphins employ. Language's constituent parts cannot just be put in any sequence. Syntax describes the grammatical principles that dictate how the parts can be arranged.
Only a few letter combinations --'ar' for quark, 'ic' for quick, 'ir' for quirk-are known to be able to fill in the gap in the word "qu--k." For example, in English, "q" is always followed by "u." But if the word is used in a sentence, like "The duck went qu--k," we can deduce that "ac" is absent because of the context.
We can fill in the blanks by being familiar with the syntax or rules. Human languages have the highest Shannon entropy of any known form of natural communication because of their complexity. Shannon entropy measures the quantity that is lacking yet still allows us to complete a word or sentence.
Alien communication might be too complex for humans to comprehend, but not with AI using Shannon entropy. AI is already being tested to understand communication from non-human animals, and it might be prepared to handle any upcoming communications from extraterrestrials if it passes that test.
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