The search for aliens, and the attempt to communicate with them, has been with us for decades at least (and if you start counting from Jules Verne's literary career, it has been almost 200 years) – but how do we even know if we have the ability to communicate with creatures whose language has evolved along a path unfamiliar to us, and may sound like total gibberish or just noise? To try to answer this question, the SETI Institute, in collaboration with the University of California at Davis and the Alaska Whale Foundation, initiated the SETI project – a kind of "training" of human communication abilities with species other than our own through "conversations" with intelligent animals living in the sea. We used ChatGPT to explain the experiment.
Humpback whales are now known to communicate through "songs" and complex conversations. Their communication shows signs of intelligence, with hierarchies, behaviors special to different contexts, and even cultural transmission of songs between populations. The researchers 'met' at sea with a whale named Twain and, using an underwater speaker, played her a recording of a sound that was recorded and analyzed as a kind of "contact" call. Twain responded, swimming in circles around their boat for 20 minutes, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of the researchers' signals, matching interval variations between calls and those made by humans.
The study, published late last month in the journal PeerJ, shows on the one hand the cognitive abilities of humpback whales, and on the other hand the ability of humans to find methods for communicating with other species. The parallels between communication between species on Earth and communication with aliens are not just speculative: Dr. Lawrence Doyle of the SETI Institute emphasized the assumption that extraterrestrials, such as humpback whales, would be interested in making contact.
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