SETI humpback whale ‘encounter’ could help us learn to talk to aliens

A team of researchers communicated with a humpback whale in research that could help us in the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life.

A picture of a humpback whale's tail. (Jodi Frediani. NOAA/National Marine Fisheries Research Permit 19703.)

The SETI Institute, which searches for intelligent alien life, had a “close encounter” with a humpback whale. Teams at the institute studied whale communication systems to develop “Intelligence filters” for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Researchers from the SETI Institute, University of California Davis and the Alaska Whale foundation communicated with humpback whales. They played a recorded humpback “contact call” in the sea using an underwater speaker and a humpback whale called Twain approached and circled their boats. The whale responded to each playback call and matched the interval variations between each signal.

According to Brenda McCowan of UC Davis, co-author of a study in the journal PeerJ, this could be the first time that humans and humpback whales and humans in the “language” of the former. Humpback whales are quite intelligent and have complex social systems. They even make tools and communicate with songs and different types of calls.

“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. This important assumption is certainly supported by the behaviour of humpback whales,” said Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute, a coauthor on the paper.

Similar to how astronaut crews practice Moon missions in simulations here on Earth, the researchers are studying humpback communications to better understand how to detect and interpret signals from outer space. The study’s findings can be used to develop filters that can be applied to any messages we receive from extraterrestrials. Recently, SETI also simulated receiving a signal from Mars to prepare for alien contact.

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Alien