When SpaceX’s Dragon Freedom capsule splashed down in the ocean off the coast of Florida ten days ago, bringing back to earth three NASA astronauts and Russia’s Alexander Gorbunov, they were greeted by a pod of dolphins performing a swim past.
Were these merely curious dolphins who happened to be playing in the water nearby? Or could these dolphins have been consciously greeting unknown beings from space to our planet?
Put yourself in the dolphins’ shoes for a moment (or should that be fins?) What would we do, as Homo sapiens, if a UFO arrived here? I guess we’d send a welcoming party (backed up by all the military might we could muster) while global governments joined together to determine the threat level and jostled to establish communications. As intelligence agencies and defence organizations went into overdrive to analyse the aliens’ behaviour, technology and capabilities, they’d also be trying to talk to them, using signals derived from art, science, mathematics and cutting-edge language research. Every type of signal humanly imaginable.
But what about communication methods that are beyond our imagination. Could computers – or maybe dolphins do a better job at welcoming aliens? Before you scoff at this suggestion, consider that with its ability to analyse huge quantities of data, recognize patterns, and apply machine learning algorithms, AI is a powerful tool to decode the complex conversations of other species, whether underwater or intergalactic. Google translate is a fine example.
Where big data meets big beasts in the vast oceanic universe, a Dolphin Communication Project is using AI to analyse and interpret dolphin sounds in conjunction with data on the contexts in which they were recorded. Whereas it was previously thought that a dolphin’s clicks were a kind of morse code, AI tools recently unearthed previously ‘secret’ sounds between those clicks. Alongside, researchers also identified complex structures in other Cetacean communications comparable to a phonetic alphabet, and last year scientists held the first ever 2-way ‘chat’ with a humpback whale in their own ‘language’.
So who’s to say that, should extra-terrestrial beings arrive on the earth, humans would be better qualified to meet and greet them, than whales or dolphins? And if cetaceans get the first word in, when approximately 25% of whale, dolphin and porpoise species are threatened with extinction because of pollution and entanglement in commercial fishing nets, what on earth are they going to tell these aliens about us? Who would the space visitors choose to engage with? And what might they offer to our rivals beneath the waves?
In one of China’s most successful novels this century The Three Body problem (written in 2008, now both on Netflix and translated into Maltese), the arrival of an advance party from a technologically-advanced space civilization splits opinion: will humans attempt to block their arrival as an unknown conquering force or would it be better to accept them as deities who can prevent the Earth’s environmental decline? Might dolphins welcome a species from outer-space to help them recover from their endangered state?
Aliens aside, new technology has given us incredible tools for translating not only between human languages but also for understanding and working with other animals. As we speed head-long into an ‘interspecies age, are we ready to hear what they might tell us?
If you’d like to know more:
Wildlife filmmaker Tom Mustill, an ambassador for Whales and Dolphin Conservation presents an exquisite narrated soundscape that offers you the chance to hear the latest in Cetacean communication, from the mouths of the dolphins and whales themselves.
Tom is the author of How to Speak Whale: a Voyage into Animal Communication.
For something more quirky, Benny The Blue Whale, co-written by Andy Stanton and Chat GPT, offers an intriguing insight into the ‘mind’ of AI, through the bonkers antics of a whale protagonist and other marine characters.
On The Three Body Problem: packed with creative metaphors, this Hugo-award winning science fiction story of enormous scope and vision take place against the fascinating but brutal backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution. The Maltese translation Il-Problema tat-Tliet Korpi published in November 2024.
The Netflix series was released in March 2024.
