There are creatures here on Earth that may give us clues on getting “chat-time” with extraterrestrial intelligence — dolphins, which are famously social and smart.
Recently, the Coller Dolittle Challenge awarded the winner of its first $100,000 annual prize to accelerate progress toward interspecies two-way communication. A prize of equal value will be awarded every year until a team deciphers the secret to interspecies communication.
This year’s winning team of researchers has discovered that dolphin whistles could function like words — with mutually understood, context-specific meaning.
Crack the code
The winning team was led by Laela Sayigh from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The researchers are studying the resident bottlenose dolphin community offshore of Sarasota, Florida.
They were on the lookout for “non-signature” whistles, which comprise approximately 50% of the whistles produced by Sarasota dolphins. Non-signature whistles differ from the more widely studied “signature” whistles, which are referential, name-like vocalizations.
Sayigh’s team used non-invasive suction-cup hydrophones, which they placed on the dolphins during unique catch-and-release health assessments, as well as digital acoustic tags.
“Bottlenose dolphins have long fascinated animal communication researchers,” Sayigh said in a statement. “Our work shows that these whistles could potentially function like words, shared by multiple dolphins.”
Sayigh and her team can now use deep learning in an attempt to “crack the code” and analyze those whistles.
Zoologist’s guide to the galaxy
But what does all this have to do with E.T.?
“My interests are very firmly here on Earth, in learning about how dolphins communicate with each other,” Sayigh told Space.com “I do know that there are others in the animal communication world that are interested in this, however.”
One of those researchers is Arik Kershenbaum, an associate professor and director of studies at Girton College, part of the University of Cambridge in England. He’s the author of “The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens — and Ourselves” (Viking, 2020).
Kershenbaum explained that the book is about life on Earth, because “that’s all we have to look at.” He also contributed a white paper for a workshop at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in California, titled “What Animal Studies Can Tell Us about Detecting Intelligent Messages from Outside Earth.”
Cross-species database
In that paper for the SETI Institute, Kershenbaum and colleagues concluded that animal communication research is the closest we are likely to get to studying extraterrestrial signals, until such signals are actually received.
“Many of the challenges facing SETI research are similar to those already addressed in the investigation of animal behavior, and the evolutionary origins of human language,” they wrote. “Indeed, the evolution of language on Earth may in fact have been driven and constrained by similar principles to those operating on life on other planets.”
The researchers have proposed the establishment of a large cross-species database of communicative signals, made available to all SETI and animal behavior researchers.
In addition, they also proposed that tools, algorithms and software used to analyze these signals should be made publicly available for application to these data sets, “so that comparative studies can take full advantage of the expertise from the biological, mathematical, linguistic and astronomical communities.”
Complex vocalizations
The topic of dolphin language interpretation, as well as the vocalizations of humpback whales and the field of non-human communications more broadly, is increasingly drawing the interest of SETI researchers and astrobiologists, explained Bill Diamond, president of the SETI Institute.
Humpback whales have very complex vocalizations, Diamond told Space.com, “where it seems clear that they are transmitting information and not simply making sounds associated with mating, feeding or dealing with threats. They plan ahead and communicate complex instructions to one another.”
Leading that look is SETI researcher Laurance Doyle, who’s working on a project in partnership with the Alaska Whale Foundation to study the vocalizations of humpback whales.
Fundamental rules
For Diamond, the relevant research question is whether or not there are some fundamental mathematical rules associated with the transmission of information that would be universal — like the laws of physics and chemistry — within our known universe.
“If there’s an underlying rule structure to the transmission of information, and we can decipher it,” Diamond said, “we would firstly be able to recognize a detected SETI signal as containing information, and therefore intelligence. And, possibly, we might even ultimately be able to translate it!”
According to Diamond, “there’s definitely a connection between SETI/astrobiology and the study of non-human communication and non-human intelligence.”
