Dolphins Are Helping Us Hunt for Aliens | Hacker News Reader

Dolphins Are Helping Us Hunt for Aliens

nautil.us

40 pointsdnetesn20 comments

I guess the zipf distribution rules out that the dolphins speech is encrypted? Sounds far fetched but we shouldn’t rule anything out for alien intelligences.

I find this so fascinating. What’s the best way to get up to date in the latest research going on with dolphin communication?

Whenever I hear about dolphins intelligence I remember this article http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/scientists-dolphin... and a fact from it that the first time dolphins language was heard by a guy under LSD influence. He was so impressed that wrote a book and this way started a myth that dolphins have a language.

That article compares dolphins to chickens and goldfish. While I doubt the level of intelligence that some people attribute to dolphins, I haven't ever seen a goldfish or a chicken do a trained complex acrobatic maneuver for food, or wipe a mark off of its body after recognizing itself in a mirror.

> When goldfish are placed in a bowl, he explains, they at least try to escape by boldly jumping out,

I don't think jumping out of a fishbowl is a particularly smart move...

> whereas dolphins that have been captured in nets won't even think of jumping to freedom.

What?!

Maybe the book was not good, but this does not change the fact that dolphins have dialects, variations to adapt the environment, and can call directly other dolphins using individual names. Many species of cetaceans have languages, for sure. There is a bottlenese, an orcanese and a commondolphinese. Probably more than one of each in fact.

Kind of unrelated, but dolphins and aliens remind me so much of Ecco the Dolphin for the Sega Genesis, one of the most unsettling games I've ever played.

I recently found a video explaining the inspiration behind the game, which is messed up in its own way too, completely related to the LSD experiments someone else mentioned in the comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xUvhUK8Dv8

> If humans couldn’t even communicate with animals that shared most of our evolutionary history, he believed, they were a bit daft to think they could recognize signals from a distant planet.

I've long thought that. Too obvious to be an original idea, but never seen anything indicating anyone was following up on it seriously. Glad to see this, and to learn about Zipf's Law.

It'd be interesting to see the results for other obviously intelligent, social creatures like Elephants and whales.

If aliens were like our whales, for example, there isn't going to be much communication anyway. No civilization, no technology, no dwellings, clothing, artifacts, or any significant culture. No effective strategy to outsmart predators. Aliens mainly devoted to eating, finding a mate, procreating and fooling around.

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.

— Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Chapter 23.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

It depends of how we define culture.

Curiosity and a desire to explore the unknown might bridge that gap. We after all are quite fascinated by whales, by the idea of living in the sea, and we even here are having a discussion about what it might be like to think having only ever existed in that environment. Whales may be similar. They know of land; they know of people in boats.

I guess I am suggesting tourism as a motivator.

EDIT: adding - I don't agree at all with that predator outsmarting point you made. Aquatic mammals often have quite complex techniques for hunting and evasion.

This is misleading... Whales and Dolphins ARE the higher intelligence, we just treat them as fish / playful things to be corralled. A serious attempt to communicate with THEM would be more helpful than using them to contact extraterrestrials. They can help up with our numerous terrestrial problems that we face, because they spend less time worrying about survivability issues than we do.

here is a deeper (but concise) discussion of Zipfs law and its shortcomings

http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~xanadu/talks/IT-dolphins-04-1-05...

the shannon entropy of dolphin utterances is even more informative. this article discusses the application of shannon entropy to animal communication and using that measure to derive the number of syllables in a language https://www.technologyreview.com/s/518486/information-theory...

Still I would like to see the database of utterances from which these researchers calculate these measures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"

in reality it would probably be "stop stealing our food"

Or maybe 'you are the aliens'.

that would be a plot twist, could also be "come have a look at the interior"

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