As a science fiction writer I love to speculate about the possibility of open contact with another sentient species (I say open since a lot of people think there’s already been some secret contact). But how would we communicate? I’m sorry to say that I think it’s most likely we would be dependent upon the aliens to learn, or be able to translate, our language.
There is a significant body of evidence that indicates that dolphins and whales are capable of intelligent communication, yet their form of language is so different from ours that we still haven’t developed a “rosetta stone” for interpreting their communications. If we can’t figure out how to interpret the communications of another species from our own planet, how would we figure out what aliens were saying?
A study titled The study of acoustic signals and the supposed spoken language of the dolphins by Vyacheslav A. Ryabov, published last month in the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute Journal of Physics and Mathematics, reported strong evidence that dolphins really do “talk” to each other.
The study reports that two Black Sea Bottlenose dolphins emitted series of sounds that could be construed as sentences, and that they took turns sounding off to each other, similar to humans in a conversation. Scientists have identified approximately 200 unique sounds emitted by dolphins.
“Most species of dolphins produce two types of sounds, which possibly play the role of communication signals in their social relationships. These are packs of broadband pulses and ‘whistles’.….The presence and the function of these packs still remain unclear, even though the hypothesis that dolphins use them for communication has been discussed since the 1960s….This hypothesis is based on the fact that the…signals are recorded when the dolphins are engaged in high social activity and at short distances…, and the interpulse intervals of these signals have a shorter processing time typical for echolocation….”
Ryabov mentioned shortcomings inherent in previous studies, some of which studied only a limited frequency range, and some in situations where some dolphins were swimming freely and were beyond the recording range of the equipment in the studies, though not necessarily beyond the range that other dolphins could hear. Ryabov’s study used a two-channel recording system and two dolphins confined to a pool that made it possible to determine which dolphin made which sounds and verify that the two were taking turns communicating.
The full text of the paper is available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405722316301177
Maybe some day we’ll be able to talk to the dolphins. I doubt they will say “thanks for all the fish.” If I were a dolphin I’d be asking why we humans feel the need to imprison other species and force them to perform for our entertainment.
