United States: Scientists from UC Davis, the Alaska Whale Foundation, and SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) have communicated with a whale in a landmark experiment.
The group spoke with Twain, a humpback whale, for twenty minutes in her tongue language. The experiment was conducted for a recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ.
To find out if any whales would react, the scientists sailed a boat off the coast of Alaska and played what’s known as a “contact call” into the water. As expected, Twain approached and circled the boat in the water. Twain answered the call each time, even closely matching the intervals, when the scientists broadcast the same contact call 36 times at different intervals over the next 20 minutes.
Just one day before their encounter, the researchers had recorded calls from a small group of humpback whales, which is when the calls originated. Twain might have been responding to her signal because she had joined the group.
As it happens, Mr. Laurance Doyle, a principal investigator at the SETI Institute and coauthor of the paper, pointed out that Twain’s actions might be comparable to how sentient alien races might try to contact humanity.
To help in their hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence, Mr. Doyle and his colleagues at SETI are collaborating with UC Davis whale and animal experts, as well as the Alaska Whale Foundation, to develop intelligent filters.
Scientists could utilize these intelligent filters to detect intelligent signals from space and potentially establish the first communication with extraterrestrial life, as per the statement.
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