"Hello!”
Hello!Have you eaten it?”
"Hello!Hello!Where's the man?”
"Hello!"Repeater?You can't be human, are you?”
"Hello!”@25e7� ！
Aliens must exist!I think so anyway, not on the basis of the Mexican candy man. Although Mr. Huo warned us not to look for aliens, the desire for knowledge is rising, urging scientists to "die". Since we don't plan to hide our existence, it is necessary to prepare for future alien exchanges in advance, first of all, to score the aliens' appearance and then make a picture book, no, it's communication.
It's troublesome enough to communicate between people in different languages, not to mention that we are all the same biological hardware. And what aliens are like we can't imagine, maybe they communicate through butt twisting?Maybe they only appear for three minutes?Maybe they come with their own BGM?
Oh no!We can't even communicate with some intelligent life on the earth, so if we want to talk to aliens directly, are we thinking about fart?In response, scientists at the Institute for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life, hereafter referred to as SETI, decided to look first at humpback whales in Earth's oceans, which could be a good place to start.
Humpback whales are very intelligent and have a complex social communication system, and humpback whales are relatively gentle with humans, and if humans offend them, the most they can do is a boat collision and not destroy the earth. Therefore, the SETI team believes that humpback whales are a good test case for future attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials.
In August 2021, a team of scientists from SETI, UC Davis, and the Alaska Whale** Society began experiments. They recorded a large number of call signals from humpback whales, and tried to understand the meaning of the signal, by using frequencies and scenarios, they could only roughly think that there was a call signal that meant "hello", and it was difficult to have results from direct analysis, or it had to be practiced!
They then signaled the call through an underwater speaker**. And guess what?A 38-year-old female humpback whale named Twain approached the scientists' boat and had a 20-minute exchange that could not be described as smooth sailing, but rather than a mess.
At first, Twain approached the ship and circled around it when he heard the call, probably curious about what this big iron bump that could speak whale language was. Over the course of 20 minutes, the scientists played several more call signals that they didn't know what they meant, and Twain responded to them all, matching the changes in the intervals between each signal, so it was obvious that she was responding at the same pace.
Good!Great!What did Twain talk to us?Who knows?But being able to respond has already made the researchers excited.
Of course, it is difficult to overcome the language barrier of non-human species, and the researchers did not have the consciousness of "I'm sorry I didn't make the whale adults happy", but they were simply super happy, although Twain must have been annoyed. Researchers couldn't change the tone, pitch, or anything else of the call, they had to play what they thought was "hello" multiple times, interspersed with other calls.
According to the researchers, the chat went through three phases. The first was the response, and Twain quickly responded to the callThen there is the communication, and during the chat, Twain often breaks through the water and makes a sound similar to wheezing, which presumably means frustrated and speechless;In the end, there was detachment, and Twain eventually swam away, presumably because he wanted to find a whale that could communicate normally, rather than "Hello!" all the time"Oh ha-yo!"!"Empty you hurry wow!"It's weird, no, you can't speak Japanese, you're going to be killed.
Although this experiment seems to be fruitless, it is actually not very useful, just kidding!At the very least, it can help researchers to have some inspiration for how to carry out future tests. And if you use a mathematical theory called "information theory", as long as you experiment more in the future, you may really be able to understand what the whale is saying.
The discipline was originally developed by electrical engineer Claude Shannon in the 40s of the 20th century. In information theory, by analyzing the amount of information contained in a signal and how that information relates between multiple signals, and then combining it with real-world events, one may be able to tease out the information contained in the signal and correlate it with those events.
So theoretically, with enough data, researchers can figure out what whales are talking about.
The researchers are ambitious, and they also hope to learn better about how to detect and interpret signals from outer space by further studying humpback whale communication systems. These discoveries may also help develop filters to pick up extraterrestrial signals reaching Earth and search for extraterrestrial life.
Thanks to Twain, with its landmark help, humanity's first contact of the third kind in the future might have been more friendly than scolding.