Speak to the sea, to speak with the stars.

in #science7 years ago

One of my childhood teachers made me notice that the only thing that sets us apart from other animals is our ability to speak, to communicate.

This seemed OK at that time, from what we could observe any form of animal communication was interpreted as a very basic thesaurus of warning signs... Nothingelse.

This idea I was loaned to hold changed when I became aware of Koko.

A female gorilla that learned more sign language that I could ever be able to (I am surprised that she does not have her own social media accounts with that lexicon, the closest I could find was https://twitter.com/kokotweets).

Yeah, but it is just an ape, we now know their limits: And that's as far as we can risk to guess it goes. It is still quite a feat, a fearsome one if we all watched Planet of the Apes. Just, don't get her be near Caesar.

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What about smarter animals? Ones with a larger and more complex brain mass, one that possesses an already known intricate language. Something like: Dolphins.

Since the 60's we've been attempting to communicate with dolphins "our way", because our selfish ego prevent us from even trying to learn another language. But there's a problem with that.
Despite being mammals, they evolved in a totally different path to ours. Their "voice" is much richer that we could humanly imagine. By forcing dolphins to learn "human communication" we are attempting to force Leonardo DaVinci to paint the Gioconda with a stickman.

Lucky us, not all scientists thought inside the box, and some worked on finding a way to set a 2 way communication channel in their language.
Up to some point, the idea is working:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129624-300-dolphin-whistle-instantly-translated-by-computer/

Given that they are obviously smarter than many terrestrial animals, the only reason I can think of for them to not teaching us their language is: They don't speak with lesser species (what kind of "smart animal" would trash his own and only enviroment? Would you attempt to have a chat with a cockroach?).

I like to think of dolphins as some sort of extraterrestrial lifeform. They have their own language, culture... perhaps their own history and science all passed to future generations orally.
I like to believe that we could learn SO MUCH from them if a channel of communication. We can prove that they do understand us. We have plenty of documents that prove that they are more than capable of reciprocous understanding.



Some, may be more fit for that task than others (just like humans, not everyone is a scientist, not everyone is a mason), "may", we are not aware of their social structure without comparing it to ours.

Ancient cultures all around the world depicted dolphins as protectors and guardians of the seas. Who knows what secrets they could teach us?

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We need to communicate with them to be able to do so in the future, when we finally find Intelligent extraterrestrial life.

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