Are we one step closer to Dr. Dolittle’s dream of talking to the animals? That’s the impression you might get from a NY Post headline this week announcing a “scientific breakthrough” involving a conversation between humans and whales. And they are hopeful that this sort of communications breakthrough might allow us to one day talk to extraterrestrials or some other sort of “non-human intelligence” if we ever run into one that seems willing to chat. But when you dig into the details of what the scientists actually did to make this “conversation” happen with a humpback whale they named Twain, it’s unclear how much actual communication was going on.

These scientists are trying to make a connection between the deep sea and outer space.

A group of scientists said they had a first-of-its-kind conversation with a humpback whale that could lead to humans communicating with aliens one day.

The extraordinary exchange happened between researchers and a female humpback in August 2021 for 20 minutes in southeast Alaska. The scientists played a recorded “contact” call that boomed underwater, drawing the whale to their boat, according to a new study.

The possibility of interspecies communication has always fascinated me and I’ve covered the topic here before. Not that long ago, we learned of a group of researchers who are using Artificial Intelligence to try to decode the languages of whales and dolphins. So when this story popped up, I thought it might be an offshoot of that project, but the two don’t seem to be related.

This group recorded and collected a lot of whale songs from animals in the wild. They somehow determined that one particular song was a form of greeting expressed when humpback whales encounter each other. They took that recording out in a research vessel and began playing it through underwater speakers. Soon enough, Twain approached the boat and began to respond. They played the song 36 times and Twain responded each time in what they described as a “conversational style.”

However, the scientists freely admit that they don’t know what Twain was saying in response. They also didn’t identify any other recorded songs that could be associated with some repeatable meaning. So in reality, what probably happened was that Twain was confused by hearing what she thought was another whale and instead found a boat full of people who kept saying “hello” three dozen times. And no matter what she said in response, they just kept repeating “hello” over and over again. If this was an experiment in anything it was probably “how to quickly annoy a whale.”

I suppose I can understand to a certain extent how they believe this might be helpful in learning to communicate with aliens. If we can decode the language of another species on our own planet and start having meaningful conversations with them, it could prove very informative. Personally, I’d love to see it happen. But at the same time, if we’re talking about an extraterrestrial intelligence that’s developed the technological capability to cross the vast blackness between the stars, they’ll probably have already worked out a way to speak with the marginally more intelligent monkeys on this rock. And that’s assuming they would have any interest in talking to us. Based on what we’ve seen with the UFO/UAP phenomena thus far, they might not really care what we have to say.