(static crackling)
(electronic humming)
It's very likely that when we do finally
make a detection of interstellar intelligence
it's gonna be very different from what we know.
We could miss a signal if it was
structured in such a way that we would
have analyzed it as a human language,
instead of as a non-human communication system.
(suspenseful music)
It's kind of best to understand
what you have in your own backyard
as you're looking up into the cosmos.
(bird warbling)
We have thousands, hundreds of thousands,
probably millions of examples
of evolved communication systems from our beautiful planet.
The humpbacks just made a perfect animal,
a perfect organism, a perfect system to look for life.
And they have an extremely complex acoustic vocalization.
This is the classic recording that changed hearts and minds
the world over. (whales vocalizing)
In the early 1970s, Frank Watlington and Roger Payne's work,
connecting these to the singing whales.
I hear lone crooners calling by themselves.
I hear these crazy males trying to attract a female,
ultimately, but it's hard not to put all kinds
of emotions and thoughts into these sounds,
'cause they're so complex and marvelous.
(bright music) (whales vocalizing)
These whales have evolved these incredible
social institutions and complex vocalizations
without technology.
And it shows you that our exoplanets
that are drifting around in the cosmos,
they could be full of intelligent life
that is not transmitting its presence.
And then you look at the under the hood,
at their brain, at the processor, it's magnificent.
Their brains are laced with spindle neurons.
And in humans spindle neurons are associated
with language acquisition, social intelligence,
facial recognition, and compassion.
We also picked humpback whales
because they use tools.
Their tools are bubble nets, for example.
It's like a giant effervescing bubbling cauldron
that allows them to essentially create a barrier
and force the prey up through the bubble net
and trap them against the surface.
And then you see the whales coming up
with their giant maws and engulfing the fish school.
The bubble tools tell you that they're goal directed,
they're very good at planning for the future,
anticipating events, and accommodating each other.
Humpback whales get together to do bubble netting,
and mitochondrial DNA shows that
they're not related to each other necessarily.
So they build these long-lasting relationships
based on ability, like humans.
And as far as we know, I don't know any other
animal that forms long-lasting relationships
based on ability.
Work has also shown that some of these bonds
are lasting across summers, decades,
perhaps even lifetimes for some of these individuals.
You can just call them economic bonds,
but boy when you watch these whales
they sure seem like friendships.
(whales vocalizing)
Humpback whales had a global communications system
before we did.
They've essentially had the ocean internet
for millions of years.
Sound speed in the oceans is five times
faster than in air.
So oceans are extremely acoustically conductive.
Maybe a thousand kilometers away
they can transmit a signal and receive it.
The sounds in the ocean, in some ways,
make amazing interstellar analogs.
It's thought that blue whales, prior to human ship noise,
could communicate from pole to pole
with their very low frequency sounds.
Some amazing work that's been done
in the Southern Oceans.
They have looked at the propagation of cultural ripples
that move across the oceans.
And these are song themes that populations innovate
that ripple across the Pacific Ocean,
that are picked up by non-interacting
humpback whale groups.
May take a couple of years for these
song innovations to move across the Pacific,
but that is absolutely remarkable
and that suggests a global communication system.
(whales vocalizing)
I think at first they're saying
is anybody out there.
Kind of like we're doing with SETI.
But I think that individuals, once they make contact
can actually plan to meet each other
in a few weeks or a month,
and can signal to start heading toward each other.
The challenge though, of course is,
if you get a signal from another whale,
like hey over here, there's a great food patch,
or there's a reproductive opportunity,
or I'm being harassed by killer whales, right.
For an individual to respond to that
it may takes days or weeks to get over there.
So it can take many hours for these sounds
to propagate across the oceans, and the whales,
if they are communicating over these distances
they're probably packaging and creating their signals
for long distance transportation.
And so this is kind of in a microcosm,
kind of a SETI problem.
How do they modify their communication system
for contact that is hours away,
and how they get together with other individuals
when it takes weeks to months to be in contact.
And that's similar to what we will start to experience
when we put humans in the solar system.
It'll be hours to get a signal
and months to get contact again.
Only the very nearest stars would be picking up
on our old television signals,
like Bozo the Clown and Howdy Doody
are our ambassadors to the stars. (chuckles)
So most of the years SETI's operated they've asked,
"Is there a technology out there?"
They haven't asked, "Is the message intelligent?"
So what's new about SETI in our work
is that we're introducing the idea of looking at
the message itself and asking is it intelligent.
And for that we had to develop an intelligence filter.
What we want to do is quantify
the degree of complexity
in non-human communication systems.
And we can do that with information theory.
Information theory is the mathematics
developed by a gentleman named Claude Shannon
to measure basically the amount of information
being sent through telephone lines.
And we realized that we could apply this
to non-human communication systems
and quantify the amount of information in bits
that they are transmitting to each other,
and under what circumstances.
And so I went looking for conditional probabilities
between the signals of the humpback whales.
And there are dependencies that we would call,
in human language, syntax.
So that's an example the insight information theory
can give you to understand how animals
have developed a kind of rule structure
within their communication system.
And you say well why would they do that?
Well, it's because rule structure allows error recovery,
and that has definite survival value in the open.
It means that you can fill in the missing letters
and words because you know the context.
Information theory was not connected
to animal communications before,
so I think this is a breakthrough concept
to go for diversity and intelligence
outside of human intelligence.
The units are not clear yet.
How to compare, for example, whether a bee dance
is more complex than an orca whistle system,
but information theory is a bridge to that.
That's another advantage of SETI,
it gets you going what is the big picture,
and how can I mix and match disciplines
in order to answer deep questions.
It's important to see that information theory
is not about meaning, it does complexity.
So in other words, you couldn't answer the question
whether the humpback whales sang
with information theory, yet.
It will tell us how many whoops,
how many throps, how many shrieks are being given.
Are they being given in a conditional manner,
in the same way that if you see a Q
you know a U is going to follow.
You could answer the question,
given common symbols could you ever translate
Shakespeare into humpback?
In other words, does humpback have the complexity
and rule structure to allow a translation
of something written in human into humpback.
If we pick up a communication,
even a communication from a planet to its satellite,
it would have structure that we could recognize
with information theory.
Anthropologists say that our social complexity
led to our vocal complexity.
In which case, information theory can measure
the social complexity of an extraterrestrial civilization
if we get signals.
We have yet to unleash the power of information theory
upon these signals,
and so I think the future is very exciting.
I think we can back out some idea of meaning.
I think most importantly is the support
from Templeton is that we can put this hydrophone array
out into this complex feeding and hunting
and bubble netting system.
And now we can pinpoint individuals.
Who's doing the calling and how other
individuals are responding.
So for the first time we're really gonna be able
to put some sort of meaning to these sounds.
And then the next round is to do the playbacks
of these sounds to the animals to test ideas.
It's getting inside their minds, right.
What is their sensory world?
What are these animals detecting,
what are they feeling,
the meaning of these sounds.
I think that's exciting, and that's precisely
why I'm working on it.
Figuring out their basic intelligence
and will we someday be able to have
a conversation with them.
The reason I support SETI is if somebody
was nearby transmitting,
it'd be embarrassing not to pick it up.
I think the effort itself
deprovincializes our thought about ourselves
and it gets you thinking big.
Let's face it, it's putting us in perspective.
When we do that picture of the astronomer
staring up at the sky and saying, "Are we alone,"
two things strike me.
One is that there's always animals,
we need to pay attention to the non-human
communication systems here for practice.
But the other thing is, as we look up and say,
"Are we alone," we're asking where do we fit in.
(whale vocalizing)
I think it was the song of the humpback whale
that made us realize that there
are otherworldly beings right here in our oceans.
Now is there life out there in the universe?
Statistically speaking it seems yes,
there most likely is, and I think
through these collaborative ventures
between people in the animal sciences and SETI
I think we'll get closer to this wonderful
and perplexing question.
(gentle music)