
Dolphins Are Helping Us Hunt for Aliens - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/-dolphins-are-helping-us-hunt-for-aliens
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mrfusion
I guess the zipf distribution rules out that the dolphins speech is encrypted?
Sounds far fetched but we shouldn’t rule anything out for alien intelligences.

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mrfusion
I find this so fascinating. What’s the best way to get up to date in the
latest research going on with dolphin communication?

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jvln
Whenever I hear about dolphins intelligence I remember this article
[http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/scientists-
dolphin...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/scientists-dolphin-
intelligence-may-be-overrated-a-924614.html) and a fact from it that the first
time dolphins language was heard by a guy under LSD influence. He was so
impressed that wrote a book and this way started a myth that dolphins have a
language.

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pvaldes
Maybe the book was not good, but this does not change the fact that dolphins
have dialects, variations to adapt the environment, and can call directly
other dolphins using individual names. Many species of cetaceans have
languages, for sure. There is a bottlenese, an orcanese and a
commondolphinese. Probably more than one of each in fact.

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julioneander
Kind of unrelated, but dolphins and aliens remind me so much of Ecco the
Dolphin for the Sega Genesis, one of the most unsettling games I've ever
played.

I recently found a video explaining the inspiration behind the game, which is
messed up in its own way too, completely related to the LSD experiments
someone else mentioned in the comments:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xUvhUK8Dv8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xUvhUK8Dv8)

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scrumper
> If humans couldn’t even communicate with animals that shared most of our
> evolutionary history, he believed, they were a bit daft to think they could
> recognize signals from a distant planet.

I've long thought that. Too obvious to be an original idea, but never seen
anything indicating anyone was following up on it seriously. Glad to see this,
and to learn about Zipf's Law.

It'd be interesting to see the results for other obviously intelligent, social
creatures like Elephants and whales.

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ASalazarMX
If aliens were like our whales, for example, there isn't going to be much
communication anyway. No civilization, no technology, no dwellings, clothing,
artifacts, or any significant culture. No effective strategy to outsmart
predators. Aliens mainly devoted to eating, finding a mate, procreating and
fooling around.

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jwilk
_For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more
intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New
York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in
the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed
that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same
reasons._

— Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Chapter 23.

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jpmoyn
So long, and thanks for all the fish.

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vat
This is misleading... Whales and Dolphins ARE the higher intelligence, we just
treat them as fish / playful things to be corralled. A serious attempt to
communicate with THEM would be more helpful than using them to contact
extraterrestrials. They can help up with our numerous terrestrial problems
that we face, because they spend less time worrying about survivability issues
than we do.

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bawana
here is a deeper (but concise) discussion of Zipfs law and its shortcomings

[http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~xanadu/talks/IT-
dolphins-04-1-05...](http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~xanadu/talks/IT-
dolphins-04-1-05.pdf)

the shannon entropy of dolphin utterances is even more informative. this
article discusses the application of shannon entropy to animal communication
and using that measure to derive the number of syllables in a language
[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/518486/information-
theory...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/518486/information-theory-
reveals-size-of-whale-and-dolphin-communication-repertoires/)

Still I would like to see the database of utterances from which these
researchers calculate these measures.

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jwilk
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law)

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_Codemonkeyism
"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"

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jlebrech
in reality it would probably be "stop stealing our food"

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jacquesm
Or maybe 'you _are_ the aliens'.

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jlebrech
that would be a plot twist, could also be "come have a look at the interior"

