Transcript of journalist and senior media executive Richard Sergay's interview with Drs. Fred Sharpe and Laurance Doyle for the “Stories of Impact” series.
Watch the video version of this interview.
RS = Richard Sergay (interviewer)
FS = Dr. Fred Sharpe (interviewee)
LD = Dr. Laurance Doyle (interviewee)
FS: I’m Dr. Fred Sharpe, I'm a Principal Investigator with the Alaska Whale Foundation. And we maintain our research station up in Southeast Alaska to study these magnificent beings.
RS: Genesis of the whale project?
FS: Well it's been a lovely collaboration. It was probably 15 years ago now, I got a call from Sean and Laurence and they started asking questions about a SETI and other worldly beings, flying saucers, Captain Kangaroos, and I'm like crinkle, crinkle, don't call back here. And it was great, it persisted and they came up with lots of interesting ideas and really impressed upon me the uniqueness of these beings in the water. Of course I was totally impressed by them but I know that the SETI Institute, they're looking for the other worldly signals, something that's totally different and unique and that they can run through their SETI filters, basically looking for other worldly analogues and the humpback whale is remarkable in that regard. And of course you know we're phylogenetically very remote from the humpback whales. They've been evolving in a very different aquatic medium. Sound speed is incredibly different there. Its cultural evolution may be very different in the water. And so the humpback just made a perfect animal, a perfect organism, a perfect system, to look at, to help sort of test their filters, to look for life in the oceans. Now what's really neat is these humpback whales and other large marine mammals, they've essentially had the ocean internet for millions of years. The ability of sound to transmit through the water at high rates of speed, humpbacks are extremely loud and so are the other baleen whales, and they have an extremely complex acoustic vocalization so that the diversity of signals that they can send, and then you look under the hood at their brain, at the processor, it's magnificent. And their brains are, what we've come to learn from some (INAUDIBLE) architectural studies, that their brains are laced with spindle neurons and in humans spindle neurons are associated with language acquisition, social intelligence, facial recognition, and compassion. So the ability for other worldly beings with the humpback whale was absolutely marvelous.
RS: They are so different, why is that an advantage?
FS: Well it's very likely that when we do finally make a detection of interstellar intelligence it's going to be very different from what we know and I think just the more examples that we have here from our beautiful planet, we have thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions examples of evolved communications systems. And it's kind of best to understand what you have in your own backyard as you're looking up into the cosmos.
RS: How advanced are humpback whale communications systems?
FS: Yeah, I would totally agree with that. Some amazing work that's been done in the southern oceans. Francis Garland and her colleagues have looked at the propagation of cultural ripples that move across the oceans. And these are song themes that populations innovate and then other non-interacting populations at least non-interacting through feeding or breeding. They're almost like, almost like a multiverse hypothesis really. You have these song innovations that ripple across the Pacific Ocean that are picked up by non-interacting humpback whale groups. And so it's remarkable to have these cultural themes that come on down from high and are incorporated in and then passed on through across the Pacific. It may take a couple of years for the song innovations to move across the Pacific and that is absolutely remarkable and that suggests a global communication system. And of course because of the tragic devastation of whaling and their subsequent recovery it's like the oceans are filling back up, they're spinning back up with sound. And you know in some ways we haven't yet to see how remarkably global these animals truly are.
RS: What does that signaling mean across the ocean? Do you have an understanding?
FS: You know we really don't know yet. And that's what's so exciting about working with the Templeton Foundation is that they're giving these tools now to set out a hydrophone array that will allow us to localize sound better, pinpoint individuals, do playback work, and so we're really excited about that.
RS: The time it takes for the vocalization to happen?
FS: Well the It's across the board. Well the sounds in the ocean in some ways make amazing interstellar analogs in that these whales, it's thought that blue whales prior to human ship noise could communicate from pole to pole with their very low frequency sounds. So it can take you know many hours for these sounds to propagate across the oceans and the whales, if they are communicating or these distances, they're probably packaging and creating their signals for long distance transportation, long distance movement, have lower frequency range, they attenuate less. And there's this whole really cool thing about that since it takes a long time to respond to a signal that may come relatively quickly, remember that the ocean sound speed is essentially five times faster than in air. So oceans have this amazing acoustical conductivity, so they can probably be communicating with each other very efficiently. Now the challenge of those 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. It's like, for an individual to respond to that it may take days or weeks to get over there, and that's the same challenge that we have with interstellar communication is that we're you know have light and signals raining down upon us, right. But for us to respond to those it would take lifetimes, you know, centuries, millennia, to actually travel or even longer to get to these sites and so whales are probably also making this, having to make this decision about information, or old information, what's old and what's, what's actionable intelligence and how quickly can I get there.
RS: Why is it quicker one way and slower the other?
FS: Well the communications between individuals are the same speed but for one individual to actually travel there to interact would take of course a long time.
RS: The intent of that signaling from your observations?
FS: Well we've had many colleagues working on this question and probably what we hear most of the time is their reproductive calls given by males in a breeding context to advertise their fitness and their worth, their value to a female, and I'm to a lot of it's probably you know a lot of bluster and crooning and with the humpback whale song we haven't yet really cracked the code to know what it is about the song that the female is being attentive to. It's probably innovation, fads, ability to copy yet innovate in these huge song cycles, these big reproductive breeding grounds and so somehow the songs are keyed to male vigor and male fitness.
RS: You call them a song, why?
FS: You bet. You bet. Well the song, a song is typically produced by a male of a species you know a variety of vertebrates. It's done in a reproductive context. It's often done to ward off other males or attract females and that's exactly what appears to be happening with the humpback whales. They congregate in subtropical breeding areas, sometimes by the hundreds, sometimes the thousands. The (INAUDIBLE) males are vocalizing, the humpbacks they're singing, they're calling, they're also engaging in very visual displays, they're breaching and appear to be showing off. They also don't mind a good cage fight once in a while, the males will compete for access to females. They try to charge and crash into each other for access to the primary escort position near a female. Of course they've given up tooth and claw for Flipper and baleen, so they don't really appear to do all that much damage to each other, but certainly the work by Adam Pack has shown that the largest oldest males are typically the ones who get to escort the females. So all of these factors suggest that these animals are classical, classical mammalian songs in a reproductive context.
RS: Other vocalizations?
FS: You bet they, there's three basic types of vocalization that the humpback gives. There's the song and then there's also the feeding calls which we study up in Southeast Alaska. These feeding calls are remarkable. They don't appear to be produced by any other population except in the North Pacific. The feeding calls are done only when they're feeding on herring. The Pacific herring. And they appear to be an inner species herding cry that the whales used to chase the herring up into the bubble net. So herring are a fish that they're, they're hearing specialists. They can hear a large frequency of sounds. They have a swim bladder that attaches to the inner ear through a little duct and so they can actually act like little sound transducers. And the whales have kind of learned to overcome this by producing these extremely loud tonal sounds, they're highly repetitive, and they appear to be used in a very co-operative, controlled context. Our sonar work has shown that the whales dive down below the herring schools, one individual goes off and starts to produce the bubble net, other individuals start to produce these amazing pulsing sounds that as the whales come roaring up through the bubble net they're just blasting these fish schools with these loud sounds and there's a really cool paper that was produced back in the late 80s by Craig Packer and Lois Rattan on the evolution of cooperation. And they predicted in that paper, they didn't actually mention baleen whales, but they predicted those organisms that have to feed, that are feeding on schooling type of prey, probably will develop the most complex hunting strategies and they nailed it perfectly because with these humpback whales we see this very unique use of sound in the ocean. We see them team hunting, using these bubble tools and in a co-operative communal fashion. They appear task specialize with roles, some animals make the sound, other individuals appear to make the bubble net and so it was a brilliant match of theory and going into the field and being able to test it and validate that feeding on these bioplasmas, these fish schools, tends to facilitate enhanced social institutions.
RS: A bubble net is?
FS: A bubble net is a form of tool using behavior where one of the whales in the group will start to swim in a circle below the surface at about 30 or 40 feet percolating air out of the top of its blowhole and as air rises it percolates and effervesces and starts to form a very effective curtain and the whales have learned that the fish schools tend to be highly frightened of this. In fact some of my work that I did at Simon Fraser University with Laurence Still, we actually brought fish schools into the lab, these Herring's schools, and we tested the effects of bubbles essentially building a, a whale, an artificial whale in the lab. We made large flippers and we made various bubble configurations to test how the fish would respond to these bubbles. And as it turns out you can contain a fish school with a corral of bubbles. We showed that if you have a curtain of bubbles and even if you have a predatory stimulus on one side the fish are reluctant to cross over to the other side. So it appears that these bubble tools that the whales used to have a visual, a mechanical, and an acoustic component that the herring find very frightening.
RS: It traps them and allows the whales to eat them?
FS: Exactly, it's like a giant effervescing bubbling cauldron that allows them to essentially corral the fish create a barrier, create a wall, and the whole pod comes rocketing up through this tunnel of bubbles and essentially it's like a dead end, it's a dead end alley. The whales force the prey up through with the bubble net, trap them against the surface, that compresses the school, then you see the whales coming up with their giant mozz and engulfing the fish school.
RS: What does that tell you about whales?
FS: Well the bubble tools tell you that they're goal directed. They're planning for the future. They're extremely adaptive. They can adjust the bubble size for different types of fish prey, different types of krill. They can adjust their nozzle, the depth, the volume of air that comes out. So it shows that they're very good at planning for the future, anticipating events, and accommodating each other.
RS: Connection to SETI?
FS: I would say absolutely. Absolutely. I mean. I guess what has been so remarkable is that these whales have evolved these incredible social institutions and complex vocalizations without technology. And it shows you that there are exoplanets that are drifting around in the cosmos, they can be full of intelligent life that is not transmitting its presence. In fact, scientists didn't even really know that baleen whales produce sounds even into the late 40s and 50s it was like, thought they were mute. You know we hadn't made the connection yet. And it wasn't until Frank Watlings work and the work by Dr. Roger Payne that we started to realize that these incredible sounds are connected to the humpback whale. And you know, I think you know, these sounds, they really changed the human's perceptions about the oceans. It was at a time, a critical time when we were crafting the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. And as Laurence mentioned you know being able to look back, Carl Sagan looking back and seeing pictures, pictures of the earth from our satellites that just like, it's like oh my goodness we're just a little, a little beautiful orb floating out here in the middle of the oceans, and we're a water planet. And many exoplanets appear to have liquid mediums on them. So yeah, I think it hugely can inform us that there can be all kinds of life in these oceans that go undetected to us. And it's up to the next generation of innovative astrobiologists to figure out how we're going to protect this life in remote places.
RS: Humpback whales unique in terms of communications?
FS: They do appear to be the most dynamic and diverse communicators. Now of course part of that is they have a near shore distribution both in breeding, feeding, and oftentimes migration coastwise. So we do get access to them more than other large whales. But certainly the use of the feeding calls as an inner species herding cry as far as we can tell that's unique. The complexity of the song, the fact that the song is constantly evolving, it's using rhyming, syntax, there's you know it's structural. Those are properties that I think we've been able to show now, other research teams have shown that in bowhead whales they also have songs. They appear to be a bit simpler and perhaps faster evolving but I think it also uses the social chatter of the humpback whales. It's the social sounds that they use when they're just chattering and interacting and they do that while they're feeding, well they're breeding, and even migration. And in all ocean basins of the world, the social chatter has been recorded and it definitely appears to be much more complex than other baleen whales. I feel like that's the Rosetta Stone getting at their communication system. That's why it's been so exciting to work with Laurence and Brenda and the SETI Institute, is bringing the tools and information theory to look at the complexity of these signals and also we try to get at the underlying meaning with the hydrophone (STAMMER) hydrophone array and looking at the behavioral context when the signals are produced.
RS: These whales are actually talking to one another?
FS: Actually showing that one individual is broadcasting a signal that's being received, another whale is calling back. We're actually not even that far yet. There's been some innovative stuff with doing playbacks in the song, but you know we assume that they're communicating out there. Sort of a basic paradigm of biology, if you have a trait and it's widely present in a population you assume some adaptive value. And so we think that these signals could potentially be communicating all kinds of information, potentially that could be command and control signals when they're coming up in a bubble net, they could be helping each other find aggregations of prey. Certainly we know that humpback whales have this very unusual compassionate habit to run towards individuals that are distressed and that includes their own cabs or members of their own species that are being attacked by killer whales so they're clearly using sounds in those contexts to approach each other.
RS: Rhyme and syntax, how do you interpret that with whales?
FS: Dr. Roger Payne and Katy Payne's work has suggested that rhyme might be a sort of pneumonic tool to help them rem-- remember these extremely long and complex song sequences. And what's really crazy is that you go to one of these subtropical breeding areas and all the males are essentially singing the same version of the song, of the same song, up to 20 minutes long. These complex series of whoops and screams and howls and ratchet-like sounds and but they're all singing, they all join the song cycle in a different place, and they're not singing in unison. But yet somehow they're memorizing and remembering these amazing sounds over this, this 15 to 20 minute period. And so that suggests a remarkable localization skills and cognitive skills and probably a lot of females are coming into that, this big breeding arena. In fact the closest ecological analog we have to that is the lekking that you see in sage grouse and other ground dwelling birds where they'll form these large leks, prairie chickens. All the males will assemble on communal prairie grounds, away from the food resource, engage in these conspicuous visual and physical and vocal displays. The females show up, they're basically there to mate. And that's exactly what these humpbacks appear to be doing. Another notion is that the song is associated with reproduction.
RS: Song, feeding, what's the third?
FS: The social chatter. So humpbacks have three basic types of vocal signals. There's the songs and the subtropical breeding areas, there's the feeding calls that they give up in Southeast Alaska to herd herring. And then there's this global social chatter that we don't know what they're saying yet.
RS: How far away are we from understanding whale communication?
FS: I think we've made a lot of progress in understanding the structural aspects of their songs and social chatter and feeding calls. I think we've done well in understanding that the feeding calls are an interspecies herding cry. We recently published a paper on the use of feeding calls by solitary individuals and that suggests that they're herding the prey by themselves, that tends to suggest it's not a command control signal but is an interspecies signal. Because why would a lone individual be communicating with himself in that fashion. We've also done playbacks in the lab with these feeding calls to show that the herring can hear, they can localize and flee-- flee away from these sounds. So I think we're, we're on the right track with feeding calls. That's just one of the dozens and dozens of signals that they give. I think the song, I think we can get pretty confidently say it's associated with, with male, male competition and mate attraction. But this social chatter, the social sounds, are also called non-song sounds. The jury's still out and what they can be potentially saying. You know one theory is that with these social sounds, the strongest selection pressure for acoustic diversity is in the wintering areas for the male's vocal, vocal complexity, vocal intelligence, that the female can use for mate attraction. And then when they migrate in the spring up to the summer breeding areas, it's like they have these acoustic headdresses, they're all dressed up and have no place to go. And so these sounds are all just produced incidentally. So that's one you know that's kind of the model at one end of the spectrum. The other notion would be that these are highly important sounds. They could each be their own sort of symbol or glyph. And they had lots of information. Certainly these social sounds. They're very complex and the amount of surface area for them to encode information is huge. Many of the sounds, these social sounds are graded and so the whales can put all kinds of different emphasis on them. So they, we're really excited about the future. And I guess most importantly is the support from the Templeton Foundation is that we can put this hydrophone array out into this complex feeding and hunting and bubble netting system where there's fission fusion behavior going on, 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 going to be able to put some sort of meaning to these sounds and then the next round is to do the playbacks of the sounds to the animals to test ideas about our animals aggregating, are they dispersing, really cool at the recent synthesis meeting in St Andrews. It was fantastic to meet up with scientists from all over the world working on various problems and we got some great ideas there about what we can do next. I sat in on some of the meetings on play and compassion. And the idea was, well why don't we start to inundate these humpback social sounds with more emotion or just playback sounds of other animals in distress and see if we can attract humpbacks over, and that would show that they are truly compassionate beings, not just incidental encounters but they're actually going out of the way to assist other individuals. So that's really exciting.
RS: The structure-- versus meaning?
FS: Yeah, we know that humpback whales, they vocalize primarily between oh, 300 hertz and two kilohertz, that's where most of the energy is. It's crazy, it's almost word-like. They produce these you know half-second to three second sounds that are punctuated by silence, very, in some ways very language-like. They're produced in these long strings. Of course at this point we can't say that it's the language. We haven't constrained the meaning to the sounds yet. But being able to see the social context and know who's vocalizing, because you drop a hydrophone into the water. It's just like if you can't localize you're getting sound coming in from over the curve of the earth right. And it's just, it's like a cocktail party. And so that's really exciting working with Brenda and Laurence and the SETI Institute to start to parse out individual data streams within this cocktail party, isolate individuals, and then we can start to run these information theory analyses on these sounds to get some appreciation for the amount of complexity.
RS: Other whales, more difficult to monitor or to get to them?
FS: That is correct, yes. The modern tools of remote sensing are really helping, right? Hydrophone arrays out there in the ocean, using various unmanned craft, various boats out there, satellites, drones now are becoming online. So there are lots of tools now to help us access these more remote and humpback whales, they've recovered marvelously in the past half century so there's a lot of them nowadays to study and celebrate.
RS: Is your assumption if this is happening in humpbacks, it's happening in other communities?
FS: Yeah very possibly. You know the more we look at animals, the more we seem to come up with the diversity of signals, certainly the bowhead is now being shown to be a very competent singer. It doesn't mean that these animals aren't complex communicators, it just means that they're doing it in ways that we haven't detected yet. Like gray whales, it can be much more important McKenna reception, potentially olfaction in the water, the of course the blue whales are out there in the middle of the ocean with their subsonic signals that they're much more challenging to detect and process and they tend to have certain call types for certain populations that are act-- sort of acts as identifiers. But again it's still, there could be ways that they are encoding information on these signals that we yet haven't deciphered.
RS: An ocean internet?
FS: Well sound speed in the oceans is five times faster than in air, so oceans are extremely acoustically conductive. Visually, light-like rays don't travel very far in the water. You know just a few feet are tens of meters but sounds, they can travel over hundreds if not thousands of miles. And studies have shown that in the North Pacific, Hawaii, Japan, and Mexico, not identical but they do have similar sorts of songs that are evolving in somewhat synchrony. That suggests these animals are in acoustic contact. And Francis Garland's work and her colleagues in Oceania showing that the song themes radiate out across the Pacific, suggesting that they're in touch over hundreds and even thousands of miles.
RS: How is information theory helping understand this issue around vocalization in whales?
FS: Well when you have these animals, this social chatter out there and once we have the sophistication to isolate an individual, I think it's going to be really exciting. Laurence and Shawn and Brenda have, they've shown up to three levels of complexity with the conditional complexity with feeding calls, but those, and we expect those, those are relatively simple interspecies herding cries as far as we know, we're not entirely sure how other individuals within the pod are using them to communicate. And since lone individuals do it, it's probably blasting the fish, but the social chatter is remarkable. And really we have yet to unleash the power of information theory upon these signals. And so I think the future is very exciting to look at how much information, are there certain rules when these animals are chittering, what is a social context and from that way I think we can back out some idea of meaning.
RS: Short tutorial... information theory?
FS: Information theory will help us understand the complexity of these signals. 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, in English. Same thing, is there similar patterns within these whales or we want to start to look for rules of communications for certain patterns that are consistent across time and space and social context and that's really exciting. Or maybe they're just produced randomly by individuals. So yeah it's getting a handle on the social sounds information theory is really a promising tool.
RS: But not meaning, just patterns?
FS: It's mostly pattern, yes, yes. And the meaning comes from observing the social context that the signals are produced in and then using the playbacks experiments to test their ideas about meaning.
RS: Information theory-- what's taken so long?
FS: I think as Laurence suggested it's you know, it's a tool that probably in the last decade, decade and a half has become much more popular. The information theory has been applied to song by a number of research teams and they have shown that the order of every 100 to every 300 signals, you start to get these repetitive syntactical patterns, but that appears to be more about the, the male quality as opposed to strictly would just be like you know running around showing off for the females, right. The information is embedded in your ability to be a fad, to copy other males, to innovate. It's not necessarily information itself. And the real challenge for applying the tools of information theory to humpback whales is just that they're such social beings and as they get together in groups, that's more and more of an incentive to chatter and interact and scream and hoot and holler. And so it's just really a challenge to isolate individual whales within this male storm of acoustic sounds. So that's what we're getting at with the hydrophone array, being able to localize individuals and start into a more nuanced analysis of these signals.
RS: Where will the hydrophone array be based?
FS: Up in Southeast Alaska. We work with a lighthouse up there, the Five Finger Lighthouse and it's a great facility. It's right out there in the middle of Frederick Sound, which is a giant solar powered krill factory. Humpbacks, when the krill is abundant, they'll show it by the hundreds. And so you drop a hydrophone out there, you hear all these amazing signals. Now the array will allow us to start to pinpoint individuals and from the lighthouse tower we can use various tools including a surveyor theodolite, we can pinpoint the individuals of whales and we can see if they're coming together associated with the sounds. It'll get really exciting when we combine all these whales with the hydrophone and the playback speaker.
RS: The hope being?
FS: Well it would be really nice to know how important these signals are to the animals themselves. I mean we have huge conservation problems with acoustic pollution in the oceans, certain of these sounds, they may be at the same bandwidth as ship noise. So the sounds couldn't be masked by ship noise. Entanglements in fishing gear and ship strikes are two major conservation concerns for baleen whales. So one of the projects that we're working on within the fishing industry is to come up with these pingers which have already been developed and those sit on nets to create sounds to, so humpback and other marine mammals can make these, these fishing nets, seine nets, crab pot lines, long lines, make them more acoustically visible. And so through our work we're actually hoping to come up and show what sounds are the most important to humpback whales and do they have alerting sounds within their own communication system that we could start to adjust to these pingers to make them more acoustically visible.
RS: This is a conservation effort?
FS: Absolutely, it's an important conservation effort. Also ship strikes, you know whales get, they live out there and at any one time there's 50,000 giant container vessels plying our oceans and they run over whales. One just got hit last week in our study area and is there something that we can do with the application of ship noise, quieter ships, could we use sounds on the bow of the vessel to help make them more acoustically visible.
RS: The connection with SETI?
FS: Well I guess at the most basic level is this what's Laurence has always impressed on me is that if we can't even detect intelligence and know its levels and types in our own ecosystems and our own ocean, you know maybe it's raining down upon us right now but we're just not detecting it. So different types of intelligence, different ways of communication I think can be hugely informative for the SETI search.
RS: How do you define diverse intelligence?
FS: Great question. As an evolutionary biologist I, you know, think of survivorship and intelligence as diverse intelligences as helping animals get through the day to survive, evade predators, find enough to eat, stay warm at night, localize each other, essentially to thrive and flourish as an organism. And intelligence can take countless forms, right? And so, yeah I see it as promoting adaptive behavior so individuals and populations can survive.
RS: We've always had a human centric angle, is that changing in biology?
FS: Yes. Yeah no I clearly think that we've, as a research community, have evolved well past looking at animals as autonomous, you know, black skin boxes that's just a stimulus response, right. I think we know that we share a deep common ancestry in the part of the mammalian mind that controls basic emotions. As a really ancient you know the same neurotransmitters that coursed through their veins and brain are similar ones to ours. So there's all kinds of reasons to think that these animals live very complex emotional and cognitive lives. I mean look at the humpback whale, they're laced with spindle neurons and spindle neurons and we also find them in some of the apes and dolphins and we know that they're sort of like the fire wire of the human mind, language, social intelligence, facial recognition, compassion. The humpback mind, Vanderhoff and Gulch, their studies have shown with architecture that parts of the human, excuse me, parts of the humpback brain is laced with the spindle neurons. So we're just beginning to realize these animals are no reason to think that they're not as capable or more capable of socially intelligent behaviors without technology. I think that's really exciting. You see, when you go to the subtropical breeding area and you just hear this vast amount of social sounds and interaction it's just like, it's like a huge party there and it's their ability to differentiate each other's is, is probably, the number of individuals that they can probably recognize acoustically alone, there's no reason to think that it couldn't match or exceed greatly the human capacity and that suggests you know, high level of social intelligence.
RS: Are they like us?
FS: There's a bizarre co-evolutionary convergence between humpback whales and humans. You know first of all we, they are extremely vocally complex. We both vocalize in the same central, same central frequency range. We have sort of both have language-like sounds that are given, humpback whales, they form these remarkable teams when they're hunting, these bubble netting coalitions. I mean they're like a food co-op. I mean they came up with the food co-operative idea probably millions of years ago, open membership, they're diverse, you know in their age and their sex. They, because fish schools are hardly divisible, everybody seems to get in on the action. You know there seems to be this amazingly equalness to their groups. And the fact that these are not relatives. The number of lines of evidence suggests that whales in these bubble netting teams, they're just running buddies, they're just friends, they're just partners there. It's a meritocracy. They're working together. Our photo I.D. work has shown that some of these whales also work up in Glacier Bay National Park, Scott Baker and Chris Gabriel and Jan Strelley. Their work has also shown that some of these bonds are lasting across summers, decades, perhaps even lifetimes for some of these individuals and they don't appear to be kin so they're forming, you can just call them economic bonds, but boy when you watch these whales they sure seem like friendships.
RS: Big questions still left?
FS: I think the big questions it's that, it's getting inside their minds, right. What are these animals detecting, what are they feeling, you know of course the whole notion about the diversity of the signals that they're producing, the meaning of these sounds, I mean I think that's exciting and that's precisely why I'm working on it. I think that truly is one of the most, figuring out their basic intelligence and will we someday be able to have a conversation with them. They, I can't say, in many ways I feel like we're just catching up to them with our modern Internet tool...
FS: Tools and computers that we're just catching up to them and I think the future is really exciting about for these animals.
RS: Other species we could do this with?
FS: Absolutely, and I think there's many great research teams going out there, particularly with the toothed whales, the adonis seats?, killer whales, bottlenose dolphins, spotted dolphins. There's fantastic work going on in trying to decipher what they're saying, looking at their subgroupings and the use of sounds, acoustic clans with killer whales and of course that's the great thing about going to these meetings at St. Andrews and interacting with our colleagues. As you're meeting researchers from all over the world, working on apes and parrots and corvins and bacteria, and I think we're, we're getting closer to a unified theory on animal intelligence and communication.
RS: What does that mean?
FS: It suggests that animals, a unified theory would probably show that animals do follow the rules of information theory that in order to communicate whether it be chemically, visually, acoustically, through McKenna reception, there very likely are, you know, very concrete rules that these animals are using to interact.
RS: Hydrophones, other technologies that are important?
FS: Yeah, that's the great thing about science and technology is that there's always a new, just around the corner, a new innovation that's coming online, and there's a lot of sharing of new tagging technologies, use of satellites, use of drones. Information processing, signal-- AI, machine learning, it's we are just-- we're just going logarithmic, we're going exponential with these new tools, and it's super-exciting. And I guess, research has been really amazing to show us how incredibly compassionate these humpback whales are. A recent paper was published by Pitman and his colleagues documenting over a hundred incidences of humpback whales coming to the aid of other species. This includes their own calves, gray whale calves, dolphins, sea lions, seals, even ocean sunfish, that they'll come to the rescue, when they're in distress. And it's like, these humpbacks, it's like firemen running to a burning building. And it's like you know, humpbacks, they're not this kind of species where it's like, fix your own oxygen mask first before assisting others. They just charge over to render assistance, and of course to the tragic, partially tragic to their demise through the whaling industry, the whales would wound the calves first because they knew the mother was going to come around and protect the baby. And so it-- but it does show that these animals are, humans do not have the market cornered on compassion. It seems a deeply held, compassion and play and behavior, humpback whales, they're breaching, they're calling, they're rolling, they're after a vigorous period of bubble netting, these whales, usually towards the evening, often times you'll see a disaffiliation breach, or communal disaffiliation breach...
RS: What is that?
FS: It's just multiple individuals, in synchrony, breaching at the same time, rocketing out of the water and splashing. Usually after that, the pod is split up for the evening. And so that suggests that there's, almost like synchrony in dolphins, synchrony is thought to be an interactive, somewhat compassionate friendly behavior. And in that context, that percussive activity has to have a very specific intragroup signal for interaction and-- party's over for now, everybody take a break. Thank you very much, and we'll see you tomorrow morning.
RS: Empathy, compassion, altruism?
FS: Absolutely. Who would have guessed that this whole notion of them being gentle giants has it really has born out with the humpbacks. And of course that means that we need to maintain respectful distance from them, let them go about their natural behaviors, and but what we are seeing is truly remarkable in their ability to assist each other and other animals.
RS: Are we alone?
FS: Well, that's the cool thing about working with these animals, because I definitely don't feel alone when I'm listening to these sounds over the hydrophone. And I-- I think it was the song of the humpback whale that made us realize that there are otherworldly beings right here in our oceans and so no, I don't feel alone at all with the splendor and the beauty and diversity of life on earth. 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 will get closer to this wonderful and perplexing question.
RS: Cracking a code we may not as humans understand at this point, signals could be flowing toward earth -- we don't get, don't understand, can't interpret?
FS: Yeah, the signals could be raining down onto us as Laurence explained, it could be a technological challenge yet, through the use of quantum computers. Or it just could be in some of these astrophysical signals that are raining down, there could be real structural relationships in there that have greater meaning than we have yet been able to decipher, and by looking at the multitude of natural experiments here on earth, and then applying it to our search algorithms and filters in deep space, I think we're going to be a lot more informed.
RS: Linking trying to understand whale communications to SETI, what do you think?
FS: Well, it was like I think a lot of people when they first hear about SETI, just think about what UFO's and flying saucers, right. But I was invited down and I did some lectures and gave a talk, I was immediately intrigued by the hard science that was going on, the challenging science, the challenging tools, and it's like yeah, this is a great idea. I think you're developing, SETI was developing tools that could look at these signals coming in from deep space, you know they're processing their computational power is huge, I think it's a brilliant idea to apply that to animal communication systems. It was funny because in terms of the SETI connection, Laurence kept talking about entanglement, entanglement and I was talking about entanglement. It turns out he was talking about particles, I was talking about fishing gear, but so that was an interesting clarification.
(RUNS SOUNDS OF WHALES)
FS: That is otherworldly. I mean, that's incredible right. That is social chatter, that is when they're together in one of these bubble netting groups. That's working as a team. And sometimes you get two pods joining together, sometimes there appears to be, have to sort out command control, who's leadership here, let's see your union papers. and so you get this, sometimes you'll get this extensive social chattering.
RS: That was heard where?
FS: Up in southeast Alaska, Frederick Sound, in the vicinity of these bubble netting teams.
RS: How many whales?
FS: Average pod size is about ten whales. So you can have ten individuals, you can see the challenge of trying to separate out these signals.
RS: This is a bubble netting event?
FS: Yeah, this is a, this is almost like when things go wrong, or when there's two pods that are joining, or there's a slowdown in the feeding event. They can bubble net without making any sound except for the pulsed herding cries. So they can be engaged in very sophisticated activity silently, but other times they're just making a racket. Let me pull up a song that could be -- I got from the Ocean Institute, or Ocean Alliance that we could utilize.
(RUNS SOUNDS OF WHALES)
FS: This is the classic recording that changed hearts and minds the world over in the early 1970's, Frank Whatlington and Roger Payne's work, connecting these to singing whales.
RS: It changed minds because?
FS: Because the fact that we've been using these animals consumptively for centuries, and realizing that maybe they're better off as living, breathing, valued ecosystem components. Rather than products and a road to extinction.
RS: What do you hear?
FS: Like my heart is being torn out. I hear lone crooners calling in by themselves, maybe they've got blue balls, I don't know. I hear these crazy males trying to attract a female ultimately, but it's hard not to put all kinds of emotion and thoughts into these sounds because they're so complex and marvelous. And one other class of signals, there is social chatter, let me pull up some feeding calls.
(RUNS SOUNDS OF FEEDING CALLS)
FS: These are these very tonal signals, these are tonal signals that are given when the whales are in these bubble netting pods. Loud. Powerful. Be (INAUDIBLE) up the fish school, very smooth, right.
RS: What are we listening to here?
FS: These are the feeding cries, the herding cries of the southeast Alaskan humpback whale, when they're in their bubble netting teams.
RS: What do you feel?
FS: I hear very frightened fish. I think about the fish in schools that are being kind of crazy but this interspecies compassion doesn't appear to extend to the fish schools, because they use this in a very sophisticated fashion, so I hear them overcoming the schooling behavior of fishes with these sounds, almost like, fishes are extremely frightening. They force the fish up from the darker, deeper layers, up towards the surface where they normally would avoid, and they can scream, flying up through the water, these fish schools trying to get away from these whales. And all of a sudden to be trapped against the surface and within the confines of the bubble net, so it is a it is a terrifying interspecies trumpet of doom.
RS: Violent.
FS: Yeah, it's it's… It's survival for the whales, absolutely. They've overcome the schooling defenses. What I hear is the validation of the theory of that we shouldn't, that Packer and Rattan predicted, in the evolution of cooperation, that ocean ecosystems and feeding on schooling prey, should create some of the most complex social institutions and tactics. And that's what I hear, the validation of theory.
RUNS SOUNDS OF WHALES)
FS: Three minutes, four minutes. So they can be very repetitive, they can respirate, reoxygenate themselves, dive, get a fish school, start vocalizing, come crashing up through the surface with, producing the bubble net. Within 3 minutes, start over again, they can do this for hours, pound away at these fish schools. What I also hear in these amazing sounds is the voices of individual whales. It appears that they are distinct enough that we can over time recognize who these feeding calls track with and pinpoint who the leaders of these bubble net teams are, that's fabulous because then you can start, once you can identify individual callers, based on just the qualities of their sounds, it opens up a whole new window into their social structure. For example when you see two leaders come together to, how do they decide who is going to be the leader, that's where that exciting information comes in the social chatter, could be a dialogue perhaps going on, talking about well, yesterday you were leader, or I've got my right hand whale here with me, my half-back, my wide receiver, type information. So if there ever was a system where complex information can be exchanged, it's with these bubble netting teams. And that's why working with the SETI to help decipher these signals is really exciting.
--Begin Laurance Doyle Interview--
Dr. Laurence R. Doyle, Director of the Institute for the Metaphysics of Physics, at Principia College and Principal Investigator at the SETI Institute.
Q. The genesis of the Templeton project and the intent.
LD: When I read about the diverse intelligences program it seemed to be a description of the big questions that we wanted to answer from how animals communicate to if we ever receive an extraterrestrial signal from space. Because I'm at SETI Institute. And so as I read the description I realized that we had the tools, information theory being one of them, to address these kind of deep questions that we're asking about non-human intelligence and in particular we'd had experience with humpback whales who had a global communications system before we did for millions of years. So basically I, when I read the description it matched what our goals were and so that was the origin of our applying to Templeton in particular.
RS: The intent of the project is what?
[10:00:49.20] Well what we want to do is quantify the degree of complexity in non-human communications systems. And we can do that with information theory and also how different species adjust to environmental conditions. For example humpback whales are adjusting to 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 will be hours to get a signal and months to get contact again.
Q. Non-human intelligence?
LD: Well, I think a lot of the studies of animals has come to kind of a limited conception because we measure intelligence as how human they are acting. And I think we need to back off a little and recognize intelligence on the basis of the individual species and how they express intelligence. So for example humpback whales had a global communication system millions of years before we did and they are very socially complex and they migrate and they have different seasons for example in Hawaii they sing and in Alaska they're talking and feeding. So also they put all their communication into vocalizations.And that's another reason for picking marine mammals because they are using gestures or facials or anything like that. So they're actually, we can actually measure their full extent of their communications system by just audio recording with hydrophones and so on. So. We also picked humpback whales because they use tools and their tools are bubble nets for example. So their tool use, their complex social society, Their very complex vocalizations and they are a global network are all reasons that we want to start with humpback whales.
Q. How would you unpack diverse intelligence?
LD: To me it, I warmed up to it right away because to me it meant...
Diverse intelligences, I warmed up to that term right away because to me the first impression of that title was to deprovincialize our thinking about intelligence. In other words, recognize that intelligence can express itself in distinctly non-human ways. And so that's why I immediately thought of it in terms of diverse meaning non-human and that's something we're going to have to do as we study other animals and realize how intelligent they really are but not in a human way.
Q. Why do you think we've been stuck on human-centric intelligence?
LD: Well I think you know we had to start somewhere and we really don't know how to measure human intelligence. We've tried IQ tests and so on but so we haven't mastered what exactly human intelligence is. So I think a lot of effort's been put into that. But the extension to animals of the usual measures of intelligence seemed like a natural thing to do. But it's time to outgrow that because it has generally limited our perception of how really intelligent and complex other species are. And so I think this is a breakthrough concept to go for diversity and intelligence outside of human intelligence. And then you can compare them. The units are not clear yet how to measure, compare for example, whether a bee dance is more complex than an orca whistle system. But information theory is a bridge to that. The mathematics of information theory. [10:05:33.08]
Q. What information theory is and why it's important?
LD: Well, information theory is that mathematics developed by Bell Labs by a gentleman named Clyde Chanon to measure basically the amount of information being sent through telephone lines. And he developed the theory of a noisy channel in case there's static. You have to slow down the message. And error recovery and so on. And we realized that we could apply this to non-human communications systems and quantify the amount of information in bits that they are transmitting to each other and under what circumstances for example boat noise in Glacier Bay, causes them to slow down and how they deal with noise problems. One example would be that we can measure the channel capacity decrease in Glacier Bay pretending Glacier Bay is the telephone line and the boat noise is the static and so we can measure how much the humpback whales have to slow down in their transmission. Well they only slow down about 62 percent of what they needed to ensure the message got through and this was interesting because we're thinking ok, we've measured how much they have to slow down and they don't slow down all the way. And this was perplexing for several days and then I was actually filling in missing words from a copy machine that was low on toner and I realized wait a second I can fill these in because of grammar and spelling roles. The humpback whales must have grammar and spelling roles of some sort. In other words conditional probabilities between signals in order not to have to fill in all the words. In other words they could feel it, get the gist of it, with only 62 percent of the transmission. And so I went looking for conditional probabilities between the signals of the humpback whales and there are dependencies that would, we would call in human language syntax. So that's an example of 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 rules structure allows error recovery. And that has definite survival value in the open.
Q. Error recovery means?
LD: It means that you can fill in the missing letters and words because you know the context. In other words there are signals that have dependence on other signals. An example would be, I'm thinking of a letter and you could guess probably E because E is the most common letter. I say well it's a second letter in a word. And the first letters T. Well now you go ah there's a conditional probability of the next word on the T being first. And you might guess H words you never would have guessed H before. So that's a demonstration of a conditional probability between signals. And humpback whales have that.
Q. Why whales?.
LD: We started actually with bottlenose dolphins because they were captive marine world and we could get lots of vocalizations. And we started by applying what is called Zipf's law ZIPF. George Zipf was a linguist around the 1950s. And he basically did a plot of the frequency of occurrence of words in their rank order, first, second, third, fourth. And it's a logarithmic scale but that doesn't matter. And he got a minus one slope. And that was a 45 degree line. So the most frequent letter or word, second most, third most, and all, down to the least frequent always gave this 45 degree slope. And so he did it with English 40 minus one, Chinese minus one, Nootka minus one. He did it with Russian phonemes minus one. And we did it with bottlenose dolphins minus one. And you do babies, baby babbling gives you minus point three. Something like that. And so babies are babbling and the frequency of occurrence of their signals is about equal. So we recorded two baby dolphins that were born at Marine World and their whistle vocalizations had the same slope as baby, human baby babbling, and then we watched them learn until they were adults at about 20 months and they had a minus one slope. So we actually could show that baby dolphins are born babbling their whistles and eventually come up to speed where they get this minus one slope which shows that their communication system is compatible with a complex language.
Q. The frequency tells us what?
LD: The frequency of occurrence just tells you like for example in English letters, E is the most frequent letter, then A, then T, on down to Q. It just so happens though that each one is spaced its frequency goes down by a set amount each time so that Zipf's law is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a complex language. So in a way this is our first intelligence filter. If you record a non-coded message and it gives a slope of-- that's not minus one, you probably do not have a complex communications system.
Q. The slope tells you what?
LD: It's telling you that there's a balance between the signals such that it could have syntax in the system, in other words that there's rules present that make this balance of the frequency of occurrence of the signals.
Q. Tell me about that aha moment.
LD: Well, I'd read linguists, several linguists had published that what distinguishes human communication from non-human is Zipf's Law. And before that, well to go back to the original discovery, I got up one morning and I was reading a paper by Brenda McCowen at UC Davis. And Table 3 had a list of the frequency of occurrence of dolphin whistles. So I thought Zipf's Law, it's just for fun, see what the slope is. It was minus one. And so I went and had a cup of tea and I did the analysis all over again and it was minus one so I called Brenda and said guess what, bottlenose dolphins obey Zipf's Law. And then of course I sent the paper. We wrote a paper. It was refereed in animal behavior and I sent it to various linguists to say guess what, you should have checked. So then we did squirrel monkeys and squirrel monkeys do not obey Zipf's Law. So in other words we had a distinguisher between a complex system and a very simple, non-syntactic system.
Q. Define complex?
LD: Complex in this case does not refer to the dataset, it refers to the rule structure. In other words there are different kinds of intelligences. And one of them is communication intelligence and at SETI that's the kind of intelligence we're going to get first. So we need a quantifier, a way to quantify a signal system and so we assume that any species will have as complex a rule structure as they can think of, because error recovery is an advantage. One example is if you have a text and it's missing a word you can recover the word by context. What if you're missing two words. Well it's a little harder but not that much harder. But if you're missing nine words you can barely recover a missing word. And if you're missing ten words in a row you might as well pick a word out of the dictionary. So what that means is that human beings have 9th order entropy, word entropy, and that means that there is conditional probabilities up to nine words away and after that it pretty much is any word.
Q. When you say recovery, what do you mean by that?
LD: That you can fill in the blank words. So we can go up to ninth order entropy, we can measure the entropy of an extraterrestrial signal, soon as we get it and classify the signals, we could measure its entropy without having to decipher it. And if it's 20th order entropy we're going to know that their communications system is to ours as ours is to squirrel monkeys. So in other words we can get the intelligence complexity which we would call communication intelligence measure.
Q. The dolphins’ slope is similar to humans, what did that tell you?
LD: Well it told us that the whistle communication system of the bottlenose dolphins at Marine World has the potential to have a very complex structure as far as having rules, syntax, I have to do this for syntax because animal linguistics isn't a field yet, so we don't have a new term. But we'll just say conditional probabilities between signals. So the minus one slope told us that this has a potential for being what in language is called complex syntactic system. And so naturally we wanted to go to especially for SETI purposes, we wanted to go to a larger species that has a global communication system that also has not been influenced by humans, hopefully. And that naturally was humpback whales. [10:16:21.04]
Q. Transitioned from dolphins to whales.
LD: Yeah, we transitioned from doing bottlenose dolphins straight to humpback whales and that's where we became uh, well competent in analyzing the much more diverse signaling system of humpback whales, they may make sounds that sound like all the other animals. I mean I'm kind of surprised, I would be surprised if the Tlingit Native Americans up there don't have some story of how humpback whales gave all the other animals their sounds because they sound like they make sounds of all other animals and then make original sounds like burps and things. What, what they do in Hawaii and we're used to hearing that is sing. Because they're singing and mating in Hawaii. But in Alaska it's kind of more serious business. And so in regard to social calls and feeding calls. So in Alaska you don't hear anything like singing. Not much. It's all kind of arguing and coordinating and herding. They make a certain sound that herds herring into their bubble nets and so on. So here is a truly untampered with species coming up with a very complex communications system and that's what we want to characterize further Zipf's Law is the very first beginning of an intelligence filter. But we've since gone on to develop ways of measuring directly the rule structure within a communications system even if we can't translate it. It's important to see that information theory is not about meaning. I think you need to get the rule structure of the communications system if you're to ever translate. But information theory itself does not do meaning, it does complexity. So in other words you couldn't answer the question, what are the humpback whales saying with information theory yet. You could answer the question given common symbols could you ever translate Shakespeare into humpback. In other words, does humpback have a complexity and rule structure to allow a translation of something written in human into humpback given common symbols which are, is a stretch. But it does answer the question is the carrying capacity of this communication system able to carry a translation of something inhuman and that's one of the things we're after as well.
Q. Define rule structure.
LD: Well, rules structure, by rules structure I mean the syntax and grammar rules that allow you to recover errors. So, and that's why we developed it as well I believe. Some people say that 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. So it's looking at the rule structure, how complex a structure. I can give you an example. Say we, Koko the gorilla could understand we'll do this tomorrow or this happened yesterday. So she understood one time jump. We can say by this time tomorrow I will have finished it. So we understand two time jumps. If an extraterrestrial thinks they're speaking English and they say by this time tomorrow I will to have been done it, you diagram it, it's OK to say that but we lose it because we have reached the limit of our time jumps. [10:20:08.19] It may be by training, it may be just a limit, but there is an example of one more level of complexity where we lose it. And they could handle it. So we have a way to measure that complexity and that structure and, and the first tool is Zipf's law. And the second tool is information theory. And we're coming up with other tools too. And all this will go into what we have dubbed an intelligence filter.
Q. Other tools could include?
LD: Well there are other kinds of mathematical analyses beside information theory and also if you know the purpose of the communication you can start to eek out how much information went into meaning. An example that E.O. Wilson did years ago, the guy that studies ants, is an ant walks up to another ant and it's just come from a food source that has to transmit to that second ant where the food source is. Well that second ant then wanders within a certain bell curve Gaussian distribution of the food you can actually calculate the minimum amount of information the first ant had to have told the second ant in order for it to do that well. And so you can actually quantify the minimum amount of information required to get within that Gaussian distribution of the food. And so that's an example of getting meaning and quantifying meaning by knowing the purpose of the communication and how much information was transmitted you can actually quantify, begin to quantify meaning. And that's what everybody wants to get to but you want to get to it, one of the problems that people have run into is that you say to yourself I want to do a correlation of actions like every time they make this whistle they rise to the surface or anytime they make this whistle they make bubbles. Well the trouble with that is that if they're, if they have a kind of symbolic communication system, then they will not just say like I'm talking dolphins here and there isn't a dolphin here. So if there's a symbolic communication system like bees have, then communication is not talking about actions or not talking about things that are present. And so that direct correlation doesn't really work and it doesn't work with complex species like dolphins who may talk about fish over here not a fish here.
Q. Symbolic communication?
LD: Well, that's a good question. Symbolic communication is talking about something that is not present.
Or making a vocalization that does not correlate directly with an action. So for example bees dance and indicate where the honey source is and they do it with angle and distance. But the honey isn't there and the flower is not in the hive so they're actually communicating about something that is not present that symbolic communication. So it's a very advanced kind of communication. But I think bees and humans are the only species so far proved to use symbolic communication but I'd be really surprised if bees do it that humpback whales don't.
Q. For humans?
LD: Well, me talking about dolphins. There isn't a dolphin in sight. So I can use the word dolphin which symbolizes a real dolphin but it doesn't require dolphin to be here to get the conc-- conception across. So symbolic communication is something that animal behavior people want to admit with hesitation because it's hard, it's not that easy to show. But in order to make progress with the communication systems of complex animals, I think we have to start to recognize that symbolic communication is, they're capable of symbolic communication.
Q. We've identified bees?
LD: There was this long debate about bees having symbolic communication I think in Nature Journal. And it went on and on for a few years but I think at this point bees have been shown to have symbolic communication.
Q. Your hunch that whales have it is because...
LD: You know, they're much more complex than bees in many ways and they navigate and they do all the things bees do. As far as we know bees debate where the best honey or the best hive, bees debate where the best hive location would be when they're swarming and there's a book called Honeybee Democracy all about that. As far as we know humpback whales don't make democratic decisions but they do make decisions based on ability. They get together, Fred can talk more about this, Humpback whales get together to do bubble netting and they're not family. 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.
Q. Whales forming other language?
LD: Oh, you mean that humpback whales communication system. We can measure the complexity but it's definitely non-human. It's not a, it is, I hesitate to use the word syntax without quotes because humpback whales are communicating on their own and we don't really fully understand exactly what and how they for example can generate a bubble net and heard herring into it in a coordinated effort, but they somehow get all the ideas across and do it about every I guess 20 minutes or so, they're building a bubble net and they have it all coordinated and all and Fred can tell you a lot more details about that. But what it's doing is allowing us to approach mathematically the analysis of non-human communications system without human prejudice. The mathematics I think assumes that we can back off and objectively measure the complexity of a non-human communications system. And I think the tools as we develop them will apply to all species. If you can classify this signal we can give you a measure of the rule structure and so it's kind of encephalization quotient was brain to body mass. This is kind of a communication and encephalization quotient, how much rule structure can this non-human hold and can, we can compare that directly with how much rule structure we can handle which is ninth order word entropy. So it's a measure of communication intelligence in a way.
Q. You've chosen whales because of complex communications?
LD: We chose whales because the complexity of their global communications system but also because they rely on audio signals so we can record with hydrophones almost exclusively. They don't use facials or gestures. You know, people say why didn't you do chimpanzees? Well, very complex facials and gestures and body language and all would have to go into the vocalizations as well. And that's a complex, that's a complex mixed signaling system. Humpback whales use a almost exclusively, a audio communication system by, because they're in the ocean. And so that was the other reason for picking marine mammals. They depend heavily on signals so don't, we don't get half the system in gestures like humans or more. We get all of this system in terms of the audio we think.
Q. Complex global?
LD: Well, the complexity comes from the rule structure and also the phonemes you might say of humpback whales that make all sorts of diverse sounds and they happen to make them in our range which is interesting that humans can't appreciate.
Q. We can hear them?
LD: Yes we can hear it. Yeah, the, their global communication system can go below our range of hearing but largely they vocalize in our range of hearing. And it's global because maybe a thousand kilometers away they can transmit a signal and receive it. They can put out I don't know something like 180 decibels or something. From 100 meters away they can put out something like 140 or 150 decibels of sound which is huge. So they can reach a thousand kilometers. Probably whales have been known, blue whales especially, to reach even farther than that. So it is a global communications system. No doubt, they can talk with somebody a thousand kilometers away.
Q. And the response?
LD: And the response, they can get a response but of course it's five hours later. Speed is sound and water is about five times the speed of sound and air. But nevertheless you know it's only you know it's only a mile, well 5000 feet per second or something like that. So it still takes four or five hours to get an answer. And so this is a kind of in a microcosm a kind of a SETI problem. How did they modify their communications system. Because it isn't a two way conversation but it isn't a one way transmission either. It's kind of a mix and that's hopefully what SETI would get someday, a kind of a mix. But in this case it would be better part of a decade to get an answer at the speed of light. And a thousand years to actually meet the individual, it could take us a thousand years to get to the nearest star. The basic analogy I use is if this is the earth and this on this scale and this is the moon on this scale from here in California the nearest star would be in London. So we've done this and the nearest extra terrestrial species that lives around another star would have to come the equivalent of London on that scale. So that's a long way to come to chase somebody through New Mexico desert or something. It's a vastly superior technology that could get here from even the nearest star.
Q. So the signaling going out over this great distance is about what?
LD: Oh, I think at first they're saying is anybody out there. We're doing with SETI. But I, I think that individuals once they make contact and actually plan to meet each other in a few weeks or a month and can signal to start heading toward each other and this may be a way to find mates or you know that's kind of a Fred question. I really don't know what the purpose is of getting together. But I just assume mating would be one of them.
Q. How much of this signaling do we comprehend at this point?
LD: Oh well, I would say there may be less than a handful of signals that are understood either bottlenose dolphins or humpback whales. There is a thunk call that the mothers make and the baby dolphins come to them immediately. So it's kind of a, it's called a thunk call and it means coming here right now there's danger. So there's a few things we understand like that. But I would say a handful at most that we and those are ones where, those are signals where the meaning is, has one meaning and no syntax to it. So this works in its infancy.
Q. When you say we understand it because we've seen it, explain that.
LD: Yeah, we understand the thunk call in bottlenose dolphins because we see the immediate reaction of the baby dolphins to their mother doing a thunk. So that, in that case that wasn't as symbolic communication per se, it didn't have syntactical complexity it meant here now. And so that is understood only because it follows an-- immediate, with an immediate action that we, we see. But that's the exception not the rule in these communications systems of complex species. In simple species it's much easier to get the meaning because...
Q. Such as?
LD: Well, I think ants. I'm not underestimating their social complexity or anything but the example of finding food, we know what the purpose is. If we could quantify the complexity of the bubble net process, then we'll have a thorough understanding of the meaning and the like for example herding calls. That would be a way to approach getting the meaning out of the herding calls that humpback whales make.
Q. Bubble netting process?
LD: As far as I understand it one whale starts to blow bubbles in a cylindrical orientation and as the bubbles rise the herring get herded in by the other individuals into the cyl-- cylinder at the bottom of the cylinder and the herring can't escape because bubbles are pretty good size and they drop so they of course they're freaked out by that and then the humpback whales come underneath and make vocalizations that scare the herring to the surface and on the surface it looks like about a 100 foot diameter bubble ring is being, is rising to the surface and it's a good idea to get away from that, to back away from that because pretty soon fish come flying out and immediately followed by all these big mouths open. And then of course the seagulls come in and so the whole process is repeated about every 20 minutes. So it's basically using bubbles as tools and coordinating with herding calls the herding of the herring in Southeast Alaska into these cylindrical bubble nets and it has to be coordinated because it isn't just like a net we can throw out there and leave, the bubble that lasts maybe a minute or so. So it all has to be timed exactly.
Q. What does that teach us?
LD: It teaches us that humpback whales can use tools and that they can coordinate a very complex behavior that allows them to basically use bubbles as tools to catch herring. So it tells us that they are tool users, that they have communication complexity enough to actually carry out a very complex procedure over and over again, to catch a species that is faster than they are if they just tried to catch it on their own. So the bubble netters can eat herring. The other ones have to eat krill you know kind of shrimp. So if you want to eat herring you have to evolve a complex use of tools and a complex use of communication and you have to work together with other talented humpback whales to do this procedure. And it doesn't necessarily have to be your family that has that ability.
Q. Why is family important?
LD: Well, I know in like, a matriarchal elephant teaches the family how to forage and I guess wolves teach family how to hunt but humpback whales, apparently the bubble netting groups are not mitochondrially related to each other. So they form long lasting relationships year after year they show up to bubble net in Southeast Alaska. And it's based on fishing ability and we know humans form long lasting relationships based on ability and profession. But as far as we know no other species does that beside humpback whales. So we may have more in common socially with humpback whales than we know. This is like I say, this is, these studies, this analysis at least, Fred's been in the field for decades but this kind of analysis is new, is fairly new. So we hope to get insights into you know, a non-human, very intelligent species.
Q. The bubble net, can that help in the SETI project?
LD: Yes because one of the requirements, to have an extraterrestrial intelligence, you have to have astronomy, you have to have a communication system that's complex enough, and you have to have tools. So we look at how do humpback whales get to Hawaii. Do they use stars at all. Magnetic field of the earth, we don't know. As far as I know nobody knows. But they have the requirement of a complex society communications system and they have tool use. So, and if it turns out that they use stars to navigate it all that would be the big three. I'm not saying they'll build the radio telescope of course but they are a good example of a species that would fulfill the three requirements of an extraterrestrial intelligent technology.
Q. Explain SETI?
LD: ]Well, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, had-- started about 50 years ago with Frank Drake pointing a radio telescope at Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti, two stars that are like the sun. He got a signal but it turned out to be from Earth. And of course you have to watch reflections of terrestrial communication off the moon and so on. But since then the SETI institute has built a radio telescope array with 42 antennas. It hopes to add more antennas and they're searching in one to two ten gigahertz region. And the reason they're doing that is because on a water planet there's the least absorption by water vapor in the 110 gigahertz region. But SETI has asked the question all these years, is there a transmitter. And if you tune onto a radio station and you turn the dial once you're on a new radio station. Well turns out nature cannot produce...
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LD: Hertz wide signal the narrowest band I know of isn't an OH Maizer and that's 300 hertz. So in other words you turn the dial and you're on the same station for 300 turns. So SETI asked the question, is there a carrier wave that is narrow band, in which case that indicates technology. So most of the year SETI has operated they've asked is there technology out there. They haven't asked: is the message intelligent? So what's new about SETI and our work is that we are introducing the idea of looking at the message itself and asking is it intelligent. And for that we had to develop an intelligence filter. So SETI all these years has been asking, is there a transmitter. Now we're beginning to ask, is this an intelligent message. And that's new.
Q. A transmitter from somewhere in the universe?
LD: Yes. Well yeah, a transmitter would be from somewhere usually in the galaxy because it has to be rather somewhat close. But an Arecibo is one, that's the big radio edition Puerto Rico, has been used for SETI, an Arecibo could talk to another Arecibo across the galaxy if they were focused on each other. So in other words the galactic scale is not that inhibiting, what's inhibiting is it would take 100,000 years to get the message there. And a hundred thousand years to get it back. So the basic idea is to say is there a narrow radio station, and as far as we know nature cannot make that. Now there's a new kind of SETI also called optical SETI. We signal, computers signal each other at nanosecond, billionth of a second rates. As far as we know the fastest flashing that nature can make is a millisecond pulsar. So in other words we can, a nanosecond is a thousand times faster than the fastest thing nature can make flash. And so optical SETI looks for nanosecond pulses. So they're looking for a narrow pulse in the time realm and radio is looking for a narrow pulse in the frequency realm and these are indicative of technology but nobody until this information theory work has been looking for analyzing the intelligence of the message itself and hence we call it an intelligence filter.
Q. You've been looking for a signal but not a message?
LD: Yeah up until now SETI's mostly been looking for a signal and it's called a carrier wave. And they looked for it to transmit over 1 Hertz. So in other words you turn the dial you're on a new channel. That's technology. Nature cannot do that that we know of. Whereas looking at the content itself, the message content itself has not been done until we just started doing that.
Q. And when you say technology you are talking about an extraterrestrial intelligence that can send a signal.
LD: Yes. We're looking at extraterrestrial intelligence that is signaling with far more energy than we do. For example only the very near stars would be picking up on our old televisions signals. Like Bozo the Clown and Howdy Doody are our ambassadors to the stars.
Q. So every television signal or if or 60 years is something that a technology somewhere else could be reading.
LD: Yes. Yeah that would be the first thing to arrive, at Captain Kangaroo and so on. That's what's getting to the nearest extraterrestrial civilizations if they're there.
Q. Back to whales, why not rely on human technology and understanding to interpret the possibility of signal from technology in the galaxy, then start to dive into the animal kingdom to understand it.
LD: Yeah. The reason that we should go to and include other species in the SETI concept is that there are different structures in a communication system than just the way humans have structured things. And I think that 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 communications system. So I think we're just starting but already I think we're beginning to see that we've been too provincial in the concept of what constitutes an intelligent signal. For example, information theory would not pick up if they're transmitting pi, and I've heard this at SETI meetings. Are they transmitting the golden ratio or pi or what would they transmit. And pi for example would be random. If you get all that you know, lots of digits of pi and plot them on a Zipf plot it's pretty flat because all digits occur at about equal frequency. Why does that fail. Why is it that an intelligence filter would fail to pick up the transmission of pi. And the answer is Because pi only has meaning, it doesn't have any information. They're transmitting pi and because we know the value of pi we recognize that's an intelligent signal but only because we know the meaning. So unless the transmitter and receiver know the same meaning we're going to miss the signal when it's something like pi or the golden ratio or some transcendental number. So 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. So for example the Arecibo message that was transmitted in 1974 by Frank Drake from Arecibo and it was a diagram, kind of a, you have to recognize that there are two prime numbers and plot them. Then you get a picture of a little man in the solar system in the Arecibo telescope and so on. But if you analyze it using information theory it only goes up to second order entropy.
Q. Which means?
LD: That means that it's under-representing the intelligence of humans and their complex ability and it's because the picture itself which Carl Sagan and Frank Drake devised. It's a picture that you have to recognize the meaning in it, but it doesn't have any information in it. And so far as, unless you recognize it as a person or a telescope or something, or the solar system, then if you analyze it as far as rules structure, it doesn't have any, it has very low rules structure. So in other words we didn't put our best SETI foot forward as far as that transmission goes. It was a good first try but we really need to communicate. When you get the value of pi you say oh, extraterrestrials from Alpha Centauri have just transmitted pi. We know hey, great, we know what pi means, we know that they know what pi means. We know there's an extraterrestrial civilization. Tell me about it. Tell me about them. Well we know that they know pi and they can build a radio telescope. Tell me anything else. Nothing. What's their societal complexity. What's their rule structure. Anything. See how it doesn't have any information in it. So picking up an extraterrestrial communication is the way to go, or even a communication to a satellite would have Zipf's Law and structure, whereas, so that's an example of kind of getting out of ourselves and getting stuck on meaning.
Q. What your colleagues thought when you came up with this idea of studying non-human communications...
LD: The very first SETI meeting had a dolphin guy. Lilly was his name Roger Lilly. And there's been, whenever we talk about SETI there's been pictures of dolphins and stuff, but nobody really had made the mathematical connection before. And when I met Brenda McCowan at UC Davis she had the mathematical background and the biology to allow us to overlap a little. And we started to do information theory with our graduate student, Shawn Hunter, who was the first to apply information theory to non-human for a Ph.D. as far as I know. So, but colleagues at SETI, they thought this is really neat. This we-- this is needed to be done for some time. We just know we didn't figure out how to do it yet.So as far as like dolphins being welcomed into the realm of intelligent communicating species for the application of SETI, they loved it. It was, the trick was getting our first papers published because information theory journals go animals, this is information theory, that's computers and stuff. And then you know the animal communications people would go, information theory isn't that computers? So we fell through the cracks for a while but eventually we got some papers accepted and that led to being invited to conferences. Now I would say maybe I'm being optimistic but I would say 15 or 20 percent of animal communications community now use information theory. So it's-- I was surprised. I remember being invited to a conference and 20 people were using information theory and presenting, and I thought Brenda, these guys have read our papers or something. So it's caught on. So it's just really neat because it's been applied to rattlesnakes and gorillas and bonobos and, and you know all sorts of birds and just all sorts of species. You can quantify their communications system. So eventually we'll have a hierarchy.
Q. Sagan picture that was sent in ‘74, was an early signal from earth to say we were here.
LD: Yeah. It was basically a picture. You recognize this long string of zeros and ones. And if you recognize it as the product of two prime numbers and you put it together in a picture and the picture shows the solar system and a man and DNA strands and the Arecibo telescope all in a little dots and dashes. And so that was transmitted toward the globular cluster M13 in 1974 and it will get there in about 40,000 years. It may miss depending on the orbit. I think the orbit of M13 has been modified but it's...
Q. Why there?
LD: Well, it was a very dense field of stars so globular clusters have you know 50,000 stars and so it was a good target to think that you know, maybe one or some of those you know stars would have planets. The trouble globular clusters is that they stir up their planets because the stars are too close to each other. So it might be unfortunately that globular clusters are not the most habitable places in the galaxy.
Q. So that signal isn't even close to our nearest target.
LD: Well, you know, it was transmitted in 74 so it's you know been on the move for about 40 years, 35 years. And it's only got something like 30,000 or 40,000 years to go, one way. It's a big universe out there.
Q. Why search at all?
LD: The reason I support SETI is if somebody was nearby transmitting it would be embarrassing not to pick it up, you know. So we try radio. There are other kinds of SETI but I think the effort itself deprovicializes our thought about ourselves. It's very educational to think of extraterrestrials and their environments and so on. It's kind of like we went to the moon in Apollo 8, got that picture of the earth, and that really sparked the ecological movement. Hey, this is a spaceship we're riding first class and we need to take care of it. And I think SETI is one of those things that deprovincializes thought. It makes me think of all the other possibilities that could happen around different kinds of stars, different kind of planet, you know an extraterrestrial wouldn't have any trouble going to one of the plants and saying here's where the frequency of photosynthesize is at, that matches our eyes, our day vision. These guys are from, they wouldn't even have to look at our DNA, they'd say we're from the same planet. And then they'd say well these guys also our peak night vision is the blue frequency of the moon. So we're from this planet, no doubt about it. And so what is it like to live around a red star where the planet doesn't rotate. What's it like to live on a planet that's slightly larger or smaller. Is water universal, universally required for biologic-- biological systems or will silicon ever be substituted, and so on. So you know it's helping to deprovincialize all sorts of fields from biology to communications to try and do SETI.
Q. Raises big questions.
LD: Yeah, and it gets you thinking big. And that's, it's you know, it's about us. Let's face it. It's putting us in perspective. When we do that picture of the astronomers staring up at the sky and saying are we alone. Two things strike me, one is that there's all these animals that are tugging at our pants leg you know, saying Habla Espanol or whatever, you know. It's like they, 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 what is the context in which humans have built a space faring technology and where do we fit in. The average solar type star is older than the sun in this neck of the woods. And so all other things being equal, I'll give you an example. When the solar system was forming we formed, the Earth formed here close to the sun where it's very hot and we are made of iron and nickel and aluminum and silicon and so on. What are we doing with water. Water should have condensed out past Jupiter. So what is liquid water which is essential doing on a terrestrial planet made of iron and nickel and silicon and so on. And the answer is that Jupiter stirred up the comet clouds that condensed out where water condenses and stirred it up and threw them into the inner solar systems. So our ocean is probably forty thousand comets. So you say to yourself that's a showstopper unless you have a Jupiter you can't get an inhabitable, an inhabited planet. Well we have seen detected, astronomers have detected, a solar system where comets are being thrown into their star by the water vapor spectrum. So ok, that's not a showstopper. This is a usual thing that happens, terrestrial planets. So in other words SETI puts everything in context and you can ask yourself is there a showstopper? Are we really unique and so far I haven't found any showstoppers. They are a very complex history of things that have to happen especially to get technology. Another example is Chris McKay of NASA Ames Research Center asked the question did the dinosaurs go to the moon.And it sounds funny but we couldn't tell unless we find artifacts on the moon because the geologic record doesn't have the resolution to say here's a 10,000 year long civilization. But we know they didn't probably go to the moon. They had 200 million years to get it together, we've done it in 7 million depending on how old hominids you believe are human. They had opposable thumbs, the velociraptors had big brains, bipedal, opposable thumbs, everything you needed. Why didn't the dinosaurs go to the moon. And one of the answers is multidisciplinary, that's the other thing about SETI. Maybe because they didn't have an ice age, so they weren't forced to make fire and hunting tools. We know the Cretaceous was nice and warm throughout the whole Cretaceous so the dinosaurs may not have had to go you know, develop technology and therefore didn't go to the moon, because they weren't forced by an ice age. So you're saying ok, so ice ages are required. What if, if you expect to detect an extraterrestrial signal why you need an ice age. Well so is it usual for planets to wobble and produce ice age. Yes. So that's not a showstopper. So what you can see, you need a multidisciplinary approach and that's the other advantage is the mix and match of fields. Information theory was not connected to animal communications before recently. So, so 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.
Q. False signals?
LD: Well, Carl Sagan was the first author I think, in an article in The Astrophysical Journal a couple decades ago and it published 37 signals that qualified for a steady signals and it was sidereal, in other words they moved with the stars. It wasn't terrestrial interference including classified satellites. It wasn't bouncing off the moons of Jupiter or anything like that. These were bona fiti signals that went away and never came back. So in the movie Contact Jodie Foster is listening and she gets a signal and it goes away. And of course it comes back and you see the rest of the movie. That didn't happen. In that case those 37 signals did not come back. But there is a signal called the Wow signal which somebody wrote - Wow - next to the signal that Ohio State picked up three decades or more ago. And people have been looking at that region in the sky ever since and it's never repeated. So we don't know what that is but a Wow signal occurs fairly often, a few a year at the Allen Telescope Array and people of course drop everything and go to that signal. But so far it's never repeated. So I would say the situation is intriguing and encouraging but also frustrating.
Q. What's your best guess?
LD: Well, if I wanted to be honest about what I think they could be and give credibility to everything's been checked out, there's no secret Air Force satellite or anything. And I would say well you know when you have interstellar probes, they're going to be transmitting to and from their home planet. And we may have intercepted something like that. So you know it's interesting. Enrico Fermi the nuclear physicist is credited with having come up with what's called the Fermi Paradox and it's where is everybody. And given the age that the sun is somewhat, is a third generation star and we know that because the chemicals that it's made up had to have been made in supernova and neutron star mergers and stuff. In other words other stars had to proceed the chemical composition of the sun. So we know it's a fairly young star, five billion or so. And all other things being equal, we should have a galaxy chock full of communicating civilizations but we haven't picked up anything yet. One anthropologist said well by that reasoning North and South America should have been filled with Polynesians by now. What happened. He said well they got to (INAUDIBLE)... and... I need to start again. He said that the Polynesians got to Hawaii and Tahiti and various places, Samoa, and things got interesting so they didn't go on to North and South America. So he argued that interestingly enough that the galaxy is, must be full of interesting civilizations because they're not here. We're on kind of the outskirts. So in other words he demonstrated that one point you can fit any curve through and we have one point and it would be nice just to have one other example for example fossils on Mars or biology or another example of an extraterrestrial civilization because then we begin to get two and three dimensional. Right now one point you can speculate that galaxy's full, that galaxy's empty, where is everybody, you know. But I think we need to take baby steps and look at for example communication in non-humans and deprovincialize our thinking about what intelligence is because we may be missing a signal that has been coded in such a way that you know, a bee dance would be closer than a human vocalization.
Deprovincialization of thought is one of the great things that SETI's contributing. And I think the term in the Drake Equation (INAUDIBLE) is about what is intelligence and we're still working on that one. Of all the terms of Drake's equation, what's a good planet, what's a good place to live, it's usually liquid water and so on. The one that says what is intelligence is the least well constrained right now.
Q. Deprovincialization?
LD: Well, provincial thinking basically does permutations on the existing data instead of original thought. So deprovincialized thought means ok, we're getting completely out of ourselves and coming up with a truly original way of approaching a problem and working with non-humans. That's one of the first things that happened when I was up in the boat with Fred is a humpback whale came up nearby and breathed on us and it was, it wasn't disgusting as you would expect. There was some fish smell it was some exotic kind of smell almost like incense and a kind of a petroleum, it was this funny mix. But there wasn't bad breath but it was exotic and it made me realize it sometimes smells - we are being way too human. This is we've taken a human approach to SETI as far as what to expect and there's nothing wrong with that for the first 50 years but it's time to get out of ourselves, deprovincialize our thinking and start asking ourselves what is non-human intelligence all about. And how's that translate into a signal we may get and have we been missing a signal because it's not a human signal.
Q. Where are we in the search for ET intelligence?
LD: Well, just still beginning. We're still looking in the radio and some optical. There are other ways of doing SETI. Um, teleportation information has been demonstrated in the lab. It's quantum teleportation. I think that will play a role in SETI. So I think we have a lot, a long way to go. So I would say that in the long history of SETI, some people say it might take a thousand years to get a signal because of the vastness of the galaxy. I hope not but I would say 50 years is just beginning.
Q. Quantum teleportation is?
LD: Oh, well it turns out that you can untangle electrons with each other and the electrons think they're one electron even though they're separated by an arbitrary distance. And what you do to one instantaneously affects the other but you can't check that it affected it faster than light. So it isn't communication yet but nevertheless when you get there you realize it was instantaneously affected. So if you had entangled electrons spread throughout the galaxy you would use those to teleport information, I imagine. And then unlock it at the speed of light but you wouldn't have to send these vast transmissions you would just send the key to unlock the message you've already teleported and that's just, that's just an offhand example of a kind of communication system that exceeds ours. We have been able to do that in the lab but we haven't really teleported information farther than about oh a thousand miles or so.
Q. Some have argued that it's dangerous to do what SETI is doing.
LD: Well, too late, it's too late to stay quiet. We're leaking signals like crazy, I'll give you an unintentional example of a signal. Over at Stanford they have a linear accelerator and they generate for example particles like neutrinos and the neutrinos go zooming along the linear accelerator, well when they are created they, well any particle basically but neutrinos in particular can go through the mountain and out over the Pacific Ocean and there we have this neutrino lighthouse going, woohoo technology. Any fairly advanced civilization would have picked that up already. It would have picked up a course on our radio leaks. But they would have picked up, Carl Sagan was fond of showing that they would have picked up light variations in the sea of Japan due to the sushi fishermen. You light up the sea of Japan and then wait for squid to come to the surface and that coming and going is unnatural, it's not the right frequency for, you know, a bloom of bacteria. So in other words we've given ourselves away long since. So if any extraterrestrial civilization has gotten it together enough to do space travel it seems like they would have gotten it together enough not to be warlike or quibble with each other. There seems to be an exclusion there. You can do space travel or you can do-- plus they'd be very advanced. I mean I don't see why, unless they came to admire us as a natural history museum, I don't see the intrinsic interest in humans per se. So I generally don't think that we should be afraid because we've already given ourselves away. Long since I can think of a dozen other ways we have said you-who here's technology, even beside radio leaks. And I'd say it's interesting that our-- it's amusing that military radar is one of the brightest things giving us away. So our security people are giving us away. As much as anybody. So it's needless to be afraid. I think.
Q. If that day came, who would speak for Planet Earth?
LD: Now see, that's a great question. Who speaks for planet Earth? I wrote a little song about that. Who speaks for planet Earth? Humpback whales. I mean Star Trek 4 kind of emphasized that when Spock said the humpback whales, this alien civilization is signaling and they slow it down and it turns out underwater would sound like humpback whales. And the whole premise of Star Trek 4 was that these aliens came to talk to humpback whales, not humans. Spock says only humans would be egotistical not to think that these aliens came to talk to them. And yeah, who speaks for Earth is a good question. I think there's an ecological component to SETI and it's called El, The last term which is the least known and it says what is the lifetime of an extraterrestrial communicating civilization and that is the one we are most ignorant about. How long does this last. And I would say the big three there are: get along with each other, get along with your environment, and keep your technological head up enough to deflect a comet. Those are the big three to lengthen or shorten an extraterrestrial civilization's lifetime. So if you want to study ecology at SETI Institute and tie it in with how long civilizations last, that's completely legitimate. That's the term El. So you can see you mix and match all sorts of things. But yeah I think the one that's challenging us now in particular is getting along with our environment.
Q. Big challenges ahead?
LD: Well, getting enough data is one of the big challenges because we want to analyze the syntactical internal relationship between signals for humpback whales and for that we need to do signal one to signal two, signal one to signal three, signal four, signal five, signal six, signal three hundred, then two to three, two to four, two to five. You can see it goes up as the factorial. So in other words getting enough data with humpbacks in particular because their system's so complex to reach the end of their entropy is a ninth order, is it fifth order, we don't know. But it's going to be tricky because we need lots more signals but, and there's the logistics you know humpback whales go faster than kayaks so you need a quick skip, which the Alaska Well Foundation has. And just being in the field you have to know if you want to analyze the data correctly you have to know the salinity and the depth and temperature and so on, that affects the propagation of the signals. So what we're going to do with the Templeton funding is we're going to build a hydrophone array and the array will let us dead reckon you might say where the humpback emitting is, so in other words just listening to a party conversation we'll be able to pick out that's Joe, that's Alice, that's Sam, and that will really help us understand the internal communication between them instead of just the overall complexity of the, of the recordings, assuming they all come from one person. So that'll be a challenge but when we get the array that's in our budget we will be able to build the array, it has four components, we should be able to start really zooming in on what the network, networking that's going on, networking in the sense of social contact is going on between individuals, then that's going to provide some real insight because then we have two way communication, and there's a whole slew of two way communication tools and information theory we haven't applied yet.
Q. Once you solve this huge problem, then connecting it to SETI?
LD: Well, once we understand the social complexity and the signal complexity of humpback whales I think what will emerge are information theoretic mathematical tools. So far we've found by doing Zipf's Law and syntax that there's further rule structure and there's further grammar you might say. And so we'll discover that for humpback whales, compare it with humans, and then we'll be able to mathematically better characterize what a signal may be. So it's all a matter of letting the data dictate the mathematical derivation and then apply it to an extraterrestrial signal. That's my big interest, I'm interested in humpback whales for sure, but their application to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence makes it in my bailiwick. You know, that's home for me.
Q. Your optimism about finding the solution?
LD: Well um, wouldn't it be interesting. I guess I'm very optimistic because I'm very enthusiastic and I would say that we find a new way of filtering SETI signals and we get a message that would be, and it was there all along, I think that would be really interesting.
Q. Even when contact occurs, what happens?
LD: If we contact honest to goodness extraterrestrial intelligence technology, I think people's thinking will shift to halfway between them and us. I think we'll begin to look at the Earth more as a spaceship and take better care of it I hope. We'll, it will challenge a lot of philosophy and a lot of religion and I think we'll go what happened to us is unique in detail but not overall. Some extraterrestrial species, which I don't expect to look like us at all, has gone through the same processes of Ice Ages, of liquid water being delivered, of surviving its nuclear age, and so on. So we'll have another example. And that will enable us to put ourselves in perspective for the first time in the history of life on Earth. I think it's good for us. It's humbling but humbleness is good for us.
(ROLLS SOUND)
LD: And this is the Vela Pulsar, (ROLLS SOUND). That's one of the most organized stars, and they were called Little Green Men when they were first discovered because they're so organized. They do every three second pulses. But that is not a SETI signal, when we apply Zipf's Law, it doesn't obey Zipf's Law.
Q. That's audio captured from where?
LD: That's an audio version of the pulses of a pulsar. Called the Vela Pulsar, because it's in the constellation Vela, and um, basically it was, I included it in my analysis with Brenda McCowan, to-- it was included in the analysis because it's a very organized star and you want to be able to distinguish astrophysics from a SETI signal. So, basically we analyze that using Zipf's Law and information theory, and it's easily distinguished as a non-intelligent signal.
Q. Whale?
LD: And then we have humpback whales-- and um, they sing in Hawaii and they socially forage in Alaska. They have long distance communication, a huge repertoire. They do non-song vocalizing on the surface, they migrate, they're curious, and they sound like this. (ROLLS SOUND)
LD: They sound like a lot of other animals.
Q. Do we understand that?
LD: No, but we have applied information theory to it and we understand its structure. So, in other words there's an in-between step that's required before understanding, you have to understand what the signal units are, and you have to understand the signaling unit's relationship to each other. And then you begin, can begin to unwrap meaning but only after you've done information theory step as far as I know.
Q. Signal structure?
LD: I mean this occurrence of signals being random or there are rules between them. Like our grammar and our spelling rules, and basically in human languages it's called syntax. But it's conditional probabilities between signals, which constitute rules that allow error recovery.
(ROLLS SAME SOUNDS AGAIN)
Q. This is repeatable?
LD: Well, with bottlenose dolphins, yes. With humpback whales, their-- each communication produces signals you can classify. So you can get the signals over and over, but they have such a broad repertoire that it hasn't gotten redundant yet.
Q. Unique?
LD: Well, as far as singing goes in Hawaii, they all try to reproduce the song. But as far as social foraging in Alaska, they-- it seems more like an average conversation. Between individuals.
Q. The one now is an average conversation?
LD: Yeah, and here's another one. This may be an argument, I'm not sure. Fred could comment on that.
(ROLLS SOUND)
LD: That is not what they're used to-- people are used to hearing. They're used to hearing the yee-- the nice singing going on in Hawaii, whereas this is social.
Q. Laughter, human term?
LD: No, I just call it laughter, but we don't know if it's laughter, or anything like that. Probably not I would say. But it just shows the diversity. One thing I would like to play for you...
LD: Well, there was recently a news story about an orca that was repeating sounds played in-- for the orca. But I don't know if there has been an attempt of humpback whales known to try to communicate at human frequencies and human tempo. But here's one of the three courtings we got, from the boat in the wild. And these are humpback whales too.
(ROLLS SOUND)
Q. Interpret that?
LD: Well it's, when you try and talk underwater when you're in the swimming pool or something, (SOUNDS) it was what we sounded like talking in the boat to the humpback whales, and they were trying to not mimic us, they were making noises within our frequency range, um, maybe just an imitation, but maybe in an attempt to get our attention, I don't know. All I know is that uh, it blew us away. It's like here are humpback whale sounds that sound like human.
(ROLLS SOUNDS AGAIN)
Q. (INAUDIBLE) Sounds like they are communicating?
LD: Well, I would say that, I think I need to be a little bit more cautious as far as animal behaviors go, but if we got anything like that with a SETI signal, we'd say that's it. So yeah, it sounds to me, they're not going yee-- or out of our range of hearing or anything, they're, and also the waa-- waa-- sounds like the tempo that humans speak at. And the frequency that humans speak at, and as far as I know that was the first time that that ever happened.
Q. Singing example?
(ROLLS SOUNDS)
Q. What was that?
LD: Yeah, that's another typical signaling when they're bubble netting or when they're just socializing.
Q. Where was that?
LD: That was in Strait. In Alaska.
(ROLLS SOUNDS AGAIN)
LD: That was for, Fred would understand the context better, I forgot context.
(PLAYS VIDEO)
LD: So they're bubble netting here, and this shows you a bunch of mouths coming up open and fish flying all over the place, and we get pictures of what individuals who are hunting together, or fishing together, and then there's a bunch of seagulls. That's breathing, and they do vocalize above ground sometimes, above water I mean, sometimes. I think that's, oh, and this is another sound, it may be farewell, we're not sure.
(ROLLS SOUND)
Q. When you first heard these, what went through your mind?
LD: Well, these are going to be really hard to analyze, they sound like intelligence, but non-human, and I was enthusiastic to really record enough data to get information theory, get into the information theory realm, and see what the structure is, is it anything like human. These guys, if anybody's going to be as complex as human, it's humpback whales in my opinion. So I was enthusiastic, and of course you know, just hearing them, kind of wakes you up to the non-human world. And I gave a talk, a former student of mine, I used to teach Life and the Universe at UCD Santa Cruz, and a former student of mine there got a job at a grammar school and we had an assembly and she invited me to give a talk. And I thought I would start the talk with one of these vocalizations and then say is that an intelligent signal. Well, I hit the button, the vocalization played, and the kids went non-linear, they went nuts. They were on the chairs, they were yelling, it just sent them through the roof. And I looked at Ann and she goes, and it's like, I better be careful not to start a talk this way next time because the kids just went wild, it took me five minutes to get them all calmed down. I'm going to give a talk now. (LAUGHS) So I think it has that effect on people. Hearing a non-human intelligent communication, it wakes you up. I mean in a way that just talking head or a lecture doesn't do. When I give this talk and I play these. People wake up.
(END TRANSCRIPT)