Learning to communicate with intelligent species on earth is worth pursuing in its own right, regardless of whether there are intelligent aliens out there or not.
Imagine we could make them aware of man made environmental desasters, danger zones that they would therefor avoid. We humans are currently pretty much a world wide extinction level event and i'd rather us becoming part of the solution, teaching our childreen to be arbiters and custodians of nature instead of mindlessly going after the next paycheck.
You know, if people's need to think they're so special aliens are gonna want to be their friend is what it takes for us to actually start taking consciousness seriously instead of pretending it's a magic spell only humans have then sure let's let the alien people lead the way.
There is an interesting story about a field researcher who learned the cries various types of monkeys use to warn of various threats. He learned that they had different sounds for different threats and that the different sorts of monkeys know each other's calls. Thus if one called out that there was a hawk, a different type may translate and make their call for a hawk. He got so used to it that he could pick out the type of monkey, the threat and the danger level from the calls. He spend so much time out in the jungle recording sound and taking notes that the monkeys would just ignore him. One day as he was leaving to go back to his base camp, he suddenly realized that the monkeys were warning him of a big cat and that he was in danger. He seriously picked up his pace until he heard the monkeys reporting the cat at bigger and bigger distances going off in a different direction. He never thanked the monkeys.
I think it's pretty safe to assume the monkeys were warning one another about the big cat, and likely didn't care too much about warning the human. But, who knows?
I've heard about that guy as well, but I don't think the monkeys warned him, rather they warned each other. On the other hand, if humans occasionally do the same to wild animals, them why not monkeys to the human, especially one they associate with being near them? It's not unheard of them, although rare, doing something altruistic, even looking after an orphaned baby animal of different species!
@@oakstrong1 I think it is more like a general alarm call for all who may be listening. They also likely want the predator to know it has been spotted so it should go elsewhere.
I spent 8 years on trident submarines as a sonar tech, and we would have whale pods follow us for days. It got to where we could pick out individual whales because they had different calls. It was SO cool.
@@collincutler4992 it's very common, you're always being monitored by whoever they are as you are in their domain where they hide their bases. Can I ask if you could see the shape of their craft on your radar screen when they buzzed you or is it just an insanely fast moving blip on your screen?
I have been trying for years to communicate with multiple bird species. I understand much of what the sparrows are saying, a bit of what crackles say. Hawks I'm unsure of it feels more like a hey. When I'm extremely tired things make much more sense as I'm not listening as much as feeling. It's really cool to understand the bits and pieces I do. It seems very basic, love, cold, water, good morning, friend, leave, some more, clean, treat, sweep, and they scald me when I do something wrong. Praise me when I clean. They also have tried helping me find love. Especially the robins. I have spent lots of alone time in their environment and made their lives a bit less miserable by cleaning whenever I can, removing trash from the waterways, parks, fields. I've had the most amazing experiences. Redwing blackbirds have flown behind me for 100s of yards, they fly in patterns where I can see them. Once I ignored one and it deficated on my hat in front of a few sparrows. I went home and came back the next day to find the area where the blackbirds nest completely covered in tiny sparrow poops. That was when I realized they are definitely friends of mine. I could go on and on and on. Most people who hear me calling back to them laugh. I have heard my neighbors in the apartment complex I live in talking amongst each other about it about how they talk to me. It's the most amazing feeling to have a wild animal bridging the species gap.
Never mind about communicating with extraterrestrials, but to be able to communicate with different species on Earth accurately, even basic things would be so cool!
I would think that the easiest way to start with aliens would be with nouns. Pick up a chair and say "chair". And try to get their words for the same nouns. Obviously you'd want to pick objects that both species would use and know about.
Okay this is actually important to know, the Lilly Experiment you mentioned was a shit show and there are lots of videos and recordings of it. They were giving the dolphins lsd and other hallucinogens, the guy in charge of the project would sit in a sensory depravation tank and take lsd and other drugs then "fly through hyperspace with the dolphins". The woman who was taking care of the dolphins would frequently masturbate the dolphin to get it to cooperate and settle down. All of the findings were highly anecdotal and there was no communication breakthrough. Eventually the government shut the project down because it was so insane. Atrocity guide did a great video on it it's called "The Dolphin House" It's well worth your time if you find this topic interesting. Love the videos Anton
I saw Ritchie Havens in concert in 1989 and he mentioned spending some vacation time at that research, hanging out with a bunch of scientists who were taking drugs trying to talk to dolphins, as he put it. I don't think he was very impressed by the way he imitated them. Curiously he also mentioned that there was a neighbour there who pissed him off by the name of Richard Nixon. I assume Nixon was one of the government representatives who went there to check on the progress of the experiments. I know Carl Sagan was.
yeah, all studies mentioned here are pure hype, mate. video itself too tbh, like 98% of "science" videos on YT. There's too little actual science going on rn on the planet and what's actually going on is boring af.
Crows and Ravens often adopt a wolf puppy and maintain a lifelong synergistic relationship. The crows can tell the wolves where game can be found in exchange for carrion.
Yup , that is also part of the reason why wolves form packs : If they didn't ravens would get most of the carcass , By making a pack wolves can consume larger preys more quickly , Wolves can hunt their prey of choice alone with a pretty decent level of success ...
@@davidegaruti2582 I also know from personal observation that ravens will follow a sick or injured animal and call coyotes (or probably wolves, also) in to finish the animal off. That way they get to pick over the leavings when the predators leave. Magpies, crows, and ravens have a very complex and sometimes symbiotic relationship with predators.
I mean it's like you were speaking English with someone and they answer in a very weird tone and pronunciation. You know they're trying to speak English but you either don't understand what they've said and look at them surprised (or offended according to you?) or you barely understand it and react accordingly
Reminds me of the series by Adrian Tchaikovsky that starts with the book Children of Time (then "of Ruin," then "of memory") iirc. An amazing 3 books with different species needing to learn to communicate including spiders, humans and octopi. Great hard scifi and are on audible for anyone interested. So good.
So you can do this to racoons. works on any racoon if you can mimic the "trill" sound they make. Basically its like a high pitch rolled R sound. Whenever i see racoons out and about in the city at night, i make that noise while looking right at them, and every time without fail they stop whatever they are doing and stare at me with a shocked expression that seems to me to be " holy shit, they can TALK?!??!" They dont always reply, and sometimes they seem genuinely freaked out a little but they always respond, even if they were running away before. Granted they almost always flee after a few seconds but you can hardly blame them
if i was out minding my own business then suddenly heard something that vaguely sounded like a human, then immediately saw the creature that made it wasn't human, i don't think there's any number of pants i could wear that would be enough to contain what would follow
thats similar to dog barks or cat meows vaguely sounding similar to short phrases like "hey", "i love you" or "how you doin' ". the reason the racoons react like that is the same reason so many videos of those dogs and cats exist online.
Sometimes if a dog is barking at me as I am walking down the road. I will bark back at them and they will just sit there and stare at me for a few seconds before returning to barking at me. It's genuinely funny to see their reactions.
This is awesome. The fact that Twain waited the same amount of time that we waited doing 'our' calls is super fascinating. It's like we're starting to understand their own grammar rules! This is awesome.
I find the prospect of communicating with our fellow beings on this planet to the full potential of their communication abilities rather more interesting than aliens.
Especially when the conditions for Intelligent life and Planetary travel are so godamn difficult it's more likely we will never find out about each other's existence (The aliens won't know about us) Earth is already quite "alien", many mysteries unexplored
It's amazing, I have been communicating with birds for 5 ish years now and am barely beginning to understand. They keep it simple for me but I know it's much more complex than I hear. I'm certain it's like our own language, we just don't get what their saying. I would encourage everyone to listen, call back, and befriend some wild animals. It sparks a fire that can not be extinguished.
I wonder if some part of cetacean communication could be expressed as acoustic pictograms? Given they use sonar and echolocation to see things with certain returns, then mimicking the sound of the return of their own sonar method is basically a way to give other whales a picture of whatever is on their mind. So they could be sending each other a sequence of pictures. So they could be sending a picture of some ocean floor rock, what a school of fish looks like, a group of other whales, and then their own name sound, to basically tell other whales what their plan for the day is. (Which could be interpreted as something like I'm going to look for food in this area, and you guys are invited to join.) To me that would make some kind of sense. For us humans to interpret it better, we'd have to learn more about how whales image things with their sonar and try to copy the particular approach or method they use. Among whales there's also an "oddball" among their species that communicates a bit differently. Belugas use communication that sounds too uncannily like frequency-shift keying. Which is that acoustic modem sound that computers can use to transmit data via audio I/O interfaces. Which is weird because that means the animals are using a pulse encoding system rather than the usual flowing sounds as their speech. Maybe that species would be one to try communicating with first, because of the similarity that their method has as compared to how some of our devices also happen to work. At least if they have a language with syntax/grammar and a fixed vocabulary, then language patterns would still show with that particular encoding method similar to looking at some kind of encoded teletext being transmitted via FSK.
I think you're probably projecting your anthropocentric preoccupation with visual information (our primary sense in non blind people) on whales. Their auditory processing may have greater potential for complex thought and communication than their visual processing.
@@ifeastontoenails I find it reasonable to assume, OP isn't projecting our visual bias, but creating a convergent point between our primary sense (visual) and theirs (echolocation). The fact that we might imagine whales to "see" in a same way we do, isn't relevant at all.
ANTON, this post may be long but I REALLY hope you find time to read it. Regarding animal communication. Specifically dolphins. So… when I was little, a zoo near Chicago, Brookfield zoo had a dolphin exhibit. It made me sad to see, basically they kept five dolphins in a dirty goldfish bowl. The “shows” were just that. They played basket ball, tossed balls back and forth with the crowd. Just sad. Well eventually they built a MUCH bigger, better exhibit and instead of having them do “tricks” they showed behaviors and educated the people. MUCH better. This exhibit had underwater viewing and included an under water mic to listen in. During their “show” for the crowed, especially just before one would be asked to do a big jump, I watched the dolphin in question meet with the others at the bottom of the pool. It would shake it’s head side to side and you could hear the rapid clicks. THEN the others would go to a far corner of the tank and wait until after the one did it’s jump. Which took a pretty good amount of space for it to get up speed to go way high into the air. Now you cannot tell me it wasn’t “telling” the others what was about to happen and exactly where it was about to swim. I thought about this for years, then saw a show, forgot the name but Alan Alda hosted it, science thing. They showed an experiment where dolphins were trained hand signals to do certain “tricks.” IE’ get the ball, bring back the frisbie, jump the floating human and like that. They said it took some time to train each one what the signal was, then. what was expected. NONE were trained to do long sequences of these so in this experiment, long chains of commands were given, say jump the human and bring the frisbie to the ball. Then they would switch it up... bring the ball to the human and like that. Syntax. And without the weeks of training the trainers said this would usually take to do, the dolphins got it. Every time. They had an understanding of syntax. CLEARLY they have an understanding of language. Just not ours. I tried actually writing to Alan Alda and asked what I’m about to share with you, he actually wrote back and said that was a great idea but nothing ever came of it. MY theory is this. Humans speak using abstract sounds, (words) that we attach meanings to. And some animals can grasp it such as that parrot, anyone's dog or even cat, heck my daughter even trained her pet rat to climb up her leg on command, or spin, and so on. Sign is even better, I think of cocoa the gorilla who could sign whole sentences. BUT…. even though dolphins can grasp sign language, some even were trained to poke a computer screen to communicate, I think THEIR natural form is MUCH more complex and has nothing to do with “language” as we think of it. That they can get enough of ours to communicate at all is frankly amazing. BUT it would be like me taking weeks of a course in say Russian, then barely being able to ask where is the bus stop. Certainly I could not have any meaningful conversation because of the language barrier. But for a human, going from one language to another, the basic concept is the same. It’s just a matter of attaching the right sounds to the right meanings and remembering those sounds. But the structure is basically the same. I have NEVER seen anyone consider that language under water could be completely different. Echo location. One of the “behaviors” the zoo would go over is to show how dolphins can sound and figure out what is inside something. They would put covers over the dolphins eyes, and toss in two identical weights. one filled with sand and one with lead. Dolphins never had a problem finding the right one. Once I went to a swim with the dolphins thing in FL. They explained to everyone that if anyone has a plate or metal screws inside them that the dolphin may be particularly interested in and may pulse clicks at that area. As if they can “see” with sound exactly what’s going on inside us. It’s been described as sort of a sound dotted line going through you. Well my theory is if they can make sounds that they then can pick up to paint an image in their mind, WHY couldn’t they SEND sounds to another dolphin and create images? Kinda like how a fax machine works only probably way more efficient and detailed. After all they have had millions of years to evolve this. I have had an argument with a scientist once who said sure dolphins can talk to each other but it’s little more than food, danger, time to mate. BUT my guess is they do it in a way that more information is being passed along than you might get from say a dog, who literally IS signaling danger, hunger, horney etc. To watch dolphins coordinate driving a school of fish? Not to mention many reports of dolphins helping humans over and over... Or like that zoo where one “tells” the others stay out of the way. Our own sonar technology is primitive compared to a species that has been evolving it for how long now? Millions of years? The fact they can grasp syntax means that perhaps they are saying more than just find food. Granted I doubt they discuss how to fly to the moon, but still. We don’t give the animal kingdom enough credit sometimes. So if you know of ANY scientists studying dolphin communication I would LOVE to discuss this further. I only wish I lived closer to an ocean. I would have become a marine biologist instead of an artist settling for painting dolphins instead of living with them.
OH I should add something..... Someone asked me once how would you prove this. Well, it would be a matter of training one to do the tricks as has been done, but this time only when another dolphin actually does the trick would both be rewarded. At first both could watch the signs, but only one was "called over" and only when the one not called does the thing would they both get the reward. THEN move the second one out of sight. Now if they do have language, one would need to "tell" the other what to do. Surely someone could do an experiment like that??? Know any marine biologists?????
That sounds like an amazing idea. I would check with some institutions that have marine biology programs, specifically those involving dolphins, to see if they'd be interested in doing your study. Your thoughts on them using sonar as an enhanced communication tool is intriguing. Also, I do hope you get a chance to live closer to the sea. 💙🐬
Imagine explaining to dolphins that it’s not a literal image transfer when humans say “picture this” then use only words. Would we have to explain that humans evolved video transmission recently and require technology to do it? Do dolphins have MTV?
Cute idea, but theoretically possible and actually reality is quite different kettles of ... dolphins(?). The way our brains work (both human and dolphins) it would be difficult/(practically impossible?) to transfer a 3D state using a one dimensional signal like sound in a reasonable time. We are doing a 1D transfer to a 3D state via speech to the ears already. A near-telepathic system would require different hardware (wetware?) in the brain, and I would think biologists would have found such radically different brain structures in dolphins by now. Edit: They would have a hard time conveying more information with sound from the sender to the receiver than what we do by talking to each other, but the sender might be able to read body language much better than we can. So maybe dolphins don't need facial expressions because they can read bodily expressions? That's way more plausible to me :-)
I distinctly remember reading/watching a talk from a researcher saying that Dolphins do, in fact, mimic sonar echos to communicate about objects. But so many comments have said "wouldn't it be cool if..." but none have said "well, actually..." that I'm starting to question my sanity.
Just chiming in: Current generation transformer based neural networks could probably get a rough idea of what whale calls mean if they were trained correctly. I'm not entirely sure what the exact best setup would be, because normally in machine learning we use one-hot-encoding to encode words (so if you have three total words the network will understand, "the apple falls" they would be [1, 0, 0], [0, 1, 0] and [0, 0, 1] respectively), but this setup doesn't work as well if we don't know which sounds correspond to ie: a word. But with that said, I think there should be some way to take a large corpus of calls from a certain species and region, and store them in something like a vector database to sort by similarity, and possibly find some common clusters that are probably "words" (although possibly with "conjugation"), and then you could potentially one-hot encode them. I have a sneaking suspicion that Japanese language models will be a good one to watch to gauge progress in this area because it's a notoriously difficult language to encode the text of, as a given word could be 日 meaning day, but which could be pronounced ひ or ニチ (and actually could be written both ways for a slightly different nuance), which is a bit tricky to one-hot encode. I'm guessing any sort of encoding that can cope with the nuance of the way a word in Japanese is written (be it in kanji, hiragana, or katakana), could probably capture a lot of the nuance in encoded whale calls, should there indeed be a great deal to capture.
With the recent news regarding UAP. I'm glad that people are actively researching topics for first alien contact even though many people scrutinize the topic. Do more of this please.
I gotta say how broad your subject matter is! It is truly impressive! You are multi-lingual and surely have your own insights about language nuances etc! This video reminded me of Arrested Development when they got a little Korean boy who kept saying Hello in Korean... Ohn Yon (is how it sounded). They kept thinking that was his name and thus just called him Ohn Yon throughout the show.
5:59 i had my left earbud out when you played the whale song. At first I thought it was a joke because I didn’t hear anything. Had to come back and listen again. 6:50 that’s a fun thing to do with the local birds. Just whistle back something they did and keep “mocking” each other. It’s fun to hear the pauses and retries on their side.
Damn Anton! I just stumbled upon your channel yesterday, but already "consumed" and "observed" like 5 videos! ALL of them are stimulated my hunger for knowledge! Keep it up, you are also the 1st channel in a long time, where I actually learn NEW things! I effing love it and please keep up the great work!
So my cat does understand me for sure, but she has also learned to communicate back to me as well. She has a very distinct "yeah" and "no" meow. and has just taught me to understand her body language a lot. I feel like i can have full conversations with her sometimes!
You totally are, I do with birds but my understanding is infantile since they are such instinctual beings. They are hunted by almost everything. So getting close is almost impossible. I'm never giving up on trying to understand. It's a magic most don't care to even see. Mahalo
It makes me smile to think there is a very small possibility that afterwards Twain went back to his pod and said the whale equivalent of “I’ve just had the weirdest experience guys”…..
Bonjour, Anton! J’ai mis un LIKE dès les premières secondes de la vidéo pour applaudir l’idée des scientifiques de SETI! Bon courage à eux! Et un grand MERCI à vous pour tous vos efforts!!!
Happy New year wonderful Anton, today's video is a perfect example of synchronisity, because I've just watched STAR TREK THE VOYAGE HOME , it's the one where they have to travel back in time, to get two Humpback whales, so they can communicate with an Alien probe , how weird is that?? . PEACE AND LOVE TO EVERYONE ❤❤.
we as humans are also taught to communicate just like a dog or parrot. How do you know what food means, because they made that sound when relating to it. Just like a dog when you say “do you want a cookie”or “let’s go for a walk” then they run to the door. I worked in a parrot refuge with dozens of species, and they could communicate based on their needs just like us. If a parrot was hurt it would come to me lift it’s talon and say “ouch!” Or if it was cage time for cleaning, they would say “ lemme out!” And when I said no some would say “why not”? This is basic communication just like how toddlers learn.
Those are some very polite dolphins. The dolphins from John Scalzi's book Starter Villain called the newbie boss a fucknugget, an ambulatory collection of skintags, and a bourgeois fistula, introduced themselves as Who Gives a Shit, Don't Care, Fuck You, Fuck Off, Burn it Down, and Eat the Rich, and then tried to unionise over a labour dispute.
wow, the stories about human/animal communication are fascinating??? They remind me so much of the way people without a shared language figure out how to communicate when there’s enough shared context and shared goals, it’s so much more personal and physical than the dry academic linguistic theory I would have imagined. And the idea of animals, in the wild with no training, having human calls is just 🤯
I once figured out how to communicate basic sentences with a Spanish speaker in a game I was playing. We didn't even play for that long and neither of us knew the other language but we figured it out well enough to play with each other for a few hours
What's saying alien life isn't already amongst us? Perhaps insect, avian, us? Maybe all of it and the earth we live on is so rare in the universe all life traveled here when their planet failed from one reason or another.
Sadly, we aren't doing much to make them want to, these days. If you are an outsider and saw the things going on on this planet, would you want to engage, or would you just move on?
I am exactly the sort of person who would engage, Joe. I might wear a force-field, to make sure that nothing aimed at me would do damage, but I wouldn't pass up a chance for First Contact. I suspect that we are just 'not noticed'.
Why? Wonderful assumption but misplaced. INSERT human for wonderful alien persons and us with whales and you've got this video. Humans have the ability to travel through space but cannot have meaningful communication with lower order species ON THEIR OWN PLANET. Any wonderful alien persons would almost have to be of an order of intelligence equal to or greater than or substantially different, so the difficulties would be similar or greater. And what if those wonderful alien persons are better able to communicate with other species than humans; for example a hive mind being able to better communicate with other hive minds or alien whales or octopi analogs communicating with their earth counterparts. It's sheer hubris to hope for an "Arrival" or "Contact" scenario.
Just imagine someone comes on the roof of your house and plays your voice talking to your family on a loudspeaker... whale must've been really terrified or at least very confused.
So, of ALL the things in Star Trek that scientists could focus on, the plot to Star Trek IV is the one they picked? Gosh, I hope they figure out tribbles next!
Supposedly, the creator of Star Trek sat in a meeting involving ufos, and that's where he came up with the concept for the show. They talk about it on the Why Files channel. Couldn't tell you what episode, though.
for cats and dogs we have word sound buttons they can press. they start with the button for 'walkies' and over time more buttons for different words. some dogs tell some interesting observations and are at time pondering existence, so Im sure we can figure out what dolphins are talking about.
I'm betting dolphins might be intelligent enough to learn word buttons, as well as giving us vocalizations for the words/concepts. We just need the right scientists to develop a system.
Recording the whale sounds and playing it back to them reminded me of the movie predator from the 80s. If I ever hear someone playback my voice, must be aliens.
@@georgejones3526 You're right, good call. But imagine AI powered robot, covered with some skin-like material, calling your name and talking with you voice and intonation. That would be creepy, like what OP wrote about Predator. This would be kind of a creature, even if not biological. In principle possible just now.
Happy New Year All You Wonderful People. Thank you Anton for bringing this up, Highly Intriguing Theory which has Already shown promise. We Already know about Cetation, Dolphin, Orca, and Cephalopods Intelligence. This could prove Advantageous in Multiple Areas but, we Need to Advance/Research/Develope it MUCH FURTHER to attempt and Utilize it.
I'm now imagining the sad orcas after most whaling ended. Like, those pods of orcas had developed a tradition over generations. They taught their children this was how they could earn their fill. This was the only way of life any living orca in those pods had ever known. Then, over perhaps just a single orca lifetime, the whaling just slowly petered out and stopped. Somewhere, perhaps to this very day, there's a lone orca out there still fruitlessly slapping the surface of the water in that particular way, hoping to summon the long-lost whaling friends of legend.
Whist walking in the hills recently I was able to decode sheep language. Its quite simple: "Baa Baa" means "where are you?" Whilst the replying "Baa Baa" means "I'm over here!" They can continue this same conversation for hours without ever getting bored.
BaaBaa is how the flock stays together while grazing with their heads deep in grass. Those sheep who become separated are in much more danger from predators. When farmers put a bell on one sheep, they no longer need to baabaa, and are quiet.
In the event of contact, which is for sure coming at mass, with an intelligent alien race with the means to travel here or be much more ahead of us, the probability that they will already have a method or technology to communicate with us seamlessly is very high. So much so that the further ahead that they are from us, the more the likelihood that that would be the case. I also agree with someone in the comments that said this endeavor is already an amazing pursuit on planet earth and it’s many life forms.
I had parrots and the best part of Alex is that he had the concept of "nothing", as in zero. He was able to perform very simple counting problems, such as "how many blue balls?" when there were blue and red balls and a few blue cubes. That was impressive but if Dr. Pepperberg then asked, for example, "how many green balls?", Alex would say "none". The same when asked what was different between two objects but were identical. From my life with parrots, I can tell you that they seem to understand, although it's likely that they just reason, like AI will be able to do, without real understanding.
Imagine if humans discovered that they have no real understanding about anything. All there thoughts and words are self referencing. And it all arise, floats and vanish into nothingness. Yeah.
An absolutely wonderful video as always Anton. I would be quite curious to see replication studies done on this initial study and see if we can find other species both related and not that attempts at replication could be done. A rigorous assessment of the various species on our planet and our ability to communicate with them would be an incredibly useful scientific endeavor
There have been several significant studies involving primates, both teaching and studying linguistic communication. Unfortunately, the results of those studies have always fallen woefully short of our desired outcome(s) and haven't left much faith in future studies of a similar nature.
There are already lots of studies of lots of species for relatively simple stuff like the exact meaning of alarm calls, and greetings in prairie dogs, birds, and primates. However for more complex communication you need dedicated people willing to engage with individual animals for years or decades and that has been in short supply, results will heavily depend on both the human and the animal(willingness/ interest and ability to understand communicating will vary based on the individual not just the species) and can become subject to bias by researchers especially if the field is small and few others have spent the time to understand the communication style (Primate sign language field blew up after some research fraud, despite the fact it is very clear that it least a couple chimps do have vocabularies of hundreds of words using other systems like Kanzi's touchscreens)
Well, modern technology has given cats and dogs the possibility to communicate with humans via "buttons". Please look it up, it is so interesting. Examples are the cat Billy and the cat Todd or the dogs Mumen or Bunny. It is really interesting to watch these videos.
Billi is impressive in the abstract concepts she understands. Also, it's interesting that she uses simple sentence structure, as well as, repeating words for emphasis. As a cat lover, it's fascinating to see just how much those meows have been trying to express. 🧡😸
i was once recommended one of those videos and i frankly do not believe the animals understand anything beyond "person responds strangely when i step on these"
@@arcade5765 @geneticjen9312 I admit it, biologists like me do get carried away sometimes. I am all for that excitement, that is why I studied biology. :D
Seaquest DSV!!!! The dolfin, Darwin, has a communication device that interprets his clicks as basic abstract english words. They also have an episode where they built a holographic machine that would display abstract images based on the clicks, tail movements, and electromagnetic signals sent through the water! That show was ahead of its time as far as the future of the ocean! Love it! ❤🐬
I like to believe that when my cat says meow she is saying “I love you”. But I have a hunch that she’s saying “feed me meow” bc she always leads me to the food dish!
maybe they are really philosophical and mathematical geniuses. When aliens visit Earth to speak to intelligent life, maybe they are here to visit the whales rather than humans.
As always, exceptionally interesting content Anton :) > We have a tendency to think of verbal language in terms of letters and words, but it is all sound. We have learned to recognize those different sounds as what we call words, but ultimately they are still just sounds coming from us like the whales. When the whales listen to us, they will just hear weird song like sounds in much the same way. > Quite a long time back I began looking at a different way of describing math principles in terms of analog rather than logic. This also extended toward the idea of a universal language based in audio(analog waves) and math. In some sense treating language as sound and mathematical principles that could describe information. It was not too many months after this that the movie "Arrival" was released, using the circles as a form of communication. This had some similarities to how I cad conceptualized the idea of sound as a way of conveying information and even language. > Whales offer the closest representation of this wave like math and language. It could be that the whales are recognizing unique sounds as we recognize words and phrases, but could also be that each smaller wave pattern could represent something more like a data transmission from a radio communication or computer network over a modem. We just haven't worked out the bawd rate or encoding yet to create a modulator/demodulator..
Actually there is a recording of Lilly trying to speak in her Dolphin house. I know because I watched a documentary about that Dolphin research program. Not only did the Dolphins learn some words, but the male Dolphins taught the researchers that he would learn faster with a hand job first. And I'm 100% serious. She would give the Dolphin a hand job because the fish demanded as much and it would get it out of the way so it would calm down and not be so frustrated 😂
Let's just be grateful the dolphin settled for hand~jobs. Dolphinese: "It doesn't work for me unless you wear the Ariel outfit..." I don't even want to _think_ about when he looks to go "all the way..."
@@richiehoyt8487 Dolphins share something in common with orangutans. You're right, it is best not to think about. On a related note, there used to be a video on TH-cam of a dolphin on a dock using a fish head as a fleshlight but it was removed for breaking community guidelines. Yes, it was a real dolphin.
5:50 You may be confusing whale location signals with communication: what we hear here is a frequency-modulated location signal, very convenient - the frequency shift is proportional to the distance to the object. There are also impulse and correlation signals. Вы, возможно, путаете локационные сигналы китов с общением: то, что мы здесь слышим - частотно - модулированный локационный сигнал, очень удобный - сдвиг частоты пропорционален расстоянию до объекта. Есть еще импульсные и корелляционные сигналы.
My take on it is that if we meet an Alien then I feel it’s almost a given that them having the technological know how to traverse the galaxy that they will be much better placed than us to lead with communication.
Not necessarily, navigation with the stars utilises relatively basic physics knowledge; and in terms of technology to at least fly around a star system you don't need that advanced of sensors and equipment to do so. Faster-than-light travel is obviously the main clincher, or at least near light speed, but even now at our own tech level we have some working theories on warp technology that could very well pan out in the next several decades. Regardless, all of these are mostly engineering gains, and as we full know society doesn't necessarily advance as fast as technology does...we have all of our outer space advances and research going on right now, but yet we have a good chunk of the world population brain dead on TikToks and social media who basically just survive and don't contribute much to society other than various amounts of labour. So, even aliens that could advance enough to get even higher levels of FTL travel wouldn't necessarily have advanced societal practices amongst enough of its population to have better sociological capabilities than we would. Also, if they haven't encountered other aliens other than us then they wouldn't have any more experience with xenolinguistics than we would.
I've never understood why there isn't more research into communications with other animals here on earth, especially whales and dolphins and such. I understand the want and/or need to want to communicate with aliens but let's try to communicate with things that are a little bit closer first and maybe learn more. Sure these scientists are doing that but this could have been going on for decades already and we'd be much farther than we are today with communications.
Interspecies communication should be a major scientific goal just in case we really do contact aliens. We need some competence at this just in case. Like deflecting asteroids. Conscious creatures know to learn before the need arises. Do whales have conversations where one speaks, another answers and it goes back and forth a lot? Because this would be indicative of language based cognition similar to us. One whale singing to the pod or anyone within earshot may be different. Is it possible to tell when different whales are speaking? Would it be possible to get a dataset where someone has coded the different sounds as whale A speaking, whale B speaking, etc? An artificial intelligence could be trained to predict what sounds would be most likely as a reply to one whale's song even if it doesn't know what it is saying. This would at least demonstrate that comprehension is possible. Whale researchers with children of the age when they naturally learn language should expose the kid to as much whale song as possible while providing as much context as possible about what the whales were doing. The human brain's neural network has a critical period where it can learn any language, even several languages easily. Training of a juvenile mind may be more effective than an adult trying to reason their way through. I was a cognitive psychologist.
Countless species of earth animals communicate, with each other, and with us. Only humans say, "Let's solve a math problem." , or, " Ted has a behavior problem. Can we figure out how to help him solve it? ", or " Let's figure a way to manipulate our environment to increase our food supply! " Animals can communicate things like where there is food to be found, where there is danger, who is available for procreation, etc. No other earth creatures seem to have more than a rudimentary ability to think abstractly, much less communicate about it. Seti may not have been involved, but science has a long history of researching and learning animal communication. Many animals are far more intelligent than we believed, but not to the point of having complex language. Thank you for this insight, Anton!
After mimicking humpback's call, they got a response. Is that all? I'm very disappointed. If a dog or lion eats and growls, will you mimic a growl - you will get a response. No training is required! What did I miss?
Ngl, surprised this hasn't been done before to this degree. I feel like being able to communicate in animal languages would be like, a pretty high priority for people to research idk
There isn't "language" amongst animals, not in the way you're referring to, and it's exactly why it HASN'T been researched into much because it doesn't exist. Communication doesn't equate to language, and no living being on the planet has sapience other than humans (sapience being the ability to not only self reflect but also for a being to understand the context of its existence); many animals may be sentient, having emotions, but emotions don't make animals have anywhere close to the level of mental abilities even the dumbest human being has (which is why I always roll my eyes at the people that often comment on animal videos about how "such and such animals are smarter than many people I know"...an entirely exaggerated and false statement).
Beautiful I think that learning rather than teaching gives better ground for communication. You can teach a dog to sit, but if you know why a dog sits you can have the dog sit without a command
Doesn't anyone remember Star Trek IV, when an extraterrestrial probe wants to communicate with the whales and since they became extinct, Kirk and Spock should bring back some whales from the past?
Specifically, humpback whales. What a great way to craft a grant proposal: paraphrase a hit movie. I don't recall that the whale in the movie said, "Beam me up, Scottie."
Ever since I watched this video I’ve begun to brainstorm about several ideas of worldbuilding. Ive been so fascinated by the idea of humanity being the catalyst or progenitor of some sort in fictions. Think of it like the concept of ancient humans in Halo universe. I’ve always loved that. This is something I’ve cooked in my mind for the past 4 days and I’ve kinda ready to share it. It all started with one simple question, “what if humans ended up passing intelligence to other animals and making them sentient like us?”. From there I ended up liking 1 out of 3 scenarios of possible future worldbuilding where the stellar civilization started from earth with all these species that got “lifted” because they somehow in the past communicated with the humans. The other two is still in drafts but the more fleshed out is that. I LOVE fictions that are based in modern science, and this is one of my guilty pleasures in life because I feel like abusing(?) contents like these
Imagine finally cracking the code to whale language only to discover they spend the majority of their time talking shit about us humans behind our backs.
This is very cool and i really hope we go far in this technology id love to be able to talk to animals or aliens someday thank you so much for this video Anton its very much appreciated
"Learning to communicate" is a two way street. Do they really understand us? Do we really understand them?? Does it matter, as long as we can figure out what each other wants?
In case of whales and dolphins, the answer is that we have a little understanding. The dolphin fishermen situation (and similar cases) shows they understand humans catch fish with nets and make an action that will give mutual benefit
It’s kind of a question of what communication even is. If you can figure out enough about the other to cooperate on something, like fishing, then clearly there’s SOME kind of understanding going on.
@@napoleonfeanoron one hand, if the dolphins are trying to signal to humans, then that implies some sense on the dolphins’ part that we can recognize a signal. It seems likely that we both understand that the other is aware of the situation and can send and receive signals about it. On the other hand, if the understanding is dependent on having that shared goal, then you can’t hope to go use what you learn from one situation to communicate with different dolphins in a different situation, like you could with normal human language. The Spanish I learned from working in a factory with Spanish speakers was very much geared towards communicating with those specific people about our work, but huge parts of it were then more broadly applicable for other situations, like reading newspaper articles and talking to people in the airport.
Learning to communicate with intelligent species on earth is worth pursuing in its own right, regardless of whether there are intelligent aliens out there or not.
Exactly, who knows what wisdom we're missing from them
@@GogetaVegeth98 very colonial perspective. but sure.
@jesipohl6717 since when the exchange of knowledge/wisdom is colonialism?
Imagine we could make them aware of man made environmental desasters, danger zones that they would therefor avoid. We humans are currently pretty much a world wide extinction level event and i'd rather us becoming part of the solution, teaching our childreen to be arbiters and custodians of nature instead of mindlessly going after the next paycheck.
You know, if people's need to think they're so special aliens are gonna want to be their friend is what it takes for us to actually start taking consciousness seriously instead of pretending it's a magic spell only humans have then sure let's let the alien people lead the way.
There is an interesting story about a field researcher who learned the cries various types of monkeys use to warn of various threats. He learned that they had different sounds for different threats and that the different sorts of monkeys know each other's calls. Thus if one called out that there was a hawk, a different type may translate and make their call for a hawk. He got so used to it that he could pick out the type of monkey, the threat and the danger level from the calls. He spend so much time out in the jungle recording sound and taking notes that the monkeys would just ignore him.
One day as he was leaving to go back to his base camp, he suddenly realized that the monkeys were warning him of a big cat and that he was in danger. He seriously picked up his pace until he heard the monkeys reporting the cat at bigger and bigger distances going off in a different direction. He never thanked the monkeys.
The monkeys were just minding their business
I think it's pretty safe to assume the monkeys were warning one another about the big cat, and likely didn't care too much about warning the human. But, who knows?
you seem stupid
I've heard about that guy as well, but I don't think the monkeys warned him, rather they warned each other. On the other hand, if humans occasionally do the same to wild animals, them why not monkeys to the human, especially one they associate with being near them? It's not unheard of them, although rare, doing something altruistic, even looking after an orphaned baby animal of different species!
@@oakstrong1 I think it is more like a general alarm call for all who may be listening. They also likely want the predator to know it has been spotted so it should go elsewhere.
I spent 8 years on trident submarines as a sonar tech, and we would have whale pods follow us for days. It got to where we could pick out individual whales because they had different calls. It was SO cool.
I assume you got buzzed by various USO's as well, you're not permitted to talk about them though.
@@TheOrbGuuuy we did run across some..."questionable" stuff.
@@collincutler4992 it's very common, you're always being monitored by whoever they are as you are in their domain where they hide their bases. Can I ask if you could see the shape of their craft on your radar screen when they buzzed you or is it just an insanely fast moving blip on your screen?
@@collincutler4992Giant Johnsons on your sonar?
Just one of a million reasons I love Anton -- his fascinating audience members! So cool, thanks for the share.
I communicate with crows. So far, it's not much more than "hello", ... but they have trained me to leave food out for them every day.
Some humans really have a resemblance of an intellect. Also, they have a lot of food!
Brilliant! 👍🏽
Train them to bring you money for food. Then take them to McDonalds
well, thats one way to look at it 😂
I have been trying for years to communicate with multiple bird species. I understand much of what the sparrows are saying, a bit of what crackles say. Hawks I'm unsure of it feels more like a hey. When I'm extremely tired things make much more sense as I'm not listening as much as feeling. It's really cool to understand the bits and pieces I do. It seems very basic, love, cold, water, good morning, friend, leave, some more, clean, treat, sweep, and they scald me when I do something wrong. Praise me when I clean. They also have tried helping me find love. Especially the robins. I have spent lots of alone time in their environment and made their lives a bit less miserable by cleaning whenever I can, removing trash from the waterways, parks, fields. I've had the most amazing experiences. Redwing blackbirds have flown behind me for 100s of yards, they fly in patterns where I can see them. Once I ignored one and it deficated on my hat in front of a few sparrows. I went home and came back the next day to find the area where the blackbirds nest completely covered in tiny sparrow poops. That was when I realized they are definitely friends of mine. I could go on and on and on. Most people who hear me calling back to them laugh. I have heard my neighbors in the apartment complex I live in talking amongst each other about it about how they talk to me. It's the most amazing feeling to have a wild animal bridging the species gap.
That parrot "only" being able to use accurate grammar 80% of the time, is still a higher success rate than 90% of Internet users 😂
That includes you because of your misplaced comma
@@lucyferos205commas can be used to denote pauses
@@lucyferos205 Also includes you, because you refused to use a full stop.
@@-VenyX- who uses full stop on youtube?
We’re on the same page I think 😂
Never mind about communicating with extraterrestrials, but to be able to communicate with different species on Earth accurately, even basic things would be so cool!
Everyone wants a whale friend.
@@OblithianI have one she is in my home
@@MesserschmittReaverur mom?
We can do both things
😂😂😂@@MesserschmittReaver
I really wish we got more news on topics like this. Interspecies communication should be a main focus of science.
That's what beekeepers do with pheromones
Read more about it in Diana Psolkas Encounters 👽
If these whales do communicate complex messages, maybe we can learn from them
@@thesteelsquid863 "I protect the hive. When the system is out of balance, I correct it." -Beekeeper
I would think that the easiest way to start with aliens would be with nouns. Pick up a chair and say "chair". And try to get their words for the same nouns. Obviously you'd want to pick objects that both species would use and know about.
Okay this is actually important to know, the Lilly Experiment you mentioned was a shit show and there are lots of videos and recordings of it.
They were giving the dolphins lsd and other hallucinogens, the guy in charge of the project would sit in a sensory depravation tank and take lsd and other drugs then "fly through hyperspace with the dolphins". The woman who was taking care of the dolphins would frequently masturbate the dolphin to get it to cooperate and settle down. All of the findings were highly anecdotal and there was no communication breakthrough. Eventually the government shut the project down because it was so insane.
Atrocity guide did a great video on it it's called "The Dolphin House"
It's well worth your time if you find this topic interesting.
Love the videos Anton
Came here to say this. You're spot on. One of the craziest science experiments I've heard of.
I saw Ritchie Havens in concert in 1989 and he mentioned spending some vacation time at that research, hanging out with a bunch of scientists who were taking drugs trying to talk to dolphins, as he put it. I don't think he was very impressed by the way he imitated them. Curiously he also mentioned that there was a neighbour there who pissed him off by the name of Richard Nixon. I assume Nixon was one of the government representatives who went there to check on the progress of the experiments. I know Carl Sagan was.
Oh wow, that's wild.
yeah, all studies mentioned here are pure hype, mate. video itself too tbh, like 98% of "science" videos on YT. There's too little actual science going on rn on the planet and what's actually going on is boring af.
There is a fantastic episode of drunk history of this story.
Crows and Ravens often adopt a wolf puppy and maintain a lifelong synergistic relationship. The crows can tell the wolves where game can be found in exchange for carrion.
Yup , that is also part of the reason why wolves form packs :
If they didn't ravens would get most of the carcass ,
By making a pack wolves can consume larger preys more quickly ,
Wolves can hunt their prey of choice alone with a pretty decent level of success ...
@@davidegaruti2582 This is true. I knew some people who had a malamute who killed a large healthy buck mule deer all by herself.
@@davidegaruti2582 I also know from personal observation that ravens will follow a sick or injured animal and call coyotes (or probably wolves, also) in to finish the animal off. That way they get to pick over the leavings when the predators leave. Magpies, crows, and ravens have a very complex and sometimes symbiotic relationship with predators.
@@donnievance1942in research settings they are also able to solve multi-level problems which may not be obviously connected.
This sounds like the whale equivalent of me meowing back at my cat, except that the whale probably didn't look so offended.
try harder it works out eventually.
You gotta feel what you want to communicate. Or it's just nonsense.
I mean it's like you were speaking English with someone and they answer in a very weird tone and pronunciation. You know they're trying to speak English but you either don't understand what they've said and look at them surprised (or offended according to you?) or you barely understand it and react accordingly
@whannabi beautifully designed sentences, well defined. Bravo, bellissimo.
Mahalo
Understanding squid would be also useful. As they communicate by changing colour rather than by sound.
Cuttlefish, not squid.
Reminds me of the series by Adrian Tchaikovsky that starts with the book Children of Time (then "of Ruin," then "of memory") iirc. An amazing 3 books with different species needing to learn to communicate including spiders, humans and octopi. Great hard scifi and are on audible for anyone interested. So good.
@@seanhewitt603 the humboldt squid does. You're so certain of yourself. Try being open minded.
@@cdurkinzI also strongly recommend The Mountain In The Sea for fiction and Other Minds for non-fiction
Cephalopoda don't have any complex communication as they are solitary animals
So you can do this to racoons. works on any racoon if you can mimic the "trill" sound they make. Basically its like a high pitch rolled R sound. Whenever i see racoons out and about in the city at night, i make that noise while looking right at them, and every time without fail they stop whatever they are doing and stare at me with a shocked expression that seems to me to be " holy shit, they can TALK?!??!" They dont always reply, and sometimes they seem genuinely freaked out a little but they always respond, even if they were running away before. Granted they almost always flee after a few seconds but you can hardly blame them
if i was out minding my own business then suddenly heard something that vaguely sounded like a human, then immediately saw the creature that made it wasn't human, i don't think there's any number of pants i could wear that would be enough to contain what would follow
thats similar to dog barks or cat meows vaguely sounding similar to short phrases like "hey", "i love you" or "how you doin' ". the reason the racoons react like that is the same reason so many videos of those dogs and cats exist online.
@@asongeverydayand that thing was eight times your size
Sometimes if a dog is barking at me as I am walking down the road. I will bark back at them and they will just sit there and stare at me for a few seconds before returning to barking at me. It's genuinely funny to see their reactions.
This is awesome. The fact that Twain waited the same amount of time that we waited doing 'our' calls is super fascinating. It's like we're starting to understand their own grammar rules! This is awesome.
I find the prospect of communicating with our fellow beings on this planet to the full potential of their communication abilities rather more interesting than aliens.
I agree
Its not that its more interesting, but that its just as profound and importantly they are ..right..there.
Especially when the conditions for Intelligent life and Planetary travel are so godamn difficult it's more likely we will never find out about each other's existence (The aliens won't know about us)
Earth is already quite "alien", many mysteries unexplored
Or at least more immediately interesting.
It's amazing, I have been communicating with birds for 5 ish years now and am barely beginning to understand. They keep it simple for me but I know it's much more complex than I hear. I'm certain it's like our own language, we just don't get what their saying. I would encourage everyone to listen, call back, and befriend some wild animals. It sparks a fire that can not be extinguished.
Humpbackanise? That is a classic!! And your background has most excellent footage.
That was the problem. They needed to speak Humpbackish.
I wonder if some part of cetacean communication could be expressed as acoustic pictograms? Given they use sonar and echolocation to see things with certain returns, then mimicking the sound of the return of their own sonar method is basically a way to give other whales a picture of whatever is on their mind. So they could be sending each other a sequence of pictures. So they could be sending a picture of some ocean floor rock, what a school of fish looks like, a group of other whales, and then their own name sound, to basically tell other whales what their plan for the day is. (Which could be interpreted as something like I'm going to look for food in this area, and you guys are invited to join.) To me that would make some kind of sense. For us humans to interpret it better, we'd have to learn more about how whales image things with their sonar and try to copy the particular approach or method they use.
Among whales there's also an "oddball" among their species that communicates a bit differently. Belugas use communication that sounds too uncannily like frequency-shift keying. Which is that acoustic modem sound that computers can use to transmit data via audio I/O interfaces. Which is weird because that means the animals are using a pulse encoding system rather than the usual flowing sounds as their speech. Maybe that species would be one to try communicating with first, because of the similarity that their method has as compared to how some of our devices also happen to work. At least if they have a language with syntax/grammar and a fixed vocabulary, then language patterns would still show with that particular encoding method similar to looking at some kind of encoded teletext being transmitted via FSK.
When going to england you have to speak english, indeed.
Thats am interesting thought process, great idea!
Interesting. Will look into this further. I also wonder how machine learning will be able to assist with learning their languages and songs.
I think you're probably projecting your anthropocentric preoccupation with visual information (our primary sense in non blind people) on whales. Their auditory processing may have greater potential for complex thought and communication than their visual processing.
@@ifeastontoenails I find it reasonable to assume, OP isn't projecting our visual bias, but creating a convergent point between our primary sense (visual) and theirs (echolocation). The fact that we might imagine whales to "see" in a same way we do, isn't relevant at all.
ANTON, this post may be long but I REALLY hope you find time to read it. Regarding animal communication. Specifically dolphins.
So… when I was little, a zoo near Chicago, Brookfield zoo had a dolphin exhibit. It made me sad to see, basically they kept five dolphins in a dirty goldfish bowl. The “shows” were just that. They played basket ball, tossed balls back and forth with the crowd. Just sad.
Well eventually they built a MUCH bigger, better exhibit and instead of having them do “tricks” they showed behaviors and educated the people. MUCH better.
This exhibit had underwater viewing and included an under water mic to listen in. During their “show” for the crowed, especially just before one would be asked to do a big jump, I watched the dolphin in question meet with the others at the bottom of the pool. It would shake it’s head side to side and you could hear the rapid clicks. THEN the others would go to a far corner of the tank and wait until after the one did it’s jump. Which took a pretty good amount of space for it to get up speed to go way high into the air. Now you cannot tell me it wasn’t “telling” the others what was about to happen and exactly where it was about to swim.
I thought about this for years, then saw a show, forgot the name but Alan Alda hosted it, science thing. They showed an experiment where dolphins were trained hand signals to do certain “tricks.” IE’ get the ball, bring back the frisbie, jump the floating human and like that. They said it took some time to train each one what the signal was, then. what was expected. NONE were trained to do long sequences of these so in this experiment, long chains of commands were given, say jump the human and bring the frisbie to the ball. Then they would switch it up... bring the ball to the human and like that. Syntax. And without the weeks of training the trainers said this would usually take to do, the dolphins got it. Every time. They had an understanding of syntax. CLEARLY they have an understanding of language. Just not ours.
I tried actually writing to Alan Alda and asked what I’m about to share with you, he actually wrote back and said that was a great idea but nothing ever came of it.
MY theory is this. Humans speak using abstract sounds, (words) that we attach meanings to. And some animals can grasp it such as that parrot, anyone's dog or even cat, heck my daughter even trained her pet rat to climb up her leg on command, or spin, and so on. Sign is even better, I think of cocoa the gorilla who could sign whole sentences. BUT…. even though dolphins can grasp sign language, some even were trained to poke a computer screen to communicate, I think THEIR natural form is MUCH more complex and has nothing to do with “language” as we think of it. That they can get enough of ours to communicate at all is frankly amazing. BUT it would be like me taking weeks of a course in say Russian, then barely being able to ask where is the bus stop. Certainly I could not have any meaningful conversation because of the language barrier. But for a human, going from one language to another, the basic concept is the same. It’s just a matter of attaching the right sounds to the right meanings and remembering those sounds. But the structure is basically the same.
I have NEVER seen anyone consider that language under water could be completely different.
Echo location.
One of the “behaviors” the zoo would go over is to show how dolphins can sound and figure out what is inside something. They would put covers over the dolphins eyes, and toss in two identical weights. one filled with sand and one with lead. Dolphins never had a problem finding the right one.
Once I went to a swim with the dolphins thing in FL. They explained to everyone that if anyone has a plate or metal screws inside them that the dolphin may be particularly interested in and may pulse clicks at that area. As if they can “see” with sound exactly what’s going on inside us. It’s been described as sort of a sound dotted line going through you.
Well my theory is if they can make sounds that they then can pick up to paint an image in their mind, WHY couldn’t they SEND sounds to another dolphin and create images? Kinda like how a fax machine works only probably way more efficient and detailed. After all they have had millions of years to evolve this.
I have had an argument with a scientist once who said sure dolphins can talk to each other but it’s little more than food, danger, time to mate. BUT my guess is they do it in a way that more information is being passed along than you might get from say a dog, who literally IS signaling danger, hunger, horney etc. To watch dolphins coordinate driving a school of fish? Not to mention many reports of dolphins helping humans over and over... Or like that zoo where one “tells” the others stay out of the way. Our own sonar technology is primitive compared to a species that has been evolving it for how long now? Millions of years? The fact they can grasp syntax means that perhaps they are saying more than just find food. Granted I doubt they discuss how to fly to the moon, but still. We don’t give the animal kingdom enough credit sometimes.
So if you know of ANY scientists studying dolphin communication I would LOVE to discuss this further. I only wish I lived closer to an ocean. I would have become a marine biologist instead of an artist settling for painting dolphins instead of living with them.
OH I should add something..... Someone asked me once how would you prove this. Well, it would be a matter of training one to do the tricks as has been done, but this time only when another dolphin actually does the trick would both be rewarded. At first both could watch the signs, but only one was "called over" and only when the one not called does the thing would they both get the reward. THEN move the second one out of sight. Now if they do have language, one would need to "tell" the other what to do. Surely someone could do an experiment like that??? Know any marine biologists?????
That sounds like an amazing idea. I would check with some institutions that have marine biology programs, specifically those involving dolphins, to see if they'd be interested in doing your study. Your thoughts on them using sonar as an enhanced communication tool is intriguing.
Also, I do hope you get a chance to live closer to the sea. 💙🐬
Imagine explaining to dolphins that it’s not a literal image transfer when humans say “picture this” then use only words. Would we have to explain that humans evolved video transmission recently and require technology to do it? Do dolphins have MTV?
Cute idea, but theoretically possible and actually reality is quite different kettles of ... dolphins(?).
The way our brains work (both human and dolphins) it would be difficult/(practically impossible?) to transfer a 3D state using a one dimensional signal like sound in a reasonable time.
We are doing a 1D transfer to a 3D state via speech to the ears already.
A near-telepathic system would require different hardware (wetware?) in the brain, and I would think biologists would have found such radically different brain structures in dolphins by now.
Edit: They would have a hard time conveying more information with sound from the sender to the receiver than what we do by talking to each other, but the sender might be able to read body language much better than we can.
So maybe dolphins don't need facial expressions because they can read bodily expressions?
That's way more plausible to me :-)
I distinctly remember reading/watching a talk from a researcher saying that Dolphins do, in fact, mimic sonar echos to communicate about objects. But so many comments have said "wouldn't it be cool if..." but none have said "well, actually..." that I'm starting to question my sanity.
Now we need to create reaaally tiny touch-screens to put in front of tardigrades and say hi!
Funny! I was thinking about the tardigrades, too. 😹
They would really like the mosaic
Just chiming in:
Current generation transformer based neural networks could probably get a rough idea of what whale calls mean if they were trained correctly.
I'm not entirely sure what the exact best setup would be, because normally in machine learning we use one-hot-encoding to encode words (so if you have three total words the network will understand, "the apple falls" they would be [1, 0, 0], [0, 1, 0] and [0, 0, 1] respectively), but this setup doesn't work as well if we don't know which sounds correspond to ie: a word.
But with that said, I think there should be some way to take a large corpus of calls from a certain species and region, and store them in something like a vector database to sort by similarity, and possibly find some common clusters that are probably "words" (although possibly with "conjugation"), and then you could potentially one-hot encode them.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Japanese language models will be a good one to watch to gauge progress in this area because it's a notoriously difficult language to encode the text of, as a given word could be 日 meaning day, but which could be pronounced ひ or ニチ (and actually could be written both ways for a slightly different nuance), which is a bit tricky to one-hot encode. I'm guessing any sort of encoding that can cope with the nuance of the way a word in Japanese is written (be it in kanji, hiragana, or katakana), could probably capture a lot of the nuance in encoded whale calls, should there indeed be a great deal to capture.
With the recent news regarding UAP. I'm glad that people are actively researching topics for first alien contact even though many people scrutinize the topic. Do more of this please.
Thank you Anton for continuing to be a human being.
Wonderful person
Did you expect him to suddenly turn into a whale or something?
yes @@dieyproductions4403
I gotta say how broad your subject matter is!
It is truly impressive!
You are multi-lingual and surely have your own insights about language nuances etc!
This video reminded me of Arrested Development when they got a little Korean boy who kept saying Hello in Korean... Ohn Yon (is how it sounded). They kept thinking that was his name and thus just called him Ohn Yon throughout the show.
5:59 i had my left earbud out when you played the whale song. At first I thought it was a joke because I didn’t hear anything. Had to come back and listen again.
6:50 that’s a fun thing to do with the local birds. Just whistle back something they did and keep “mocking” each other. It’s fun to hear the pauses and retries on their side.
Damn Anton! I just stumbled upon your channel yesterday, but already "consumed" and "observed" like 5 videos! ALL of them are stimulated my hunger for knowledge! Keep it up, you are also the 1st channel in a long time, where I actually learn NEW things! I effing love it and please keep up the great work!
So my cat does understand me for sure, but she has also learned to communicate back to me as well. She has a very distinct "yeah" and "no" meow. and has just taught me to understand her body language a lot. I feel like i can have full conversations with her sometimes!
You totally are, I do with birds but my understanding is infantile since they are such instinctual beings. They are hunted by almost everything. So getting close is almost impossible. I'm never giving up on trying to understand. It's a magic most don't care to even see.
Mahalo
Some people really are delusional
Belated Happy New Year Anton!!! I love your channel, and I wish you a wonderful 2024, Wonderful Person.
It makes me smile to think there is a very small possibility that afterwards Twain went back to his pod and said the whale equivalent of “I’ve just had the weirdest experience guys”…..
I love you bro, and my realisation on the effort you put into the video links was inspiring!
Thanks for the awesome content and all the amazing videos!!
Bonjour, Anton!
J’ai mis un LIKE dès les premières secondes de la vidéo pour applaudir l’idée des scientifiques de SETI! Bon courage à eux!
Et un grand MERCI à vous pour tous vos efforts!!!
Happy New year wonderful Anton, today's video is a perfect example of synchronisity, because I've just watched STAR TREK THE VOYAGE HOME , it's the one where they have to travel back in time, to get two Humpback whales, so they can communicate with an Alien probe , how weird is that?? . PEACE AND LOVE TO EVERYONE ❤❤.
That was the most ridiculous ST outing ever :(
One of my favorite movies. I love that one. :)
@@thhseekingit’s the Superman IV of Star Trek
I ran to the comments to make sure someone made this connection. Thank you! ❤️ 😂🖖🏼
we as humans are also taught to communicate just like a dog or parrot.
How do you know what food means, because they made that sound when relating to it.
Just like a dog when you say “do you want a cookie”or “let’s go for a walk” then they run to the door.
I worked in a parrot refuge with dozens of species, and they could communicate based on their needs just like us.
If a parrot was hurt it would come to me lift it’s talon and say “ouch!”
Or if it was cage time for cleaning, they would say “ lemme out!” And when I said no some would say “why not”?
This is basic communication just like how toddlers learn.
What a great idea. They should make a Star Trek movie out of this.
I have a different movie idea, I was thinking of calling it Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but yours is more on the nose.
And maybe also include the Voyager probes if possible.
"Gracie is pregnant."
"I'm looking for nukular wessels"
Glad you mentioned the Lilly experiment... I heard that it was a very challenged approach based on a Brew video done a while ago.
The dolphins said; “So long and thanks for all the fish!”
Can I hitch a ride? ;)
42
Those are some very polite dolphins. The dolphins from John Scalzi's book Starter Villain called the newbie boss a fucknugget, an ambulatory collection of skintags, and a bourgeois fistula, introduced themselves as Who Gives a Shit, Don't Care, Fuck You, Fuck Off, Burn it Down, and Eat the Rich, and then tried to unionise over a labour dispute.
I read that book in a restaurant at the end of the universe.
Krikkit
wow, the stories about human/animal communication are fascinating??? They remind me so much of the way people without a shared language figure out how to communicate when there’s enough shared context and shared goals, it’s so much more personal and physical than the dry academic linguistic theory I would have imagined. And the idea of animals, in the wild with no training, having human calls is just 🤯
I once figured out how to communicate basic sentences with a Spanish speaker in a game I was playing. We didn't even play for that long and neither of us knew the other language but we figured it out well enough to play with each other for a few hours
This is actually an insanely good idea to "practice" alien radio communication
What's saying alien life isn't already amongst us? Perhaps insect, avian, us? Maybe all of it and the earth we live on is so rare in the universe all life traveled here when their planet failed from one reason or another.
I feel like I communicate pretty well with my cats. They did a really great job training me. Good job guys!
I've been watching videos from people whose pets use "talking buttons" to communicate. I am amazed by what their pets understand
That thumbnail was so cool, I didn’t even notice it was Anton until he was communicating in English
Any wonderful alien persons intelligent enough to travel through space to us will surely have the ability to help up us to communicate with them
And it will be in mathematics.
Sadly, we aren't doing much to make them want to, these days. If you are an outsider and saw the things going on on this planet, would you want to engage, or would you just move on?
I am exactly the sort of person who would engage, Joe. I might wear a force-field, to make sure that nothing aimed at me would do damage, but I wouldn't pass up a chance for First Contact. I suspect that we are just 'not noticed'.
Why?
Wonderful assumption but misplaced. INSERT human for wonderful alien persons and us with whales and you've got this video.
Humans have the ability to travel through space but cannot have meaningful communication with lower order species ON THEIR OWN PLANET. Any wonderful alien persons would almost have to be of an order of intelligence equal to or greater than or substantially different, so the difficulties would be similar or greater. And what if those wonderful alien persons are better able to communicate with other species than humans; for example a hive mind being able to better communicate with other hive minds or alien whales or octopi analogs communicating with their earth counterparts.
It's sheer hubris to hope for an "Arrival" or "Contact" scenario.
“Ah like so many things in life, something is missing.”
I think this is Totally Awesome 👏. SETI being involved puts a unique spin on any previous attempts to communicate with whales 🐋 Fantastic!!!
When you speed up a whale song, it sounds like a dog barking. Speed it up faster, and it's sounds like a bird singing.
I’ve been suggesting something like this for decades. I’m glad someone finally is trying to do it.
they should try talking to mushrooms to practice talking with aliens
😆😅🤣😂🤪🤑
Some mushrooms talk. You just have to know how to identify them... 😉
@@DharmaPunk111 shROOOOOOMIN
Not only tripping you can smell the words they talk ....
🚀🏴☠️🎸
Do whales get more talkative when on shrooms?
Just imagine someone comes on the roof of your house and plays your voice talking to your family on a loudspeaker... whale must've been really terrified or at least very confused.
> "They flap their meat at each other."
An Alien discussing humanity's primitive form of communication.
By far the best intro to a video I have ever seen
So, of ALL the things in Star Trek that scientists could focus on, the plot to Star Trek IV is the one they picked? Gosh, I hope they figure out tribbles next!
it's not the first time science fiction has informed science proper
Surely it would be better to study the old mind meld
Supposedly, the creator of Star Trek sat in a meeting involving ufos, and that's where he came up with the concept for the show. They talk about it on the Why Files channel. Couldn't tell you what episode, though.
At least they didn’t choose the Genesis project
Scientists should figure out how it was Gul Dukat was able to do nothing wrong.
GYATTTTTTTTTT that first frame
also super interesting topic, technology is absolutely incredible sometimes
for cats and dogs we have word sound buttons they can press. they start with the button for 'walkies' and over time more buttons for different words. some dogs tell some interesting observations and are at time pondering existence, so Im sure we can figure out what dolphins are talking about.
I'm betting dolphins might be intelligent enough to learn word buttons, as well as giving us vocalizations for the words/concepts. We just need the right scientists to develop a system.
Absolutely agree with you.@@erinmac4750
Those videos are misleading. Don't read too much into the buttons
@@geneticjen9312Some of them, maybe, but not all. There have been studies on this and I have a lot of my own experiences, too.
My dog said she don't agree with you.@@geneticjen9312
i love this, i feel like it was the first “hey. hi. hello” moment with animals :) love that the whale tried to say hi back
Recording the whale sounds and playing it back to them reminded me of the movie predator from the 80s. If I ever hear someone playback my voice, must be aliens.
“Want some candy?”
"If I ever hear someone playback my voice, must be aliens." Now voice recorders are aliens?
@@hotbit7327
Now voice recorders are creatures?
@@georgejones3526 You're right, good call. But imagine AI powered robot, covered with some skin-like material, calling your name and talking with you voice and intonation. That would be creepy, like what OP wrote about Predator. This would be kind of a creature, even if not biological. In principle possible just now.
Happy New Year All You Wonderful People.
Thank you Anton for bringing this up, Highly Intriguing Theory which has Already shown promise.
We Already know about Cetation, Dolphin, Orca, and Cephalopods Intelligence.
This could prove Advantageous in Multiple Areas but, we Need to Advance/Research/Develope it MUCH FURTHER to attempt and Utilize it.
I'm now imagining the sad orcas after most whaling ended. Like, those pods of orcas had developed a tradition over generations. They taught their children this was how they could earn their fill. This was the only way of life any living orca in those pods had ever known. Then, over perhaps just a single orca lifetime, the whaling just slowly petered out and stopped. Somewhere, perhaps to this very day, there's a lone orca out there still fruitlessly slapping the surface of the water in that particular way, hoping to summon the long-lost whaling friends of legend.
Nah dude ur high af... and so am i
Wonderful as always Anton. Thank you. 😊👍
Whist walking in the hills recently I was able to decode sheep language. Its quite simple: "Baa Baa" means "where are you?" Whilst the replying "Baa Baa" means "I'm over here!" They can continue this same conversation for hours without ever getting bored.
Haha! Good one. When they see a wolf, it's "Bae Bae Bae Bae Bae" and they repeat :) until they no longer see the wolf.
If you can pick up on intention, then words are ... for the giggles 😅
BaaBaa is how the flock stays together while grazing with their heads deep in grass. Those sheep who become separated are in much more danger from predators. When farmers put a bell on one sheep, they no longer need to baabaa, and are quiet.
So, you're essentially telling us that sheep spend their entire lives caught up in a neverending game of Marco Polo?
Your humble genius is appreciated.
Anton said "Hello wonderful whale." My life is complete.
Ty Anton and family. Happy New Year.
I feel like the parrot being able to say what it wants 80% of the time is incredible ! I feel like I say the wrong thing atleast 70% of the time 😂😢
In the event of contact, which is for sure coming at mass, with an intelligent alien race with the means to travel here or be much more ahead of us, the probability that they will already have a method or technology to communicate with us seamlessly is very high. So much so that the further ahead that they are from us, the more the likelihood that that would be the case. I also agree with someone in the comments that said this endeavor is already an amazing pursuit on planet earth and it’s many life forms.
Alaska Whale Foundation can now call themselves I'll Ask a Whale Foundation 😁
I’ll allow this one.
This is the most terrible dad joke I have ever seen but it's also the best one. 🤣
anton thanks for keeping up the good work
I had parrots and the best part of Alex is that he had the concept of "nothing", as in zero. He was able to perform very simple counting problems, such as "how many blue balls?" when there were blue and red balls and a few blue cubes. That was impressive but if Dr. Pepperberg then asked, for example, "how many green balls?", Alex would say "none". The same when asked what was different between two objects but were identical.
From my life with parrots, I can tell you that they seem to understand, although it's likely that they just reason, like AI will be able to do, without real understanding.
Maybe you are judging their intelligence from a biased, anthropocentric perspective.
The difference between reasoning and understanding is as unexplored as it gets. There might not be one.
Your assuming you have understanding. Something that is yet to be proven.
Imagine if humans discovered that they have no real understanding about anything.
All there thoughts and words are self referencing. And it all arise, floats and vanish into nothingness.
Yeah.
😢@@AurelienCarnoy
So one solid sound introduction tone to sound silence upon connection verification. using incoming input for languistic analysis before responding.
An absolutely wonderful video as always Anton. I would be quite curious to see replication studies done on this initial study and see if we can find other species both related and not that attempts at replication could be done. A rigorous assessment of the various species on our planet and our ability to communicate with them would be an incredibly useful scientific endeavor
There have been several significant studies involving primates, both teaching and studying linguistic communication. Unfortunately, the results of those studies have always fallen woefully short of our desired outcome(s) and haven't left much faith in future studies of a similar nature.
There are already lots of studies of lots of species for relatively simple stuff like the exact meaning of alarm calls, and greetings in prairie dogs, birds, and primates. However for more complex communication you need dedicated people willing to engage with individual animals for years or decades and that has been in short supply, results will heavily depend on both the human and the animal(willingness/ interest and ability to understand communicating will vary based on the individual not just the species) and can become subject to bias by researchers especially if the field is small and few others have spent the time to understand the communication style (Primate sign language field blew up after some research fraud, despite the fact it is very clear that it least a couple chimps do have vocabularies of hundreds of words using other systems like Kanzi's touchscreens)
Watching in my Wonderful Person hoodie that I got for Christmas. Happy new year Anton 👋
Well, modern technology has given cats and dogs the possibility to communicate with humans via "buttons". Please look it up, it is so interesting. Examples are the cat Billy and the cat Todd or the dogs Mumen or Bunny. It is really interesting to watch these videos.
Billi is impressive in the abstract concepts she understands. Also, it's interesting that she uses simple sentence structure, as well as, repeating words for emphasis. As a cat lover, it's fascinating to see just how much those meows have been trying to express. 🧡😸
You're reading too much into those videos
i was once recommended one of those videos and i frankly do not believe the animals understand anything beyond "person responds strangely when i step on these"
@@arcade5765 @geneticjen9312
I admit it, biologists like me do get carried away sometimes. I am all for that excitement, that is why I studied biology. :D
Seaquest DSV!!!! The dolfin, Darwin, has a communication device that interprets his clicks as basic abstract english words. They also have an episode where they built a holographic machine that would display abstract images based on the clicks, tail movements, and electromagnetic signals sent through the water! That show was ahead of its time as far as the future of the ocean! Love it! ❤🐬
I like to believe that when my cat says meow she is saying “I love you”. But I have a hunch that she’s saying “feed me meow” bc she always leads me to the food dish!
"meow I demand sustenance at once, this is a tragedy, you are a disappointment, meow"
You left out the BEST PART regarding the Lilly Experiment.
And what they heard was "Krill good, Orcas bad". Whale interests are rather limited.
maybe they are really philosophical and mathematical geniuses. When aliens visit Earth to speak to intelligent life, maybe they are here to visit the whales rather than humans.
@@crabbypaddy5549 Star Trek IV. With all due respect, filter feeders have no need of math - or Spock.
As always, exceptionally interesting content Anton :)
>
We have a tendency to think of verbal language in terms of letters and words, but it is all sound. We have learned to recognize those different sounds as what we call words, but ultimately they are still just sounds coming from us like the whales. When the whales listen to us, they will just hear weird song like sounds in much the same way.
>
Quite a long time back I began looking at a different way of describing math principles in terms of analog rather than logic. This also extended toward the idea of a universal language based in audio(analog waves) and math. In some sense treating language as sound and mathematical principles that could describe information.
It was not too many months after this that the movie "Arrival" was released, using the circles as a form of communication. This had some similarities to how I cad conceptualized the idea of sound as a way of conveying information and even language.
>
Whales offer the closest representation of this wave like math and language. It could be that the whales are recognizing unique sounds as we recognize words and phrases, but could also be that each smaller wave pattern could represent something more like a data transmission from a radio communication or computer network over a modem. We just haven't worked out the bawd rate or encoding yet to create a modulator/demodulator..
Actually there is a recording of Lilly trying to speak in her Dolphin house. I know because I watched a documentary about that Dolphin research program. Not only did the Dolphins learn some words, but the male Dolphins taught the researchers that he would learn faster with a hand job first. And I'm 100% serious. She would give the Dolphin a hand job because the fish demanded as much and it would get it out of the way so it would calm down and not be so frustrated 😂
And they say humans are the smart ones
The dolphin commited suicide after if I remember right going on to another research project
Ketamine
Don’t forget all the Ketamine lol
Let's just be grateful the dolphin settled for hand~jobs. Dolphinese: "It doesn't work for me unless you wear the Ariel outfit..." I don't even want to _think_ about when he looks to go "all the way..."
@@richiehoyt8487 Dolphins share something in common with orangutans. You're right, it is best not to think about. On a related note, there used to be a video on TH-cam of a dolphin on a dock using a fish head as a fleshlight but it was removed for breaking community guidelines. Yes, it was a real dolphin.
Uh…how did the dolphin learn what a handjob was or how to ask for one in the first place?
Your humor is out of this world.
5:50 You may be confusing whale location signals with communication: what we hear here is a frequency-modulated location signal, very convenient - the frequency shift is proportional to the distance to the object. There are also impulse and correlation signals. Вы, возможно, путаете локационные сигналы китов с общением: то, что мы здесь слышим - частотно - модулированный локационный сигнал, очень удобный - сдвиг частоты пропорционален расстоянию до объекта. Есть еще импульсные и корелляционные сигналы.
Humans also give off sounds
Interesting where all this will lead 🤔 thank you Anton 😊 take care wonderful people ☺
My take on it is that if we meet an Alien then I feel it’s almost a given that them having the technological know how to traverse the galaxy that they will be much better placed than us to lead with communication.
My bet is the only communication we’re going to get from ET is run for our lives.
@@rolandthethompsongunner64"We come in peace!" ~Mars Attacks
Not necessarily, navigation with the stars utilises relatively basic physics knowledge; and in terms of technology to at least fly around a star system you don't need that advanced of sensors and equipment to do so. Faster-than-light travel is obviously the main clincher, or at least near light speed, but even now at our own tech level we have some working theories on warp technology that could very well pan out in the next several decades.
Regardless, all of these are mostly engineering gains, and as we full know society doesn't necessarily advance as fast as technology does...we have all of our outer space advances and research going on right now, but yet we have a good chunk of the world population brain dead on TikToks and social media who basically just survive and don't contribute much to society other than various amounts of labour. So, even aliens that could advance enough to get even higher levels of FTL travel wouldn't necessarily have advanced societal practices amongst enough of its population to have better sociological capabilities than we would. Also, if they haven't encountered other aliens other than us then they wouldn't have any more experience with xenolinguistics than we would.
I've never understood why there isn't more research into communications with other animals here on earth, especially whales and dolphins and such. I understand the want and/or need to want to communicate with aliens but let's try to communicate with things that are a little bit closer first and maybe learn more. Sure these scientists are doing that but this could have been going on for decades already and we'd be much farther than we are today with communications.
Interspecies communication should be a major scientific goal just in case we really do contact aliens. We need some competence at this just in case. Like deflecting asteroids. Conscious creatures know to learn before the need arises.
Do whales have conversations where one speaks, another answers and it goes back and forth a lot? Because this would be indicative of language based cognition similar to us. One whale singing to the pod or anyone within earshot may be different. Is it possible to tell when different whales are speaking? Would it be possible to get a dataset where someone has coded the different sounds as whale A speaking, whale B speaking, etc? An artificial intelligence could be trained to predict what sounds would be most likely as a reply to one whale's song even if it doesn't know what it is saying. This would at least demonstrate that comprehension is possible. Whale researchers with children of the age when they naturally learn language should expose the kid to as much whale song as possible while providing as much context as possible about what the whales were doing. The human brain's neural network has a critical period where it can learn any language, even several languages easily. Training of a juvenile mind may be more effective than an adult trying to reason their way through. I was a cognitive psychologist.
Fascinating Anton. Thank you
It's time to watch Star Trek again!
Countless species of earth animals communicate, with each other, and with us. Only humans say, "Let's solve a math problem." , or, " Ted has a behavior problem. Can we figure out how to help him solve it? ", or " Let's figure a way to manipulate our environment to increase our food supply! "
Animals can communicate things like where there is food to be found, where there is danger, who is available for procreation, etc. No other earth creatures seem to have more than a rudimentary ability to think abstractly, much less communicate about it.
Seti may not have been involved, but science has a long history of researching and learning animal communication. Many animals are far more intelligent than we believed, but not to the point of having complex language.
Thank you for this insight, Anton!
TY Anton for showing us how interspecies communications might be advancing faster than humanity's interspecies communications are progressing. 🙊
You said the same thing twice, boss.
*intraspecies
Wait what? Boid bad naow? HALP!
After mimicking humpback's call, they got a response. Is that all? I'm very disappointed.
If a dog or lion eats and growls, will you mimic a growl - you will get a response. No training is required!
What did I miss?
@hotbit7327 you missed that Hobbits are rabbits. From peter rabbits. Now go and comback with the stories they told you❤.
Thank you, Anton! I hope you stay healthy and as brilliantly inquisitive as ever.
Ngl, surprised this hasn't been done before to this degree. I feel like being able to communicate in animal languages would be like, a pretty high priority for people to research idk
There isn't "language" amongst animals, not in the way you're referring to, and it's exactly why it HASN'T been researched into much because it doesn't exist. Communication doesn't equate to language, and no living being on the planet has sapience other than humans (sapience being the ability to not only self reflect but also for a being to understand the context of its existence); many animals may be sentient, having emotions, but emotions don't make animals have anywhere close to the level of mental abilities even the dumbest human being has (which is why I always roll my eyes at the people that often comment on animal videos about how "such and such animals are smarter than many people I know"...an entirely exaggerated and false statement).
It was done already. You need the Vulcan mind meld technique...
Communicating with whales ehh, did anyone anyone try a Vulcan Mind Meld? 🐳🐋
Do you guys like Italian? Yes, no, yes, no, yes. I love Italian, and so do you. Yes.
Beautiful
I think that learning rather than teaching gives better ground for communication.
You can teach a dog to sit, but if you know why a dog sits you can have the dog sit without a command
Doesn't anyone remember Star Trek IV, when an extraterrestrial probe wants to communicate with the whales and since they became extinct, Kirk and Spock should bring back some whales from the past?
Specifically, humpback whales. What a great way to craft a grant proposal: paraphrase a hit movie. I don't recall that the whale in the movie said, "Beam me up, Scottie."
Do you know how far down I had to scroll to find the first Star Trek reference? 😂
The Chilren of Time book series covers these concept. Great books!
“That’s crazy! Who would send a probe hundreds of light years to talk to a whale?!”
I was going to be more obvious, but I'm glad somebody got Star Trek into the mix.
Ever since I watched this video I’ve begun to brainstorm about several ideas of worldbuilding. Ive been so fascinated by the idea of humanity being the catalyst or progenitor of some sort in fictions. Think of it like the concept of ancient humans in Halo universe. I’ve always loved that.
This is something I’ve cooked in my mind for the past 4 days and I’ve kinda ready to share it. It all started with one simple question, “what if humans ended up passing intelligence to other animals and making them sentient like us?”.
From there I ended up liking 1 out of 3 scenarios of possible future worldbuilding where the stellar civilization started from earth with all these species that got “lifted” because they somehow in the past communicated with the humans.
The other two is still in drafts but the more fleshed out is that.
I LOVE fictions that are based in modern science, and this is one of my guilty pleasures in life because I feel like abusing(?) contents like these
Imagine finally cracking the code to whale language only to discover they spend the majority of their time talking shit about us humans behind our backs.
This is very cool and i really hope we go far in this technology id love to be able to talk to animals or aliens someday thank you so much for this video Anton its very much appreciated
"Learning to communicate" is a two way street.
Do they really understand us? Do we really understand them??
Does it matter, as long as we can figure out what each other wants?
In case of whales and dolphins, the answer is that we have a little understanding. The dolphin fishermen situation (and similar cases) shows they understand humans catch fish with nets and make an action that will give mutual benefit
It’s kind of a question of what communication even is. If you can figure out enough about the other to cooperate on something, like fishing, then clearly there’s SOME kind of understanding going on.
@@napoleonfeanoron one hand, if the dolphins are trying to signal to humans, then that implies some sense on the dolphins’ part that we can recognize a signal. It seems likely that we both understand that the other is aware of the situation and can send and receive signals about it.
On the other hand, if the understanding is dependent on having that shared goal, then you can’t hope to go use what you learn from one situation to communicate with different dolphins in a different situation, like you could with normal human language. The Spanish I learned from working in a factory with Spanish speakers was very much geared towards communicating with those specific people about our work, but huge parts of it were then more broadly applicable for other situations, like reading newspaper articles and talking to people in the airport.
This is really amazing!
It's way more interesting that we can now possibly talk with animals than talking to aliens
".... they're all saying, ' don't eat me.' Weird."
According to whistle-blowers like David Grusch, we've already been in communication with NHI for decades... ⚠️ 📢 🚨
@@archmage_of_the_aetheryeaaah, excluding this part, lol
we can't. well, not more than before. this study is empty hype.
@@archmage_of_the_aether no. I don’t want to talk to chickens
Next semester our school district should offer humpbacknese! 🐋
Have a wonderful day and new year my friend