Dolphin's "conversation" was largely involved in searching for messages from extraterrestrial intelligent life forms

ByDhammika Heenpella

Dolphins, which are thought to have high intelligence, are known to "talk" with their colleagues using their own communication methods. From analyzing the difference between such dolphin conversation and human conversation, it is said that it lives in stars other than EarthExtraterrestrialsAn attempt was made to use it to analyze the message sent from.

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In 1961, at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, USA, a meeting was held to explore the communication method with the alien and its science. This is a program to explore intelligent life forms outside the earth "SETI"This meeting, also known as the" Green Bank Conference ", attended by 12 experts. Among them were three Nobel laureates and at the time it was still in the late 20'sKarl SaganHe is a brain scientist who studies communication with dolphinsJohn C. LilyIt seems that Mr. and others were included.

Because there were Mr. Lilly, a dolphin researcher among the participants, the participating members named this group "the Order of the Dolphin" (Dolphin Medal). This is based on the idea that "There is no way to comprehend signals coming from outer space if it can not communicate even with dolphins who have shared evolutionary history". So the group studied the dolphin language to find ways to talk with extraterrestrial intelligent life forms.

ByShami Chatterjee

Initial research conducted by Lilly et al. Gradually revealed that several animals are communicating in a conversational way with complexity close to human language. However, since there is discussion as to whether or not truly non-human animals are talking with "language", discussion on what concepts are forming the "language" human beings talk about is discussed Was done.

Language is inherently not human being, it is a thing acquired after acquired culturally and acquired. In addition, in addition to being able to refer to concepts that are not present in front of our eyes by language, we have the property that sentences can be extended infinitely long, but if dolphins are like this Many zoologists were skeptical about whether to control languages ​​with features. In fact, however, dolphins are talking about their surrounding environment by making use of unique "signals" such as sound and appearance, and dolphins use "signal" to express mood, sex, age It is also believed to convey concepts such as.

BySusanne Davidson Follow

It was attracting attention in the research that "1980s was proposed by American linguist George Kingsley Lee Zip"Zip's law(Zipf's law) "is a linguistic feature called. This shows that there is a certain rule in the number of appearances of words used in human English conversation, "The most frequently used word is twice as many as the second most frequently used word, 3 Three times more words that are used most frequently "appears. For example, the most used word in English in the United States is "the," the first place is "the" and the second place is "of", but each of them accounts for 7% and 3.5% of the total words, You can see that it is doubled.

Plotting this trend on a logarithmic graph shows that a line with a slope of "-1" is drawn as in the graph below, indicating that the human language has a clear trend. In other words, if some kind of conversation is taking place, this "Zip's law" exists, and conversely,When a graph of -1 is obtained when analyzing a certain signal, there is a high possibility that the signal is "conversation"That will lead us to that.

BySergioJimenez

Research teams such as Mr. Lawrence Doyle, who is involved in SETI, investigated whether Zip's law exists for "conversation" in which four kinds of living things are done by band lizards, humpback whales, squirrel monkeys and cotton. In the case of dolphins, analysis is performed by decomposing the sound based on "silence" included in the sound emitted by the dolphin. And when plotting "daughter" conversation on the graph, "-0.95"It was found that the graph is close to the human conversation, and it was shown that the possibility of grammar being very high in" dolphin ". Mr. Doyle says that "Why does grammar exist, because it has a function that has important meaning to preserve life, to compensate for what is missing during communication."

The result in the case of squirrel monkey did not become larger (approaching -1) than "-0.6". This means that the conversation of squirrel monkeys is random and can not be found in grammar. In the case of cotton, I analyzed chemical substances released from trees and investigated "conversation". Then the result was "-1.6", which means that the content of "conversation" is too redundant.

From these studies, we can see that a certain law is necessary for "conversation" to be established. If Zip's law applies to radio waves that flew from outer space like dolphin's voice said to be talking with advanced intelligence, it means that "an extraterrestrial intelligent life is finally found" maybe.

BySusanne Davidson