Something about the ship noise.
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SETI? Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence?
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Wait, what? The translation is up to the point where the whales can give us their names? Wow … 
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That whale is also very likely sick of people misattributing witty bon mots to them all the damn time. Whale Mae West and whale Churchill get the same treatment.
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I cant find it right now, but Whale Lincoln said something apt.
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This is interesting but I don’t think it qualifies as a “conversation.” It was one interlocutor (the humans) making noises they didn’t understand and the other (the whale) mimicking them, which doesn’t mean the whale understood or considered the sounds to have semantic content so as to mean something other than (implicitly), ‘I can make that sound too.’
I have little doubt whales and dolphins have complex languages that would, for instance, allow them to communicate about things outside their presence. But my guess is that based on the fact that those languages developed over millenia as part of ways of living in the ocean that they would be non-translatable for humans. Probably the best hope for communication would be to develop a completely new inter-species language that was not always already rooted in ways of living either on land or in the ocean. (Although to the extent that would require keeping beings in experimental captivity, it should never happen.)
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Whale Yogi Berra never said most of the things he said either.
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If you come to a fork in the river, take it.
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Cetacean needed.
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The whales response was first recognition, then a raspberry, then disengagement. It was like hearing a greeting, you think someone is hitting on you but it’s a parrot or myna saying hello, then you realize they don’t have a clue what they’re saying so you ignore them. Same thing. The speaker used also couldn’t replicate the full lower range of sound they use so it was probably closer to a parakeet speaking tonal mandarin. No wonder she left. Maybe interspecies diplomacy can still be salvaged though, Next time find out what an apology sounds like and try that.
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Whale keeps eyeing the ship.
“Hey where the female whale at?”
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Another mark of their intelligence and good taste.
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It’s so true. Many so-called whale Yogi-isms are actually ahem rightly attributed to whale Casey Stengel.
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Oh, how could I have overlooked the article’s ‘Click for Transcript’ bit? It’s all right here, kind of a lot of unpacking some Resource Protection they said / they said, then they slag Apple for a straight day about IP gatekeeping Apple ID, suddenly invite humans who identify as Attack Helicopters to a bubble blowing event, then it straight up has demands for Oculus 3 in their size, very very detailed stuff about no Ray-Bans or plug-in water stills. They just want cottagecore sims and to be in our Lisa Frank events.
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Welcome the weird, the unfamiliar & unusual, embrace the strange & foreign, especially in fellow humans, for they are the vanguard of the alien species that we all seem to be searching for and wishing to be welcomed among. ~ Alsep Bahar Moridamus
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