They’re saying: So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Ok, all joking aside. Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to communicate verbally with another species?
Only to find out that whales are some of the foulest mouthed, rudest, and just plain mean creatures on the planet. Sure, they are mostly gentle physically, but they will absolutely destroy you verbally.
But all joking aside… what would you ask a whale?
But all joking aside… what would you ask a whale?
I’d ask what it thought about Star Trek IV.
I had not thought about what to ask a whale.
I’d probably ask them some inane crap and they’ll respond by threatening me, my family, my friends. They’ll leave me depressed and lost. On second thought, maybe we shouldn’t communicate with them.
Or, I’ll end up finding out that they are the original founders of Reddit and they’ve been posting memes non stop for 15 years trying to topple humanity.
I’d ask it to jump out of its tail.
We kind of can…
Birds are manipulative dicks and constantly lie about shit, but you can verbally communicate with more than a few species in your native human language.
They won’t have a perfect grasp of what’s going on, but they understand a lot.
Corvids are the best ones to do this with, especially crows and ravens. Crows and ravens are capable of mimicry, are fairly common, and have their own language complex enough to pass down accurate information through generations
No animal understands the concept of a question not even great ape relatives to us
You might be interested in some of Dr Irene Pepperberg’s work. She worked a lot with parrots specifically, and pretty well showed that they’re capable of an actual working vocabulary, not just mimicry.
Edit - Damn there were like 5 mis-auto-corrected words in like 2 sentences. Apologies to anyone who tried to read that and thought they were having a stroke.
