I've had the good fortune today to read a bit from Carl Sagan's well-received book, Cosmos, published in 1980. On pages 272-273, he writes about whales. He recounts how whale songs can be as long a work as the Odyssey, that the whales can repeat again and again the complex material sound by sound. He reports incidents where pods of whales sing or speak the same song together, and that some repeated communications of considerable complexity change when the pod returns from a migration, as though they have edited their communication. Sagan states that hearing is their primary sense, which is one factor in the development of such a complex repertoire. He states the whales communicated across tremendous oceanic distances in the thousands of years before humans industrialized life, but that the noise production of commercial and military vehicles has greatly hampered their ability to hear each other. He expresses concern about the slaughter of such intelligent animals for unnecessary products.
'We humans, as a species, are interested in communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence. Would not a good beginning be improved communication with terrestrial intelligence, with other human beings of different cultures and languages, with the great apes, with the dolphins, but particularly with those intelligent masters of the deep, the great whales?'
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