Space Time
Meet the Alien Whisperer
How an astrophysicist uses dolphin and whale communication to prepare for possible alien contact
When astrophysicist Laurance Doyle was six, his father presented him with a map of the solar system and said, “The stars are other people’s suns.” The line sparked Doyle’s interest in space, and he’s been studying outer worlds ever since.
In the past, Doyle has worked on discovering exoplanets with NASA’s Kepler mission. Today, he’s leading a project that could be equally groundbreaking: building a framework for understanding alien languages.
Since 1987, Doyle has worked at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, where he is a principal investigator on an assignment to imagine how another intelligent civilization might communicate. Of course, there are no known alien languages available to study today — if they even exist in the first place — so Doyle is using intelligent animal languages as a guidepost.
To do this, Doyle and his colleagues have collected a range of sounds made by dolphins and humpback whales. They currently have 180,000 dolphin whistles that they use to analyze the sea creatures’ syntax, the same way a linguist would for human sounds.
