God I cannot wait to talk to whales. Their oral histories must be incredible. People have fantasized about communicating with extraterrestrials for ages. I don't understand why we haven't invested significant resources in trying to communicate with the other animals on our own planet. What an incredibly weird and non translatable experience it will be to (finally?!) start this adventure with whales.
Tangent time. If you do a cursory search of how smart whales are, you'll get nonsense about how humans are much smarter because the size of the brain isn't relevant, its the ratio of the brain size to the body size. But somehow that argument doesn't apply to squirrels. Or to a 7 foot human vs. a 4.5 foot human. Whales probably aren't as smart as humans, but its due to the environmental pressures selecting for intelligence, not raw capability. Whales have the capability to far outstrip humans in intelligence (if you accept that neuron count and neuron connections are the raw inputs). Lets get some whale engineers working on the hard problems please.
Tangent time. If you do a cursory search of how smart whales are, you'll get nonsense about how humans are much smarter because the size of the brain isn't relevant, its the ratio of the brain size to the body size. But somehow that argument doesn't apply to squirrels. Or to a 7 foot human vs. a 4.5 foot human. Whales probably aren't as smart as humans, but its due to the environmental pressures selecting for intelligence, not raw capability. Whales have the capability to far outstrip humans in intelligence (if you accept that neuron count and neuron connections are the raw inputs). Lets get some whale engineers working on the hard problems please.