That is not going to happen. I don't know how people entertain these absurd ideas about animal communication.
We know animals communicate with each other, and the trend is we generally discover more and have underestimated what many animal species practice and can do.
Everyone agrees that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis have talked together and lived (and bred) together; what makes inter-species communication (assuming a translator or device) impossible?
No, I don’t think “universal translators” are outside the domain of science fiction; but I think us building a device that enables two-way communication between one species and us, is probably more likely than not.
[1]: https://urban.uw.edu/news/crows-hold-grudges-against-individ...
Not everyone agrees that Neanderthals possessed language like us either, although evidently they are much, much closer evolutionarily to us than crows or whales, and it is vastly more plausible that they talked. Having Neanderthal DNA doesn't mean that we talked with them though, it needn't have been even consensual, unfortunately.
They're pretty damn interesting. Cats sometimes think hard about their responses. And they use metaphors. And express emotions.
There's always the suspicion this is a fake marketing exercise. But if it is, it's a very ornate and extended one.
I have no idea how we're supposed to communicate with aliens if we can't communicate with other mammals.
"They're really stupid and can't do calculus or invent FTL travel" isn't much of an excuse.
There is a well-known story about this discussed in Radiolab [2010] https://radiolab.org/podcast/91725-words/transcript
Here's ChatGPT summarizing one section:
> Younger signers had developed a richer vocabulary for mental states—concepts like believe, remember, forget, understand. They were much better than the original older signers at tasks requiring them to reason about what another person thinks or knows. Later, as the older signers picked up those mental-state terms from younger people, some of them improved on the same tests. Senghas describes it as language giving them new insight into other people’s thinking and motivations.
I see several likely stories:
* Much animal communication is practical, descriptive of the present (nothing abstract, or very few abstract concepts)
* If a species could expand its communication, it would give it more powerful tools and allow for more meaningful conversation with humans
* If such a thing is possible, it will be extremely disruptive to that species
I think if you could communicate about abstract ideas with your dog, you could exchange bedtime stories. However, I don't think such a thing is possible today, and it's not clear what species (if any, besides humans) will, in fact, be able to learn such things
I don't think it's particularly controversial to say "written language is a meaningful technology advancement for a civilization", though!
Whale and Dolphin "languages" (or substitute "utterances" if the hypothesis is so antithetical to you) score remarkably complexly, close to Human "utterances" (again, if animal language is so offensive a notion) on some of these measures. Dog utterances do not:
Zipf's Law (Data Efficiency) • Humans: -1.0 slope showing an optimal balance of information and physical effort. • Whales & Dolphins: -1.0 slope matching the exact mathematical curve of human speech. • Dogs: No -1.0 slope, heavily skewed toward isolated, repetitive alert spikes.
Menzerath's Law (Physical Pacing) • Humans: Present; internal sounds get shorter as the total sequence grows longer. • Whales & Dolphins: Present; highly efficient pacing across multiple species. • Dogs: Absent; vocalizations lack the structured phrase sequences required for this law.
Shannon Entropy (Predictability) • Humans: High; complex grammatical dependencies stretch across long sentences. • Whales & Dolphins: Moderate-High; governed by structural rules and click patterns. • Dogs: Very Low; individual sounds are isolated events with no grammatical rules.
Repertoire Size (Signal Diversity) • Humans: Infinite vocabulary built from tens of thousands of words. • Whales & Dolphins: High diversity with hundreds of whistles and thousands of clicks. • Dogs: Very small vocal pool limited to roughly 10 distinct sounds.
I'd say, it's difficult to say, but calling the hypothesis of whale language "absurd" sounds like something someone might have said (and still might say, incorrectly) about the concept of evolution by natural selection. I think you are overselling your argument.