First Contact
I.
“All good down there?”
“I’m still breathing, so, I think so. Pressure is steady. ”
“And the Translator?”
“Receiving, nothing yet.”
“Can you see them?”
“It’s so dark. I don’t know.”
“Are you sure? You should be close.”
“Oh, shit. Wait. I’m getting something.”
“Okay. Okay. Good. Any more detail?”
“Woah. Sir, we just made contact.”
II.
I dedicated the better part of my 20s to searching for other intelligent life in our universe. It is only during the past few years that I have redirected my focus entirely.
In my senior year of high school, I read Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem series—and while I was ostensibly pursuing astrophysics to better understand our universe, what I actually wanted was to find intelligent life.
And it’s promising, when you start. Fresh out of school. Enough optimism to believe you may be the one to dig up the next breakthrough, find the perfect planet. Or maybe get lucky and be part of the generation that finally gets something through CHIME, or the ATA.
Back then I would have given anything to find smart aliens; life complex enough to really communicate with. And though I knew that most human attempts to search outwards had not been particularly successful, I held out hope that perhaps one day the aliens would find us and initiate a dialogue. [0] Any day now, I would tell myself. They might reach out.
Then I met my now-wife, Maggie, who is a marine biologist.
III.
“So, to recap?”
“Strange and overwhelming. Unlike anything we’ve encountered this cycle.”
“More intelligent?”
“It’s hard to say. They hardly have any technology. At least not anything visible. They could not have made our journey. Which is part of what makes them so remarkable.”
“I saw in the logs that they are capable of advanced language. You had a conversation.”
“Yes. And there’s another unique marker - they have real emotional depth, emotional intelligence. They grieve when their loved ones are injured or killed. They communicate over long distances. They participate in altruistic behavior, like protecting other species from attacks.”
“Hm. More complex than the last 6 cycles, at least. Good work. Should we take one with us?”
“They asked if it would be like a museum.”
“I guess it would.”
“Then we shouldn’t. None of them wanted to go.”
“That’s a wrap, then. I just need to call the project something. For the files. Do you have a name? Or did they have one? For their planet, maybe? Always fun to use some local vocabulary.”
“I asked but the name was seventeen minutes long. There is not a great way to write it down.”
“Ha. Okay. Unfortunate.”
IV.
The universe is a cold, dark, inhospitable place, and it is mostly empty. There may be intelligent life out there. Maybe one day we will reach them, or they will reach us. I would be delighted.
Over the past few months, though, I have begun to look inwards. On our own planet. Out of billions in the universe, our planet not only has life but has a lot of it. There are people, and fish, and trees.
There are also whales: an animal we have spent most our residency on this planet killing.
During the first few months of our relationship, Maggie told me a lot about whales.
Did you know that whales speak? (And some of them, like dolphins, even have names for each other.) Analysis of humpback whale songs has found that they statistically mirror human speaking patterns in structure; in some ways, their language may be no less complex than our own.
There is whale culture, and what works for some whales is eventually adopted by the broader group. Upon the collapse of herring stocks in the 1980s, whales off the coast of New England innovated new hunting technology by slapping their tails on the water to improve efficiency. By the mid-2000s, this technique had spread to ~40% of the population.
Whales are self-aware, and they can even develop fads. A pod of Orcas in the Pacific once began wearing dead salmon as hats after a female in the group began doing so. The trend only lasted a few months. There is so much more I could tell you, friends, though I fear if I kept writing about all of the things that make whales so wonderful you may nod off before I get to my point. [2]
If you take away one thing, let it be this: the more I learn about whales, the more I wonder if perhaps the intelligent life I was searching for in outer space was there in our oceans all along.
V.
“If you want a name, though, I might have one.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“On their planet there is another species that lives on land. Seemingly intelligent but did not fit our criteria this cycle. It was suggested to me we might use that other species’ name for the planet.”
“Sure. That works too. What is it?”
“They call it Earth.”
VI.
The first time it was easy to see whales in captivity was when P.T. Barnum locked them in a basement in lower Manhattan. “After months of immense labor and at an expense of NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS,” the advertisement read, two whales “were captured and brought to this city from the coast of Labrador.” The whales did not live long. Over four years, at least nine of them died in Barnum’s New York prison. [1]
(If you had been listening carefully off the shore of Labrador after one of Barnum’s expeditions, it is possible that you would have heard cries echoing through the water, grieving the loss of a loved one.)
They did ‘shows' with the whales three times per day: mid-morning, mid-afternoon, and early evening. As the ad read, “GEORGE, the great WHALE CAPTURER, will enter the WHALE TANK every day.” It is unclear exactly what George did in the tank. Perhaps he jumped in under the pretense that the whales would attack him. Perhaps he played games with them, or prodded them with sticks. I doubt it was pleasant. What I am certain of is that nobody watching the shows, not even George himself, knew that they were inches away from a creature so complex that 20-year-old me would have given anything to find if it had just happened to be on some other planet, far away.
I have spent so much of my life wondering what it might be like if we discovered a promising planet and identified intelligent life on it. What we might ask, what we might learn.
But now, I wonder: would we even know what to look for, or what to ask?
* * *
[0] Humans are pretty cool, too.
[1] I wonder why they didn’t include this in The Greatest Showman.
[2] There are plenty more cool whale facts. Like how they evolved from a land-dwelling animal that basically looked like a deer. Or how the blue whale, a kind of whale that still lives in our oceans today, is probably the largest animal to have ever lived on the planet.
Author’s note: Because Quarter Mile is mostly a website with non-fiction essays, it is worth pointing out that this story is a work of fiction and, while (we think!) the whale facts in it are true, the opinions in the piece are those of the made-up character writing the essay, not necessarily our own. And, of course, the technology that the aliens are using is made up and fantasy; maybe there is truly no way to have an understandable conversation with a whale. Maybe there is.
Usually a caveat like this would not be necessary in a work of fiction, but I thought it was worth including given the contents of the rest of this site. If you want to read another story we wrote, try Human. (Also, there are plenty of other complex and intelligent non-human creatures on this planet, not just whales!)
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