Looking for Dominant Intelligences

Looking for the Dominant Intelligences

On those millions worlds inhabited by advanced intelligences, consider a rare planet, the only one in its system with a surface ocean of liquid water. In this rich aquatic environment, many relatively intelligent creature live – some with eight appendages for grasping; others that communicate among themselves by changing an intricate pattern of bright and dark mottling on their bodies; even clever little creatures from the land who make brief forays into the ocean in vessels of wood and metal.

But we seek the dominant intelligences, the grandest creatures on the planet, the sentient and graceful masters of the deep ocean, the great whales.

Some sequoia trees are both larger and more massive than any whale. Illustration, artwork by © Megan Jorgensen

In fact the great whales are the largest animals ever to evolve on the planet Earth, larger by far than the dinosaurs. An adult blue whale can be thirty meters long and weigh 150 tons. Many, especially the baleen whales, are placid browsers, straining through vast volumes of ocean for the small animals on which they graze; others eat fish and krill.

The whales are recent arrivals in the ocean. Only seventy million years ago their ancestors were carnivorous mammals who migrated in slow steps from the land into the ocean. Among the whales, mothers suckle and care tenderly for their offspring. There is a long childhood in which the adults teach the young. Play is a typical pastime. These are all mammalian characteristics, all important for the development of intelligent beings.