NASA has funded bizarre experiments to find techniques for communicating with aliens. For example, for these purposes, in the 70s, dolphins were given drugs and had sexual intercourse with them. Malcolm Brenner made headlines in 2010 when he confessed that he had a passionate seven-month romance with a dolphin. It wasn't just sex, he insisted, Dolphin understood him. He felt that dolphins were no less intelligent than humans and that he could find common ground with them. He is not the first person to try to find common ground with large-brain aquatic mammals, according to the Daily Star.
American neuroscientist Dr. John Lilly was fascinated by responsive, playful animals and in 1961 published the bestselling book "Man and the Dolphin", in which he described his attempts to teach dolphins the English language. His experiments on intraspecific communication attracted the attention of Frank Drake, an American astronomer and astrophysicist, who came up with the famous equation that estimates how many alien civilizations exist in our galaxy.
“I read his book and was very impressed," said Drake, who is revered by UFO enthusiasts as the father of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). “It was a very interesting book because it had these new ideas about creatures just as intelligent and sophisticated like us, yet living in a completely different environment.” Drake saw Lilly as a like-minded person who could help SETI build a toolkit for learning alien languages. He said that he and Lilly both "wanted to understand as much as possible about the problems of communicating with other intelligent species."
Drake's approval provided Lilly with financial support from NASA for his work. One day, perhaps in 100 years, perhaps tomorrow, humans will meet intelligent aliens for the first time. And when that happens, the first hurdle we have to overcome is to find a language that we can speak. Most of the languages that currently exist on Earth have at least a few things in common. The sounds we use, the idea of grammar. It can be difficult to learn a new language, but it can be done. After all, we all have very similar bodies.
But the aliens will not have the same bodies as ours. NASA saw in Lilly the key to taking the linguistic leap and talking to someone with a completely different physiology. But Lilly was more than just a translator. Lilly, along with her partner Margaret Howe Lovatt, used this NASA money to build a new laboratory where humans could share space with dolphins. Lovatt spent a lot of time with a young male dolphin named Peter, who seemed to take a great interest in her.
“He was very, very interested in my anatomy. If I were sitting here and my feet were in the water, he would have come up and stared at the back of my knee for a long time. He wanted to know how this thing worked and I was so fascinated by him.” This charm eventually turned into physical intimacy, and Lovatt took it upon herself to provide Peter with sexual relief whenever he became too sexually aroused to participate in her experiments.
“It was just easier to do it and let it happen,” she said. “It would just become part of what's going on, like itching, just get rid of that scratch and we'll be done and move on.” "It wasn't sexy on my part," she continued, "perhaps sensual." “It seemed to me that it brought us even closer. Not because of sexual activity, but because of the lack of need to keep breaking down. And that's really all there was. I was there to meet Peter. It was part of Peter.”
Meanwhile, Lilly experimentally administered LSD to two other dolphins to see if the drug's psychedelic effect would help them communicate. Lovatt forbade Lilly to give acid to Peter. But Frank Drake sent Carl Sagan, a young astronomer who worked for him and would eventually become world famous himself, to see how NASA's money was spent. This was the beginning of the end for Lilly and Lovatt's experiments. Soon after Sagan reported this to Frank Drake, NASA cut funding.
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Shortly after parting with Lovatta, the dolphin Peter drowned in apparent suicide. Dolphins need to surface regularly to breathe, and it seemed to deliberately stay underwater until it suffocated. “He wasn't going to be unhappy, he just left,” Lovatt said. "And that was okay." After all, the first deliberate message to the aliens sounded more like a simple video game than dolphin sonar clicks. The Arecibo message, as it was called, was developed by a team led by Drake and Sagan.
The three-minute message, directed towards the star cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, contained several crossed images of people, a DNA chain and a radio telescope. It will take 25,000 years for the message to reach the stars, and at least another 25,000 years to receive any answer. In fact, the M13 core will no longer be in this location by the time the message arrives. Who knows what humans - or dolphins - will look like by then?