A team of scientists from the SETI Institute, University of California Davis and the Alaska Whale Foundation, had a close encounter with a non-human (aquatic) intelligence. The Whale-SETI team has been studying humpback whale communication systems in an effort to develop intelligence filters for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
It will be both awesome and depressing as fuck if it turns out they are capable of complex high order thinking and meta cognition. If we open a line of communication and then have to explain ourselves… I don’t envy the person who has to explain our failures.
I’ve started considering myself as member of a still young and rather foolish species and I think that is a much better approach than the old ‘god put humans here to rule the earth’ - I mean look where that got us.