UNDER PRESSURE

SPACE AND THE SEA ARE THE LAST-STANDING FRONTIERS OF HUMAN EXPLORATION. WHAT DOES OUR APPROACH TO THE GREAT UNKNOWN REVEAL ABOUT US CLOSER TO HOME?

By Megan Hullander

Imagine that you are a tuna. Not a metaphorical tuna, and not the anthropomorphic variation with big, wet Pixar eyes and a plucky attitude. No, you are an albacore, the kind that gets shredded into cans and mixed with mayonnaise. Or, if you like, you can be bluefin, showing up on sushi menus at prices that make hedge fund guys dive for their Amex Black. It doesn’t matter, really, because you have no sense of life on the surface. Your awareness is instinctual, concerned only with pressure gradients, shifting temperatures, the distant electric hum of something not-quite-right on the periphery. Then—a hook. A net. A trawler. And you are, for lack of a more poetic phrase, absolutely screwed.

Now rerun the scenario, but instead of a tuna, you are a human. And instead of a trawler, it’s a spacecraft. A vast, unknowable intelligence, combing the Earth, plucking people up for purposes unknown, but, let’s be honest, probably not great. And now, you—a being that once thought itself on the top of the food chain, a being that has, at various points, built pyramids, split the atom, and invented Doritos Locos Tacos—are the one captured. And you don’t know why.

This, by the way, is not an entirely new thought experiment. Jonathan Safran Foer posed a version of it in a 2009 vegan treatise, asking: If a species more intelligent and powerful than humans arrived, and they viewed us as we view fish, how would we convince them not to eat us?

Foer’s formulation is a kind of rhetorical entrapment, a hall-of-mirrors trick that turns the interlocutor into the interrogated. It assumes that intelligence confers moral obligation—a distinctly human assumption, and one that may not be shared by our hypothetical extraterrestrial overlords. (Just as it is not currently shared by, say, a grizzly bear.) Foer’s question challenges the ethics of animal consumption, but it also does something more insidious, which is to confront the ways we structure our relationships with other forms of life—alien or terrestrial, hypothetical or real.

The thing about Earth—the fundamental, inescapable thing—is that it is quite large. It is also, unfortunately, fragile in ways that have become increasingly difficult to ignore (melting ice caps, microplastics in fish, the vague-yet-ominous term ecosystem collapse that hovers like a collective nightmare over policy briefings and doomscrolls). We have, in our grand and ceaseless traversal of the planet, not so much charted it as gnawed through it, an industrious beaver with bulldozers and legislative loopholes. As the landscapes we inhabit flicker like old neon signage—failing, sputtering—we lift our eyes elsewhere: upward, to the spangled abyss of space, or downward, into the murk of the ocean, a place we’ve romanticized far less and therefore care about proportionately less. These sentiments carry to intelligence that might live beyond our skies, and that we know for certain exists in our seas.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the marine biologist-explorer-filmmaker-humanist, transformed our collective understanding of what it means to inhabit a planet that is, despite all anthropocentric bias to the contrary, predominantly not land. Born in 1910, he came of age in an era when the idea of exploring the deep ocean was still largely theoretical, yet he envisioned underwater colonies. Not domes of scientific interest, but actual, functioning cities. And he made that dream more plausible—not just with the invention of the Aqua-Lung (which revolutionized human interaction with the ocean, allowing divers to glide weightlessly through water like astronauts in Zero G) or with the countless conservation efforts he led before “climate change” became part of the cultural lexicon, but with his simple, almost naïve insistence that the ocean mattered. His dream of aquatic cities, obviously, has not yet come to fruition.

Why? Partly because the ocean is a bit nightmarish. Light dissolves a few hundred meters down, giving way to an oppressive, sucking blackness that is physically impenetrable and existentially unnerving. In the depths of the Mariana Trench, submarines fold in on themselves like cheap lawn furniture. The ocean is a series of increasingly hostile physics problems.

By contrast, there is an elegant simplicity to space. No pressure, no friction. No invisible monsters you can’t see from arm’s length. Its difficulty, and its promise, lie in its sheer magnitude. The Cold War’s feverish space race, NASA’s funding booms and busts, and Elon Musk’s techno-libertarian fantasies have all been fueled by the belief that space is the future. It is blank, unclaimed, unspoiled by human error. As opposed to, say, the Pacific Ocean, which is home to a floating island of trash the size of Texas. We also send our trash to space, though on a scale so minute it barely registers, tiny fragments drifting away in silent orbit, as if even our waste aspires to escape us.

This, ultimately, is the paradox. The ocean—immeasurably closer, infinitely more tangible—has become an afterthought in the grand schema of human exploration. It is a mirror to the failures of humanity: the things we cannot physically overcome, the damage we’ve already done. In space, we imagine new beginnings. Within these imaginations, we seriously consider relationships with other life that might unfold—as resources to live off and intelligence to interact with.

Alien encounters in films and literature generally conform to one of two narratives: (1) Humans are under threat, or (2) humans are the threat. In either case, the conclusion is usually: Good (us) triumphs over evil (them), or we arrive at a new, tender understanding of one another. We like to think of ourselves as uniquely diplomatic creatures, capable of ethical introspection, committed to the idea that intelligence recognizes intelligence and will extend a hand rather than a fist. The counterexamples to this assumption are so numerous as to constitute their own genre. Throughout history, intelligence has been weaponized as justification for domination. The European colonization of the Americas, for instance, was predicated in part on the belief that Indigenous civilizations were less “rational” or “advanced” than their European counterparts. The transatlantic slave trade was similarly justified by pseudo-scientific hierarchies of intelligence that deemed some humans more human than others. Even now, intelligence as a metric of worth plays out in contemporary spaces like Twitter—or X, if we must—where complex ideas are distilled down to sound bites, and the appearance of intellect often outweighs substance. Online, the ability to perform intelligence—to wield irony, to “win” discourse, to outmaneuver opponents rhetorically—takes precedence over the actual pursuit of knowledge or truth. Intelligence, then, is not just a biological trait but also a social currency easy enough to fake, whose value is contingent on the structures that define it. It is, in essence, self-congratulatory, circular justification for our reign.

Consider: Dolphins have intricate social structures. Whales compose songs that travel miles, carrying meaning we have yet to decode. Octopuses solve puzzles. (A brief and highly incomplete list of things octopuses have done: unscrewed jars from the inside; stolen fish from neighboring tanks; squirted water at lightbulbs to short-circuit them, that is, turned off the lights when annoyed.) And yet, despite these obvious markers of intelligence, we capture them for entertainment, pollute their habitats, and disregard their suffering. Humans seek intelligence in the stars while ignoring its manifestations in the water. Another brief list: We sent radio signals into space; launched the Golden Record aboard the Voyager probes, a mixtape meant to introduce extraterrestrial civilizations to the best of humanity; crafted mathematical messages in the hope that an advanced species would recognize them as intentional, as decipherable. We aren’t just attempting contact; we’re offering proof that we are worth writing back to.

Human exceptionalism, as a story, often begins with the Neanderthals—a species so tantalizingly similar to our own that its very existence demands we prove our difference. Why did we survive and not them? (A little bit of them did, actually, as we still carry two percent of their DNA.) What made our intelligence the intelligence? What was the evolutionary trump card? “Being the last surviving hominin is not a victory, but rather a story of serendipity,” Rebecca Wragg Sykes writes for Broadcast. “Facing an uncertain future, it’s time to accept that perhaps we didn’t outlive the Neanderthals because of our capacity for cleverness or coercion, but thanks to our knack for conviviality, cooperation, and compassion.” We assume our intelligence is the standard against which all others must be measured. But what if it isn’t the driving trait of our evolutionary success? What if our failure to recognize other forms of intelligence beyond our own prevents us from making meaningful connections—not just with hypothetical extraterrestrials but also with the life already around us?

“We are not alone in the universe,” reads the opening line of a now-unclassified paper presented at the 1965 IEEE Conference on Military Electronics. “Even the staid National Academy of Sciences has gone on record that contact with other civilizations ‘is no longer something beyond our dreams but a natural event in the history of mankind that will perhaps occur in the lifetime of many of us.’” Despite the likelihood that we could witness such contact soon, our entire history of interspecies relationships suggests we are woefully unprepared. In our thousands and thousands of years of sharing a planet with whales (the earliest evidence of whaling dating back to around 6000 B.C.E.), our progress in communicating with them has been relatively incremental.

In 2024—8,000 and some years on from that initial contact—researchers from the SETI Institute, UC Davis, and the Alaska Whale Foundation spoke to a 38-year-old female humpback named Twain (“spoke” in the loosest, most experimental, whale-acoustic-data sense of the term) using an underwater speaker to play a recorded “contact” call. And Twain, rather than ignoring it or registering mild confusion and then going back to whatever it is whales do when humans aren’t attempting to phone them, actually responded. More than that, she responded in a structured, predictable way, matching the interval variations between calls, over and over again, for about 20 minutes.

It’s impressive, but also where things start to feel disingenuous. Because while the official line here is that the Whale-SETI team was studying humpback whale communication for the sake of, you know, understanding humpback whale communication (a fine, noble pursuit), the subtext (or actual text, as it’s referenced in their statement) is that this is actually about how we might communicate with aliens. These researchers surely must care deeply for whales, and perhaps that top-line is their true intent, but they’ve only been able to acquire funding under the guise of feeding galactic messaging initiatives.

This is sort of like how astronaut crews simulate Mars missions in the Atacama Desert, or some other deeply inhospitable patch of Earth that vaguely resembles an off-world landscape. What we’re doing with the whales is, effectively, a dry run. A practice round. Except instead of donning spacesuits and pretending the air is unbreathable, we’re setting up acoustic feedback loops with the largest-brained mammals on the planet to model how we might one day parse the syntax of something even further removed from us.

Which, when you really sit with it, raises a rather uncomfortable question: If a SETI-backed research initiative is treating terrestrial non-human intelligence as a stand-in for extraterrestrial intelligence—if we are running drills on whales so that we might one day be better prepared to talk to aliens—what does that say about our interest in understanding these creatures for their own sake?

It starts to look an awful lot like we are, yet again, only willing to invest in the study of non-human minds insofar as it benefits us. And if that’s the case—if we are more captivated by the speculative mystery of distant life than by the actual, breathing intelligence closer to home—then maybe we should be asking them for advice. If anyone understands what it’s like to call out across vast, indifferent expanses, to sing and wait and hope that something, anything, will answer, it’s the whales.

Dolphins, in a similar vein, are capable of complex problem-solving, yet we make them do circus tricks for dead fish. Foer’s thought experiment isn’t just about the ethics of eating animals—it is also about the ethics of recognizing intelligence that doesn’t look like our own. If we accept that intelligence manifests in ways we may not fully comprehend, our continued failure to respect it is not just an oversight but a fundamental moral failing.

We have tried, in our limited ways, to communicate with other forms of life on Earth. And the more we study these creatures, the more we realize how much we don’t know. Even if we fully deciphered their languages, would it change the way we treat them? Would it grant them the same moral consideration we extend to humans, or even to alien lifeforms? More pointedly, would it prompt us to treat them as beings with interests, desires, and rights rather than as resources to consume? It’s not just intelligence we fail to recognize, but also the systems by which intelligence operates. Take the Greenland shark, an ancient, slow-moving creature that can live for over 400 years. Its existence unfolds at a tempo we can barely grasp. From a human perspective, it seems sluggish, almost inert. But perhaps, to the shark, we are the ones who are frantic, flickering like fireflies, burning out before we even begin to understand the dark.

Our perception of intelligence is so entangled with our perception of time—of speed, of efficiency—that we miss how it might express itself in quieter ways. Maybe a species that lives for centuries does not need to rush to prove itself. Maybe it has nothing to prove at all.

This bias—that which conflates intelligence with activity, with the ability to build and consume and innovate—has led us to some rather embarrassing miscalculations. In the 19th century, the naturalist George Romanes attempted to rank animal intelligence by testing species’ ability to manipulate objects in ways that resembled human dexterity: pulling strings and unlatching doors. Unsurprisingly, primates did very well. Certain birds—particularly corvids—scored higher than some mammals, which is exactly the moment Romanes could’ve had a breakthrough. Instead, he dismissed the results as an anomaly. When we do recognize intelligence in other species, we assume it must be an exception, a freak occurrence, rather than evidence of a broader pattern we have not yet learned how to read.

Which brings us back to whales and the deeply rooted arrogance that keeps us from truly understanding them. In 1980, an orca named Luna got separated from his pod and spent years attempting to befriend humans off the coast of British Columbia. This wasn’t just a matter of proximity; Luna actively sought out social interaction, nudging boats, mimicking human speech patterns, and generally behaving in ways that suggested an unsettling, almost uncanny understanding of what friendship is. The prevailing scientific explanation was that Luna had transferred his social instincts to a new group out of necessity.

That analysis—framed in terms of survival, adaptation, need—misses something fundamental. What if Luna was not simply replacing one social unit with another, but making an autonomous choice? What if this wasn’t about instinct at all, but rather preference? The very question—whether a non-human animal is capable of wanting something in the same way as humans—exposes our cognitive egotism. We assume that animal behavior is mechanical, while ours is laden with depth and intention. But why? Because we have language? Whales have syntax. Because we build things? Termites have architecture. Because we write self-indulgent essays about the nature of intelligence?

But here’s the thing: If history tells us anything, it’s that intelligence is most evident in hindsight. We recognize it only when we can no longer deny it, when the weight of its presence becomes too significant to ignore. The question is, will we recognize it in time? Perhaps whatever hyper-intelligent, hyper-advanced species eventually makes contact will turn out to be less interested in us—self-important, endlessly squabbling primates—than in the whales, whose elaborate sonar poetics and deep-ocean ruminations might strike them as a far more compelling form of consciousness, leaving us, yet again, talking only to ourselves.

Intelligence might not be this thing to hoard or wield. Perhaps it’s an ongoing group project, a collaboration among all the intelligences on and off this planet, the capacity to learn from and with each other. Cooperation. Humility. That sounds a little pie-in-the-sky, but it also sounds like the one thing that might work—not just for us, but for everything in this beautifully weird ecosystem we are a part of.

We do have this not-totally-dismal habit of recognizing when we’ve fumbled and, bizarrely enough, reaching for the better instinct. It’s like we’re constantly walking into the glass door of our ethical failings, but eventually, we start rubbing our heads and thinking, Maybe that door isn’t something we should keep walking into.

And, to give us some credit, the science of communication is hard. Really hard. We are trying to talk to creatures who may have an entirely different set of standards for what counts as conversation. And sure, we can’t yet decode their languages, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t made progress. The Whale-SETI team isn’t playing a record of our achievements for whales while waiting for them to RSVP to an intergalactic cocktail party. They’re opening doors—tiny, creaking doors—that might, just might, lead to better understanding. Maybe we’re flipping the script here: While we beam messages into the void, hoping for some grand cosmic acknowledgment, it’s entirely possible that whales have been saying something urgent this whole time, and we’re the ones fumbling with the translation.

Cousteau’s whole thing—undersea humanism, the belief that the oceans matter—didn’t vanish. It planted something, a seed that is still growing, even if we’re not sure what it will become. It’s in the work of scientists and ocean activists, some of whom are not just working to study the ocean, but to care for it. We’re trying, although clumsily, to live by what Cousteau kept telling us: The ocean isn’t a frontier; it’s a home. One that’s already occupied, with ways of thinking and communicating that we’re just on the edges of understanding.