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Those giants of the ocean, to use a metaphor, that nobody
likes. But did you see them recently, when they were lying
around back along the coast of North Germany!? It doesn't
matter, anyway:
The sea is all cloudy, they can't see or smell anything there.
So over the course of evolution another method was perfected
which works very well: the hearing. A 'whale song', as some
of their cries are called but the true significance of which
we still don't know, covers a broad range of frequencies.
A typical whale song only lasts quarter of an hour; the longest,
an hour. Often it's repeated note for note, oscillation for
oscillation. Sometimes a group of whales suddenly stops singing
to leave their winter grounds, but when they come back half
a year later they continue exactly where they had stopped,
on exactly the same note – as if there had never been
an interruption. If only Deleuze could have seen that! Whales
have good memories. For over 99.99% of their history there
were no people around in either the deep oceans nor the high
seas. In all that time whales developed an extraordinary acoustic
system of communication. A blue whale, for instance, can produce
exceptionally loud noises with a frequency of 20 Hertz. Such
low-frequency tones are hardly absorbed in the ocean. According
to findings by Roger Payne, an American biologist, at 20 Hertz
two whales can contact one another practically anywhere in
the world via deep-sea channels, for example from the Ross
Ice Shelf in the Antarctic to the Aleutian Islands. The whales
have had a world-wide communications network for a long time,
and can sing to one another in the ocean depths over distances
of 15,000 kilometres. With the increasing number of merchant
vessels and warships this wall of sound, primarily in the
area of 20 Hertz, was audible in the foreground. Which made
communication between whales far more difficult. Two hundred
years ago blue whales could communicate with one another over
distances of 10,000 kilometres. Today it's only a couple of
hundred. We may not know whether they give one another 'names'
or recognise one another by their voices, but there is no
doubt that we have cut them off from one another. We've shut
them up.
Now imagine
that San-José scale suddenly developed intelligence
or something like that, and then builds something that is
somehow characteristic of its culture or somehow durable,
and suddenly I can’t hear my girlfriend talking to me
from the next room and my internet connection is only five
baud, ... bugger!
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