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A whale that's known only by the sound of its voice

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Re: A whale that's known only by the sound of its voice

#21

Post by kergonath »

capableweb wrote: post #15
kergonath wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most probably not. If civilians heard it, you’d expect half a dozen of semi-competent militaries would have done so as well. And some of those militaries have objectives that don’t neatly align or have less than stellar opsec. Also, it’s very difficult to keep secret a project that involves more than 10 people, especially if it involves building things.

> Also, it’s very difficult to keep secret a project that involves more than 10 people, especially if it involves building things. But not impossible, and there are a lot of examples of things being built (or destroyed for that matter) in perfect secrecy involving groups larger than 10 people.

Again, there are operators in that space that don’t have any incentive to keep your program secret. And I am not talking about complete transparency.

People retire or fall out, documents get lost, someone slips somewhere. It does not take much for the existence of a project to become public knowledge. It’s the other side of the OPSEC coin: a single mistake and some information gets available.

Still, I am not saying this is impossible, merely improbable. Which, combined with the other factors, makes the story being a secret military project implausible.

Re: A whale that's known only by the sound of its voice

#22

Post by userbinator »

kergonath wrote: post #10
userbinator wrote: post #5

Given the elusiveness, I wonder if it's something else, military in nature, merely disguised as a harmless-sounding whale...

Most probably not. If civilians heard it, you’d expect half a dozen of semi-competent militaries would have done so as well. And some of those militaries have objectives that don’t neatly align or have less than stellar opsec. Also, it’s very difficult to keep secret a project that involves more than 10 people, especially if it involves building things.

Sometimes the best way to hide something is in plain sight.

Re: A whale that's known only by the sound of its voice

#24

Post by borg16 »

Title reminded me of this episode of "The Wild" podcast[1]

> This past summer, I was in Alaska in a little coastal town called Seward - a gorgeous spot on the Kenai Peninsula tucked between the ocean and some giant glacier-covered mountains. I met a guy named Dan Olsen, who records killer whale calls using an underwater hydrophone.

[1] https://www.kuow.org/stories/eavesdropping-on-orcas-love-gri...

Re: A whale that's known only by the sound of its voice

#25

Post by wheels »

pineaux wrote: post #9
rational_indian wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so wild if you consider the fact that we don't live in the sea/ocean. There is a reason why we know more about land animals.

Also because in the sea life is more volumetric. Most sea animals move through the water at least in one stage of their life. Most land animals just move over the ground. Not through the air.

Your point isn't completely invalid, but there are two major counterarguments:

- Most land animals do fly. Most insects fly, and most land animals are insects.

- Almost all (90%+) of animals live in the top 200 meters of the ocean. That's not that much different than the portion of the "air" that includes things that live in trees.

In both cases, it's a pretty thin layer of the total volume that contains almost all of the animals. It is more distributed in water, but not as much as your comment implied.

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