Very interesting thought, whether in turns out to be true or not. Seems plausible, at least. If not whales, maybe some other species.
The existence of sonar as a highly evolved sensory experience already tells us about scale of possibility within the creative repertoire of biology. Our brain design is clearly influenced a lot by the sensory and communication tasks that are important to us.
For example, human smell is something unimpressive, by mammalian standards. We have smell and it affects us occasionally. It says 'don't eat that!' or somemsuch, sometimes. We also have some pheromones that are a basic scent communication method. Many mammals make 90% of mating decisions based on smell. Some species can react to a 6 day old pee stain the way humans react to strippers. Some find food from long distances away. They use highly developed scent based communication to transmit information about themselves (mostly) to one another. Something can smell scary, in a "Shit, that gave me a fright!" kind of way. It's not a stretch to imagine they dream or think in smells the way we do in words, sort of.
We communicate with sound in amazing ways. Right now we are communicating using sight (most of us) in a way that piggybacks on our brain's special design to understand words, which are sound based. This is fairly common in our biological branch, words... or so it seems. Anyway, the design is flexible to be used in various ways. You can learn language without having hearing. There is obviously a lot of potential for nature to be novel.
To be fair, most people massively underuse their sense of smell. Feynman described being able to distinguish who touched long untouched books by smell - sounds a bit farfetched until you try, it's not that hard for most. Then again, it's also not very useful in today's society.
The existence of sonar as a highly evolved sensory experience already tells us about scale of possibility within the creative repertoire of biology. Our brain design is clearly influenced a lot by the sensory and communication tasks that are important to us.
For example, human smell is something unimpressive, by mammalian standards. We have smell and it affects us occasionally. It says 'don't eat that!' or somemsuch, sometimes. We also have some pheromones that are a basic scent communication method. Many mammals make 90% of mating decisions based on smell. Some species can react to a 6 day old pee stain the way humans react to strippers. Some find food from long distances away. They use highly developed scent based communication to transmit information about themselves (mostly) to one another. Something can smell scary, in a "Shit, that gave me a fright!" kind of way. It's not a stretch to imagine they dream or think in smells the way we do in words, sort of.
We communicate with sound in amazing ways. Right now we are communicating using sight (most of us) in a way that piggybacks on our brain's special design to understand words, which are sound based. This is fairly common in our biological branch, words... or so it seems. Anyway, the design is flexible to be used in various ways. You can learn language without having hearing. There is obviously a lot of potential for nature to be novel.