But by and large, the last couple decades have not been a great time for mainstream interest in saying hello to cetaceans.

And so, when I heard about this Google X-dolphin thing, I was skeptical. Not because I didn't think people at Google would be interested; on the contrary, dolphins' clicks and squeaks seem like a perfect dataset on which they could run some of their "deep learning" algorithms.

Learning to communicate with dolphins could be seen as practice for any sort of communication with extraterrestrials, which I'm sure some Google people imagine will happen in their lifetimes (because the Singularity will come and they will be immortal and their uploaded minds can travel on spaceships to Alpha Centauri).

So I filed it away for a while. Until I was reading through Burkhard Bilger's New Yorker feature on the driverless car, which was developed at Google X, and what do I see? A reference to CYBERNETIC DOLPHINS.

Next thing I know, I've discovered that a site belonging to Google's head of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, has linked to a scientific paper on a "'dolphin speaker’ to enhance study of dolphin vocalizations and acoustics."

And you know, maybe delphic civilization had a little zazzle back! Dolphin researcher Denise Herzing gave a TED talk this year on dolphin communication, and it's received more than half a million views.

In any case, I was beginning to break out into an excited sweat. The narrative was all there: a broad, nerdy interest in dolphin codes gets distilled when some leaders of Google X see this TED talk.

And maybe Google X wasn't just decoding the dolphin speech. Maybe they were also playing it back to the animals. Maybe they really were working on this stuff!

In a very real sense, this would be the fulfillment of Michels' dream to put "a Supercomputer and a Population of Dolphins" in the same place. (Of course, for Michels that place was low-earth orbit, but close enough!)

I dashed off an email to Google X's press person, hoping, praying she'd say that the company was, in fact, solving interspecies communication. (That's solutionism I can get behind!)

Her initial response was discouraging: "I haven't seen any dolphin tanks out back anywhere."

But then ...

The real truth turned out to be a little more complicated. It's not that Google X is doing work on dolphin communication. BUT! BUT! BUT!

One of its close affiliates, wearable computing pioneer Thad Starner, who is a Technical Lead/Manager on Project Glass, is also working with dolphins.

Let's say that again: Starner, a Project Glass manager, is also working on human-dolphin communication in his academic role at Georgia Tech.

As a matter of fact, he's working with Denise Herzing, the TED talker, on something called the Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry project, which would allow for *real-time* communication with free-swimming dolphins. This is a major difference from most would-be communication systems, which have relied on captive dolphins and large, clunky apparatuses.