A team of scientists from the SETI Institute, University of California Davis and the Alaska Whale Foundation, had a close encounter with a non-human (aquatic) intelligence. The Whale-SETI team has been studying humpback whale communication systems in an effort to develop intelligence filters for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
No. We still have a lot in common with whales. They’re mammals after all. We have NO inkling of how or what aliens will be. Let’s look at one of the many possible problems: our sense of time. An alien race might have a very slow growth rate/information polling rate that to them, 10000 years is but 1 second. To us, such aliens might not even appear to be alive.