UNLIMITED

The Atlantic

How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold

If we can learn to speak their language, what should we say?
Source: Shawn Heinrichs

One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language. Gruber said that they hope to record billions of the animals’ clicking sounds with floating hydrophones, and then to decipher the sounds’ meaning using neural networks. I was immediately intrigued. For years, I had been toiling away on a book about the search for cosmic civilizations with whom we might communicate. This one was right here on Earth.

Sperm whales are the planet’s largest-brained animals, and their nested social structures are immense. About 10 whales swim together full-time as a unit. They will sometimes meet up with others in groups of hundreds. All of the whales in these larger groups belong to clans that can contain as many as 10,000 animals, or perhaps more. (The upper limit is uncertain, because industrial whaling reduced the animals’ numbers.) Sperm whales meet just a fraction of their fellow clan members during their lifetime, but with those they do meet, they use a clan-specific dialect of click sequences called codas.

I recently visited the paleontologist Nick Pyenson in his office at the end of a long corridor of fossils at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. As we hefted a sperm whale’s skull out of a fiberglass crate, he told me that the clans likely date back to the Ice Age and that a few could be hundreds of thousands of years old. Their codas could be orders of magnitude more ancient than Sanskrit. We don’t know how much meaning they convey, but we do know that they’ll be very

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic6 min read
How Tortillas Lost Their Magic
Photographs by Victor Llorente At about midnight each weekday, a group of five men and women arrives at the darkened restaurant doors of Sobre Masa in Brooklyn and performs a sacred art of transformation. Heirloom corn—hundreds of pounds in shades of
The Atlantic6 min read
Trapped—And Lavishly Rewarded—For Playing a Part
Maybe it’s the time of year, but I’ve been thinking lately about Nora, the whirling, frantic heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, overspending on Christmas presents, quietly operating her household in ways that go unseen, twisting herself into k
The Atlantic6 min read
The Walmart Effect
No corporation looms as large over the American economy as Walmart. It is both the country’s biggest private employer, known for low pay, and its biggest retailer, known for low prices. In that sense, its dominance represents the triumph of an idea t

Related Books & Audiobooks

pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy