SETI conducted a cool experiment back in 2021 where scientists listened to a humpback whale named Twain, but there were two limitations of this approach. For one thing, the communication was mostly limited to the whale talking to the researchers, who in turn couldn’t say much of anything back to the animals. Now, some of those researchers think that AI could close the gap and give us the equivalent of Star Trek’s universal translator, but all of this is predicated on one big assumption: that the whales have something worth saying.
As marine biologist Dr. David Shiffman notes, “Most organisms simply have no need to communicate anything more complicated to another member of their species than ‘Watch out there’s a predator!’ or, ‘Wanna mate?” Shiffman’s logic is that if animals like whales have so little to say to each other, they probably have even less to say to humanity. And what they do say to us, he argues, is that we are getting too close to their offspring and need to get back ASAP.
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