Perhaps soon
artificial intelligence will be able to decipher whale language and other forms of communication, but what nature informs humans won't be a surprise.
According to
Charles Darwin, humans learned to speak by imitating the singing of
birds: perhaps the first words of human ancestors were a kind of information exchange between species. It may not be long before humans join the conversation again.
The race for supremacy in translating animal words is heating up, with not only riches at stake, but a place in history. The Jeremy Collier Foundation has pledged $10 million dollars to whoever can crack the code. Generative AI is in this race: large language models can analyze millions of recorded animal vocalizations to find their hidden grammar.
Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like humans, they learn through vocal imitation and communicate through complex sound combinations that appear to have structure and hierarchy.
Talking underwater
Sperm whales communicate in codes - rapid sequences of clicks, each lasting no more than 1,000 seconds. Project Ceti (IPRC - Cetacean Speech Translation Initiative) uses artificial intelligence to analyze the code to unlock the secrets of
sperm whale speech.
There is evidence that the animals take turns speaking, use specific clicks to address each other, and even have separate dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation and hopes to be able to speak "whale language" as early as 2026.
The linguistic barrier between species already seems permeable. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an artificial intelligence program for translating
dolphins, trained on 40 years of data.
In 2013, scientists using an artificial intelligence algorithm to sort dolphin communication discovered a new click in the animals' communication with each other, which they recognized as a sound they had previously learned to associate with the seaweed
sargassum - the first recorded case of a word from one species moving into the vocabulary of another.
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Photo: alev.biz
The prospect of talking to a dolphin or whale is irresistible. And they seem to be just as enthusiastic. Last November, scientists
in Alaska recorded an acoustic "conversation" with a humpback whale named Twain, during which they exchanged calls and responses known as "whup/throp" with the animal for 20 minutes. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus learned to imitate the vowel sounds A, E, O and U.
Human influence on animal communication
But in this excitement, people should not ignore the fact that other species already bear eloquent testimony to the human impact on the natural world. A living planet is loud. Healthy coral reefs buzz and crackle with life. But soundscapes can degrade just as ecosystems can. Degraded reefs are quiet deserts.
Since the 1960s, shipping and mining have increased background noise in the oceans by about three decibels per decade. The song of the humpback whale occupies the same low-frequency range as deep-sea dredging and drilling for rare earth metals needed for electronic devices. Ironically, mining for the minerals we humans need to communicate drowns out the voices of whales.
Humpback whale songs are incredible vocal performances that sometimes last up to 24 hours. "Song" is the right word: they seem to include rhyming phrases, and their compositions travel the oceans with them, evolving along the way in what are known as "song revolutions," when a new cycle replaces an old one. They are crucial to the migration and breeding seasons.
But in today's louder soundscape, whale song is being pushed out of its usual range and even silencing them - up to 1.2 kilometers away from commercial ships, humpback whales stop singing to avoid competing with the noise.
Sound is only partially helpful in interspecies communication. Animals communicate using a range of visual, chemical, thermal, and mechanical cues, inhabiting a world of perception very different from that of humans. Can humans understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for which sound waves can be translated visually?
The German ecologist Jacob von Ixkull called these impenetrable worlds umwelten (umwelt). To truly translate an animal's language, it will be necessary to know its umwelten, and then answer the question, what is imprinted from us on it, and what is imprinted from it on us?
Umwelt is the particular way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world.
"If a lion could speak," writes Steven Budiansky, revisiting Wittgenstein's famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations. "We could probably understand him. It's just that he would no longer be a lion." Researchers must then address the question of how talking to other beings can change people.
The arrival of the aliens
Talking to another species can be very similar to talking to alien life. It's no coincidence that Ceti echoes the Nasa Seti Institute's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In fact, the
Seti team recorded the whup/throp exchange on the grounds that being able to talk to whales could help if humans ever meet intelligent aliens.
In Denis Villeneuve's film The Arrival, aliens that resemble Earth-like cephalopods with seven tentacles communicate using a script in which the distinction between past, present, and future time disappears. For Louise, a linguist translating the script, learning the heptapod takes her consciousness out of linear time and into a reality in which her own past and future are equally accessible.
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Photo: nplus1.ru
To explain this, the movie mentions Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Wharf's theory of linguistic determinism, the idea that human perception of reality is encoded in language. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was rejected in the mid-20th century, but linguists have since argued that there is some truth to it.
In the village of Pormpuraau in Queensland, there are indigenous Australians from the Taaiorre tribe who claim that time moves from east to west rather than forward or backward, making time inseparable from the connection between body and earth.
Whale songs are born out of a sense of time that is radically different from the time in which humans exist. Humpback whales can project their voices over many kilometers of open water; their songs span the widest oceans.
A talking whale would expand humans' sense of space and time into a planetary song. And people would have a very different attitude to the pollution of the ocean's soundscape.