<
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/02/talking-whales-project-ceti/677549/>
"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 difficult to decode. Project CETI’s scientists will need to
observe the whales for years and achieve fundamental breakthroughs in AI. But
if they’re successful, humans could be able to initiate a conversation with
whales.
This would be a first-contact scenario involving two species that have lived
side by side for ages. I wanted to imagine how it could unfold. I reached out
to marine biologists, field scientists who specialize in whales,
paleontologists, professors of animal-rights law, linguists, and philosophers.
Assume that Project CETI works, I told them. Assume that we are able to
communicate something of substance to the sperm whale civilization. What should
we say?"
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/good-news-human-rights-greece-education-burundi-reforestation-america/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
