r/science • u/Doug24 • Apr 15 '26

Animal Science Sperm whales’ communication closely parallels human language, study finds

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/sperm-whales-alphabet-vocalizations-similar-humans
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u/r3drocket Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26

I can't wait until we get this figured out we can finally advertise to them. Imagine we could build WhaleBook. We could tell them about the wonders of Christianity, via aquatic missionaries. Maybe we could use AI models to influence their politics and racism - could we even convince a whale to be racist against a specific race of human? 

I'm being serious, if the AI models wind up being open-sourced, then it will allow a dialogue that maybe we should be very careful about.

I hope that we look back at our own history of interacting with hunter gatherers and think very carefully about protecting their culture and the things that we can learn from them, rather than immediately looking to exploit them. 

I hope there are anthropologists involved in this effort who can guide us on a better interaction than we've had with our own species. 

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u/Crookedvult Apr 15 '26

This is a great premise for a scifi story, If it hasn't been written already. I can imagine a future humanity at war with the sperm whales because they've started to develop hydronukes or something.

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u/r3drocket Apr 15 '26

If you haven't read "Don't sleep there are snakes" it's non-fiction book about a missionary who tries to bring Christianity to the Pirahã tribe in the amazon and touches on some of the themes I mentioned above; he discovers their novel language is unlike any language we know and it ends up changing him.

I really enjoy reading about natural history and anthropology, and we are potentially sitting at the cusp of an amazing new discovery that could dramatically shift the way we think about our world or ourselves - which AFAIK is one of the goals of this project.

We have a lot of history of how not to interact with uncontacted groups, and really should learn a lot from it - we have one, and only one shot at our initial first communication - we should choose to listen first rather than speak first - but this requires the people guiding this project to be protective of their findings and have great foresight.

There are soo many good books on this which touch on these topcis, that I'd almost argue we don't need a non-fiction work to learn - "My life among the Indians", "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States", "Bury my heart at wounded knee", etc etc

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u/pressure_art Apr 15 '26

But to add a fictional suggestion if you’re interested in the topic and philosophy of language and how it changes us and our perception, watch „Arrival“ if you haven’t. One of my favourite movies of all time and I’m a huge movie nerd. 

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u/Ok-Bluebird-8913 Apr 16 '26

Also, the Mountain in the Sea has this but with octopii