Unlocking the Language of Whales with AI | David Gruber

If aliens landed on Earth tomorrow, how would we talk with them? Well, we already have a kind of creature on this planet we could attempt to talk to first, and in the last few years a team of renowned scientists have been exploring the ocean studying sperm whales to get that conversation going. David Gruber is a professor of biology and environmental science at CUNY and the founder of Project CETI (https://www.projectceti.org/) , an interdisciplinary scientific initiative that is using the latest developments in AI to understand, and possibly communicate with, sperm whales. The day when we break the cross-species communication barrier may be here sooner than you think. Just this year CETI managed to decode what could be called a sperm whale “alphabet”. More Big Brains podcast links and episodes: https://wavve.link/bigbrains/episodes 00:00 The Alien Communication Conundrum 00:51 Introducing Project CETI 03:53 The Quest to Understand Whale Communication 14:52 The Intricacies of Sperm Whale Codas 19:02 Innovative Research Methods 19:23 Ethical Considerations in Marine Biology 23:34 The Future of Interspecies Communication 24:08 Final Thoughts and Reflections