What would it mean if we were able to ‘speak’ with whales?

Until the 1950s, when ‘whale songs’ were first captured by US underwater surveillance systems during the Cold War, whales were widely thought to be mute. This discovery changed how humans view these creatures and influenced how we treated them, helping to drive campaigns for whaling bans and long-term conservation efforts. In this conversation, hosted by the cosmologist Janna Levin at Pioneer Works in New York City, the biologist David Gruber and the comparative anatomist Joy S Reidenberg discuss how our understanding of whale communication has developed over the decades. This includes Gruber’s work as the founder and president of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), which is using emerging technologies to decode sperm whale communication, and may one day make an interspecies dialogue possible.