Echoes Between Worlds: What Whales Might Teach Us About Alien Languages
If you’re here because you love whales, you’re in a good place. If you’re here because you believe in aliens…you’re also in a good place. At work they think I’m a tin-foil-hatter, but really, I think they’re pretty arrogant to think that we’re the only intelligent life in the entire universe.
In the depths of the sea, where sunlight softens into shadow and currents weave slow lullabies, there are voices not made for our ears that sing. They roll beneath the waves like thunderclouds turned inside out, singing stories in tones too wide for our instruments to pick up and too deep for our breath.
These voices belong to whales, those mysterious, ancient beings whose songs ripple across oceans like lost prayers. Their songs have long had a draw on us enough to inspire playlists and beats to listen to at night to sooth our aching souls after working a double and lull us to sleep.
What if these songs are more than songs though? Someone out there believes that hidden within the patterned echoes of humpbacks and the low moans of blue whales, lies not just communication, but a code or a syntax. Something that might help us, one day, understand life far beyond this world.
The Ocean as an Interstellar Training Ground
In labs and listening stations across the globe, scientists are now studying whale communication for what it tells us about marine life yes, but also, for what it might teach us about alien life.
The truth of the matter is, if we can’t decode the voices of whales (creatures with whom we share the same planet, the same biology, and the same oceans) how could we ever hope to decipher the language of extraterrestrial intelligence?
Enter Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a groundbreaking interdisciplinary effort to understand the language of sperm whales using machine learning, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and deep-sea acoustics. Dr. David Gruber (CUNY) is the mastermind behind this and works in collaboration with MIT researchers, Harvard, the University of California, marine biologists, linguists, AI researchers, and roboticists.
By analyzing tens of thousands of whale codas (brief sequences of clicks) researchers hope to identify patterns, meanings, even "words." These codas, exchanged like sonar Morse code, aren’t just chatter. They bear a striking resemblance to something we consider sacred: language.
Codas are not random noise either, each sperm whale clan uses its own distinctive set, passed down culturally rather than genetically. Some codas function like names, identifying who is speaking, while others appear to signal group belonging, coordination, or social bonding. A few change subtly depending on situation, suggesting that meaning could even shift with context. Exchanged through sound codas carry information across truly massive distances in the dark (about 2.5 miles for these softer sounds, but up to 31 miles for their louder songs). We think of them like identity beacons in an ocean where sight fails and sound is everything. While scientists are careful not to anthropomorphize, the evidence suggests these signals do more than locate or hunt, they connect.
Language, as we understand it, is linear and deeply symbolic. However, whale communication is spatial, immersive, and often multi-layered. Their clicks bounce through the water in three-dimensional ways, carrying not only sound but also shape, distance, and texture in a way that shouting up the stairs to your husband that dinner is ready doesn’t.
It’s not just what they say either, it’s how it echoes. This raises profound questions about perception that my philosophy-loving brain just grasps onto like a lifeline. How do whales even experience time? Do their songs remember things? Do they mourn, warn, joke, or dream? Some marine biologists believe they do, while others are more cautious, arguing that trying to humanize whale behavior could distort the data.
Still, the parallels are hard to ignore.
Human infants learn language by mimicking and repeating…so do whale calves. Different whale pods have different dialects and cultural transmission happens through song. If that’s not a form of culture (if that’s not a kind of civilization) we might just need to redefine what those words even mean at this point.
Whales as Blueprints for Alien Intelligence
Here’s where things get weird, so stick with me. Whales offer something unique to the field of astrobiology: a non-human intelligence with a rich, complex communication system developed in a completely different environment.
Unlike apes or dogs, whales didn’t co-evolve with us. Their intelligence grew underwater, guided by sonar and silence, shaped by migration routes older than pyramids. In trying to finally understand whale song, we’re learning to listen to the unfamiliar and to think outside the narrow confines of our built in logic. It’s a kind of humility training if you will, and humility might be the most essential trait for first contact.
Because if aliens do arrive (or if we find evidence of them) we’ll need more than telescopes, we’ll need empathy and tools for interpreting messages built by entirely foreign minds.
Long before AI algorithms parsed spectrograms, sailors spoke of sea monsters. Cultures from the Haida to the Maori believed whales were divine messengers and symbols of protection, strength, and intuition. After that cruise to Alaska my family took well over a decade ago, I still feel small when I think about those giant beautiful and majestic beasts that followed the ship for days.
Even Moby Dick, in Melville’s fever dream of a novel, wasn’t just a whale. He was the unknowable.
That’s still true to this day, too. Whale song is the soundtrack of the sublime: something vast and humblingly ancient, and gently beyond our grasp.
At its heart, the study of whale song isn’t about translation at all, it’s about connection. What makes a message meaningful, is language only valid if we understand it, or is the act of sending it, of trying to be heard, enough?
Whales call out to each other across thousands of miles, not knowing who’s listening. I think that’s what we do too, when we beam messages into space. We’re singing into the void, hoping someone hears the echo and sings back.
Internal Links to Explore
The Day the Ocean Whispered Less: When Blue Whales Began to Go Silent
The Microbiome of Wine: How Yeasts and Bacteria Shape Every Sip
The Hebridean Hum: Scotland’s Haunting Sound That No One Can Locate
Immerse yourself in the underwater world with the Underwater Headphones for Swimmers, perfect for listening to whale songs (or your favorite podcasts) during laps. Waterproof, sleek, and designed for the curious.
In the end, decoding whale song might not unlock the secrets of alien tongues, but it will teach us how to listen a bit better, and how to pay attention to frequencies outside our own. At the end of the day, I think that’s what intelligence really is.
Not the power to speak, but the courage to hear what isn’t meant for us, and respond with wonder.
