AI Could Help Translate Alien Languages - The Atlantic

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — I'm so glad you're here. I'm Marina, a marine biologist and science communicator, and this podcast is my love letter to the most extraordinary minds in the ocean: whales and dolphins. Marina: Before we dive in, a huge thank you to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually work; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts guiding projects all the way from A I to full system-on-chip design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. We couldn't do this without them. Marina: And today? Oh, today is a good one. We're talking about sperm whales and their alphabet — yes, alphabet — we're exploring what A I might teach us not just about whale language but potentially about communicating with life beyond Earth, and we're visiting the Hawaiian spinner dolphins, a beloved population facing a quieter, more worrying kind of crisis. Let's go. Marina: So let's start with voices. Because if you've ever heard a sperm whale click, you might have thought — okay, that's interesting, kind of rhythmic, maybe even a little eerie. But here's the thing. Those clicks are not random. They're not just sonar pings bouncing off squid in the dark. Scientists are now saying they look a lot more like a structured communication system than anyone previously understood. Marina: Sperm whales produce what are called codas — these short, patterned sequences of clicks. Think of it like morse code, but richer, more layered. For decades, researchers have catalogued hundreds of distinct coda types across different sperm whale clans around the world. Different clans in the Caribbean use different codas than clans in the Pacific. That alone is remarkable — it suggests these aren't just instinctive sounds. They're learned. They're cultural. Marina: But the new findings go even further. Researchers analyzing sperm whale codas have found that the clicks aren't just varied in pattern — they vary in tempo, rhythm, ornamentation, even something that functions a bit like a rubato, that musical term for when a performer stretches or compresses time for expressive effect. These variations appear to be meaningful. They seem to change the signal in consistent ways that could indicate something like context or intent. Marina: And this is where scientists started using a word that made me do a double take the first time I read it: combinatorial. The idea that sperm whales might combine a set of basic elements — something like phonemes — into a vast range of distinct signals, the way we combine letters into words. In other words, an alphabet. Not metaphorically. Structurally. The research suggests the sperm whale communication system may have a combinatorial structure analogous to what underlies human language. Marina: Now, I want to be careful here — scientists are not saying sperm whales are having conversations about philosophy. What they're saying is that the architecture of the system, the way elements combine and vary, looks more sophisticated than we thought, and more language-like than almost any non-human communication system we've studied. That is genuinely extraordinary. And it opens the door to a different kind of question: if we learn to read this alphabet, what might the messages actually say? Marina: Which leads us perfectly into our second thread — because a group of remarkable scientists and technologists are trying to answer exactly that question, using some of the most powerful tools we have. Marina: Project CETI — that stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative — is one of the most ambitious scientific projects happening anywhere on Earth right now. The team includes marine biologists, linguists, cryptographers, and A I researchers, all united around one goal: to record enough sperm whale communication to actually decode it. We're talking about collecting billions of clicks, in context, with video, with behavioral data, with social information — who is speaking, who is listening, what is happening in that moment. Marina: The A I systems being used here are the same class of tools that have transformed natural language processing for humans. They learn patterns. They find structure. They identify which elements repeat, which combinations are rare, which sequences seem to predict what comes next. Applied to whale codas at scale, researchers hope these tools can surface meaning that human ears and eyes simply cannot detect in raw data. Marina: What's genuinely new is the scale of ambition. Previous cetacean communication research was painstaking and small — researchers might spend years analyzing a few hundred recordings. Project CETI aims to gather millions. And the A I doesn't need to know what the whales are saying in advance. It looks for structure, and structure is where meaning lives. Marina: Here's what struck me recently, though — an idea that came up in a piece in The Atlantic. Scientists working on decoding animal communication have started thinking about what these tools might mean for a completely different problem: contact with non-human intelligence beyond Earth. If we ever encounter a signal from another civilization, we will face exactly the same problem we face with whale codas. We won't share a language. We won't share a culture. We won't even know for certain that it is communication. The framework being developed right now, by people listening to sperm whales in the Caribbean, might be the framework that guides humanity's first conversation across the stars. I find that almost impossibly beautiful. Marina: And the BBC Science Focus reporting on this broader animal communication effort makes the same point — scientists studying bats, prairie dogs, elephants, and cetaceans are all converging on similar methods, and the results are humbling. The more carefully we listen, the more we find. The gap between human language and animal communication is narrowing — not because the animals have changed, but because our tools and our willingness to take the question seriously have finally caught up. Marina: Now, I want to turn to something closer to home — and a little harder to sit with. Marina: Off the coast of Hawaiʻi Island, there is a population of spinner dolphins that many people know and love. If you've ever been lucky enough to snorkel in a bay on the Big Island in the early morning, you may have seen them — these gorgeous, acrobatic animals, spinning as they leap, resting in the shallows after a long night of deep-water feeding. They are one of the signature wildlife experiences in all of Hawaiʻi. Marina: But researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi have been watching this population carefully for years, and the numbers are telling a worrying story. The Hawaiʻi Island spinner dolphins are producing fewer calves. The birth rate has declined. And the scientists believe they understand at least part of why — and it connects directly to those beloved morning snorkel encounters. Marina: Spinner dolphins are nocturnal hunters. They spend the night diving deep, pursuing fish and squid, and they return to shallow, sheltered bays during the day to rest. And rest, for a dolphin, is not optional. It's critical. Their ability to hunt, to navigate, to care for young — all of it depends on getting adequate rest in those daylight hours. Marina: Here's the problem. Those same beautiful bays where the dolphins rest are exactly where tourists want to be. And for years, people have been swimming out to be near the dolphins — sometimes guided by well-meaning tour operators, sometimes independently — and the dolphins, being the socially tolerant animals they are, don't always flee. But they are disturbed. Their rest is interrupted, repeatedly, across hours. And physiologically, that has consequences. Marina: NOAA — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — established rules in 2021 creating a buffer zone around resting spinner dolphins in Hawaiʻi. Swimming with or approaching resting spinner dolphins within a certain distance became prohibited. It was a significant and somewhat controversial step. Tour operators pushed back. Some visitors were frustrated. But the science was clear: the disturbance was real, the rest deprivation was real, and the reproductive consequences — fewer calves born, fewer surviving — were documented. Marina: What I find moving about this story is that it's not about villains. The people swimming out to the dolphins weren't trying to hurt them. They were doing what humans almost always do around these animals — they were drawn in by wonder and love. But love without knowledge can cause harm. And the researchers and the agencies that took action weren't rejecting that love — they were trying to give it shape. To say: here is how you love a dolphin well. You give it space. You let it rest. You come back to shore. Marina: The declining calf numbers are a warning. But they're also an invitation — to be the kind of people who care enough to change our behavior when the science asks us to. The Hawaiian spinner dolphins have been swimming those bays for thousands of years. With the right protections, they can swim them for thousands more. Marina: We are living through a remarkable moment. The songs are still echoing in the deep. The clicks are still cascading through dark water. And for the first time, we have the ears — and the minds — to begin to understand them. Whether it's the combinatorial complexity of sperm whale codas, the A I systems quietly finding structure in millions of recordings, or the quieter story of a dolphin population asking us simply to be better neighbors — it all points to the same truth. These are not simple animals. These are not simple sounds. These are minds, ancient and brilliant, sharing a world with us. Marina: Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Thank you for listening — and thank you to our sponsors for making this show possible. Marina: If today's episode made you see the ocean a little differently, please subscribe wherever you listen, leave us a review, and share it with someone who loves the sea. The show notes have links to the research and reporting we talked about today — find them at the link in show notes. Marina: Stay curious. Keep listening. The ocean has so much left to say.