Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Voices from the Deep with Dr. Michelle Fournet and Dr. Ellen Garland About this episode Can whales help us understand aliens? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice take a journey to understand the language of whales with marine biologist, Dr. Ellen Garland, and marine ecologist, Dr. Michelle Fournet.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. This is gonna be a Cosmic Queries edition. And of course, that means I have Chuck. Hey! Chuck helping me out here. Hey Neil! How you doing? Yeah, I'm excited for this one. Yeah, this one, this is like... This is very cool. This is gonna be a happening Cosmic Queries. You know why? Because... Uh, normally, when the expertise falls outside of anything I know, we, of course, bring in an expert. But this time, we've got two experts. Yes. Two experts. And why? Because they're both the subject of a recent documentary called Fathom. Fathom. And it's a groundbreaking story to learn how to talk to whales.
0:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow! How to talk to whales. And I've got with me Ellen Garland and Michelle Fournet. Did I pronounce that right? Welcome!
1:07 Speaker 01 Thank you so much!
1:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thank you! Both you guys. And so you're each PhD marine ecologist... Oh, Michelle, you're a marine ecologist. And Ellen, you're a marine biologist. Do I get that right? Yeah.
1:20 Speaker 01 Yes!
1:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, okay. And so, so I didn't know you can get separately a PhD as a marine ecologist? From... Because we've all heard of marine biology, right? But marine ecology, is that a new field? That we...
1:32 Speaker 01 I mean, if I was gonna be really specific, my PhD is actually in wildlife science. Which means that I focus specifically on studying animals in the wild, in their natural habitat. Um, instead of in houses or zoos or homes.
1:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, I got it. Okay, but, but, but, okay, how about humans? Uh, when I'm in the city, that's my habitat. And you can study humans like just as they gather into cities.
1:55 Speaker 02 Oh, absolutely.
1:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the wild.
1:57 Chuck Nice? Which, by the way, is nothing more than an open range cage. Let's be real. Let's, let's just call it what it is.
2:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's true, that's true. We put ourselves.
2:09 Chuck Nice? We put ourselves.
2:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cajuns. So, so Michelle, you're a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell. That's right up state New York in Ithaca. And you specialize in animal communication and marine bioacoustics. I like that. I love new words. There was clear what you're saying. You don't have to say, oh, what does that mean? Bioacoustics, figure it out. We got that.
2:30 Chuck Nice? It's, uh, it's a really like laid back whale with a guitar at a cocktail party. It's bio, uh, bioacoustics.
2:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, acoustic, yeah, MTV unplugged. It's an acoustic thing. Um, and Ellen, you are a marine biologist, research fellow at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. But you're not Scottish.
2:55 Speaker 04 No, no, I'm not Scottish. Um, I'm originally from New Zealand, so I'm a, I'm a Kiwi, but I've had to, I've moved all over the world, so I don't have as strong a Kiwi accent, though I feel it may come out today a little bit. A few certain words will come out.
3:11 Chuck Nice? We, we can still hear a little bit. You have like a residual Kiwi accent, you know?
3:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, we love New Zealand. Nobody doesn't love New Zealand.
3:18 Chuck Nice? Everybody loves, what is it about New Zealand that?
3:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's because they filmed Lord of the Rings there.
3:23 Chuck Nice? That could be, that could be it. Yeah.
3:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, no, I'm sure.
3:27 Speaker 04 It's a beautiful country. It's, it's really, it's lovely and green and there's a lot of, you know, ocean there. So I, yeah, definitely grew up around that.
3:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So this, this new documentary we're talking about, which I'm told is being entered into film festivals, but also will come out on Apple TV Plus, I think they call, call that channel now. Um, the director of the film, Drew Zanthopoulos, I think I pronounced his name right. Uh, he describes this film as Arrival, but with whales. Remember the arrival?
4:00 Chuck Nice? Arrival, yes.
4:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Visitation, except that one had like, like. You know, septapods in it, or like, like seven limbed octopuses. And this one has whales. Okay.
4:12 Chuck Nice? But we would be the arrival for whales. We would be the arrival. Very good. Whales wouldn't be the arrival, we'd be the ones who landed and, and wants to talk.
4:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And we wanna land and talk, okay, so let's, let's get to the bottom of this. Let me ask you guys, and I don't know who to direct it to, so you all just, you know, fight each other and then, you know, whoever's still speaking.
4:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What, each of your specialties is the communication methods and tactics of these creatures who bear the largest brain of any living creature there ever was on Earth. So, uh, we hear the sounds they make, but why are you so convinced that we can crack that code?
4:55 Speaker 01 Oh, well, for my part, I'm not, but, um, any good, any good question?
5:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, okay, well then.
5:03 Chuck Nice? Thanks for tuning in, people. This has been StarTalk with Michelle Fournet and Ellen Garland. Certainly appreciate it.
5:11 Speaker 01 Well, but it's worth a good try, right? Any good question is worth, is worth trying to answer. And when you're dealing with something bigger than yourself and other than yourself, then you, you put in the, the very best of what our slightly smaller human brain has to offer. And so for the work that I do, the best that I could do wasn't to say I'm gonna tackle all humpback whale communication at once. I started with a very tiny piece of the puzzle. And I said, what does this one sound mean? And so if you start small, the hope is eventually you can get big. Before you shoot for the stars, you have to make it to the moon.
5:44 Chuck Nice? Interesting, right.
5:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, and so, so you got a little, a little piece of the sound, and then what did you find?
5:51 Speaker 01 Uh, well, this is the kind of cool thing. I found that, I mean, it, it seems simple, but I found that whales talk to each other. And that if you do a good.
5:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But did we need you to figure that out?
6:01 Chuck Nice? I mean.
6:02 Speaker 01 Well.
6:02 Chuck Nice? Yes, absolutely. I learned that from Ellen in Finding.
6:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I speak whale.
6:12 Speaker 02 I speak whale.
6:17 Speaker 01 The answer is, the answer to that is decisively yes. Uh, this is one of the first times in human history that we have actively gone out and designed an experiment to try and figure out exactly what a whale does when you, when it talks to itself. So when one whale talks to another whale, how do they respond? Why is that important? Why is this whale producing a sound? And to do that, we had to go out and drop a speaker in the water and produce a sound that a whale would make to see, is this an exchange? Or is this a whale trying to find fish? Or is this a whale that's trying to navigate? Or is this whale that's trying to keep itself company? I mean, you have to remember that in, I do my work in Alaska. So southeast Alaska, it's in the summertime, lots of primary productivity, which means the water is completely cloudy, no light.
7:01 Speaker 01 Um, a whale that is 10 meters away from another whale is invisible unless it makes a sound.
7:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, what, what kind of activity is there?
7:09 Speaker 01 Primary productivity, so.
7:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Pri- pri- pri- wait, say that.
7:13 Speaker 01 Primary production. Primary production, so phytoplankton.
7:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Activity?
7:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, so.
7:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, oh, oh, oh, okay. So the base of the food.
7:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
7:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so it's, it's great feeding ground. It's.
7:25 Speaker 01 Really good feeding ground.
7:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so the water is dense with, with food?
7:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's got, we've got krill and copepods and, and lots of little swarming tiny food, which is why the whales come there. But it also means our water's really cloudy and that a whale can't see another whale. So we might laugh and say, oh, why would a whale talk to another whale? And that's because if you want to know if someone's around, you have to be sound producing. Otherwise the whale is functionally invisible.
7:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dating in the dark. Is that what that is? Well, look at that. Wait, so Ellen, you're based up in Scotland. Are there any whales up in the north?
8:02 Speaker 04 Of course, there is a, there are humpbacks up here, but I do my work actually in the South Pacific, being from that region. So I investigate.
8:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So whales get around.
8:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's lots of different populations.
8:16 Chuck Nice? How, how far around? Because now I, now I think it was humpbacks that we were watching. I was in Hawaii and we went watching. It's during their breeding time where they go. I was off of Lanai in Maui and they say the waters are warm and so they, that's where they go to birth. So where, where is the scope of their travel around the world?
8:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because I saw one on the East River a few days ago.
8:43 Speaker 04 So.
8:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So.
8:45 Speaker 04 So they do travel thousands and thousands of kilometers because I work in kilometers. So they'll spend the summer months feeding, which is where Michelle works in the polar regions. And then over winter, they go to the tropical and subtropical breeding grounds. So.
9:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Winters and summers are switched from each other.
9:07 Speaker 04 Exactly. So we have.
9:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so do they cross the equator?
9:11 Speaker 04 They do just around Colombia, that Costa Rica, Nicaragua, that area on the western side of the South America and Central America.
9:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But if they have habits that are seasonally driven, then they can't go too far across the equator. Otherwise they'll get completely.
9:29 Speaker 04 Exactly. And they go back to the same breeding location and feeding ground usually every year. They have this really strong sight fidelity. So they'll go basically, you guys can see, up and down. So they'll go north and south.
9:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How do they do this without GPS?
9:45 Speaker 04 Oh, that is a really fantastic question. We're not entirely sure exactly how they navigate. It may have something to do with. Magnetism and how that style, but we're not entirely sure exactly.
10:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, all right.
10:02 Speaker 01 So, I mean, this might be of interest to you, but in addition to magnetism is one theory, there's also a theory that whales can actually detect differences in the gravitational tug of the earth. And so they use different gravitational forces to know when and where to migrate. Or alternatively, as an acquisition, this matters to Ellen and I, that they can actually listen to learn their way around, that they hear what a soundscape sounds like, and they know, oh, I'm in the right place or I'm in the wrong place. Kind of like you would know the difference between if you were in a basketball court or if you were in a closet.
10:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, right. So I vote against that they're feeling earth gravitational field. I'm voting against that.
10:40 Chuck Nice? All right.
10:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As like a physicist.
10:43 Chuck Nice? As an astrophysicist.
10:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As an astrophysicist. Because the whale is basically neutrally buoyant, right? And so people say, how much does a whale weigh? It weighs zero until you pull it out on land. Where now what does it weigh in air? But in water, it's basically zero. And if you weigh zero, then variations in gravity around you are kind of irrelevant because you're just floating there. So that's, that's my first take at that, but I could be wrong. Let me, before we go to break and then get to our questions from our fanbase, let me just ask you, the, is there any way Dr. Dolittle could be a documentary?
11:20 Chuck Nice? Hmm.
11:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Look, what I mean is, okay, let me be more precise. All animals, all animals we care about communicate with each other. So it's just a matter of us learning how to communicate in that same way. Can you imagine a day where we just communicate with all the animals the way Time Lords do in Doctor Who, for example? Or the way Mary Poppins does when she talked to the dog and the parrot?
11:42 Speaker 01 All right, I'm going to counter that with a slightly more complicated question. Um, should we?
11:47 Chuck Nice? Right, exactly. That's what I was going to say. First of all, there's a lot of animals. I really don't want to talk. I mean, if I'm at a cocktail party, I don't want to talk to a llama. That's all I'm saying, alright? I may want to talk to the orangutan. That orangutan looks like he might have something on his mind. You know what I mean? I certainly want to talk to a humpback whale. You know what I mean? But not a chimpanzee. They're assholes, they're rude, they throw their poop. I don't want to talk to you. Oh, no.
12:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you mentioned orangutans in Planet of the Apes. The orangutans were the diplomats.
12:27 Chuck Nice? Oh, yeah, that's right.
12:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, the gorillas were the police.
12:31 Chuck Nice? That's right.
12:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the chimpanzees were the academic research scientists.
12:35 Chuck Nice? That's right.
12:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I just want to throw that out there. Anyway, so let's end this segment. We're going to come back and go straight to questions. This is like marvelous expertise to have on StarTalk. Because this is like, we've all thought about this. And you guys get to declare it your profession. And we're all jealous. So we'll be right back on StarTalk Cosmic Queries.
13:06 Speaker 05 I'm Joel Cherico, and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
13:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries edition. And this is a good one because we're talking about how to talk to whales. And neither Chuck nor I have any clue how to do that. So we bring in PhD experts on this topic. Michelle Fournet and Ellen Garland. Each of them specialize in animal communication. And they were each featured, both featured, in the documentary Fathom. Fathom, which you can find on Apple TV+. It was also entered into film festivals, which are always fun to attend. A quick test. Chuck, how long is a fathom?
14:14 Chuck Nice? Pretty long, Neil.
14:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, thank you, Chuck.
14:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, Ellen, you said you're metric and fathom is anything but metric. How long is a fathom?
14:23 Speaker 04 Oh, oh, I'm in trouble. I'm in trouble. I don't know.
14:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Michelle, how long do the fathom?
14:29 Speaker 01 Six feet.
14:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Six feet, I think she's about right. I think you're right there. That's right.
14:33 Chuck Nice? Okay.
14:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's right.
14:35 Speaker 01 Dodge the bullet there.
14:36 Speaker 04 Yeah, I've shown my ignorance. There you go. Under the bust already.
14:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So can you fathom this? That six feet is not that much, you know? When you think about it. All right, let's go to Q and A from our supporting Patreon members. They support our, what we do. And there's some perks in return.
14:57 Chuck Nice? Yeah, they give us money.
14:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Can I?
15:00 Chuck Nice? Neil doesn't like to say that. He likes to use words. He likes to use euphemistic words like support. Support and, you know? I'm like, yeah, give us money. You give us money and we'll give you. Uh, but anyway, um, all seriousness, uh, the people from Patreon give us the opportunity to do some things that we otherwise would not do, so.
15:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, we experiment and we do things that are just fun and we'll let you know when that, Ellen, when that happens. Chuck, give us one.
15:27 Chuck Nice? Let's go to, uh, Tomas Paz. And Tomas says, hello. It seems to me that verbal communication underwater or any other liquid would be difficult. Do you think that intelligent life that lives beneath the surface could communicate using something else than sound? Ah. Mmm, that's a really kind of cool concept. It's, you know, whales is definitely sound, you know?
15:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Ellen, what do you think about that?
16:00 Speaker 04 That's a, it's a really good question. Um, I mean, underwater, you really want to go for sound. I mean, visual communication, as Michelle was saying earlier, that you're not going to see that far underwater. So it's, it is really all about sound.
16:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And they can't send smoke signals, right?
16:19 Speaker 04 No.
16:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There are a lot of other ways we take for granted that you can't do underwater.
16:22 Speaker 04 Exactly. It's a really different environment and I think, um, also, you know, chemoreception,
16:30 Speaker 04 That's not gonna go as far, so it's really all about sound underwater. I'd be really surprised if there was a different communication system going on.
16:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Michelle, do the different frequencies of sound travel different distances? Because just because you're underwater, it doesn't mean sound doesn't work. It's another medium through which the sound is moving. It's just a pressure wave through the molecules. So, that's the physics of it. So, um, do the whales, have they found a special frequency where they can talk a gazillion miles around the world?
16:57 Speaker 01 Yes, actually, well, a gazillion miles perhaps not, but yes, is the answer to that. Um, so low frequencies-
17:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A gazillion is just, just longer than six feet.
17:07 Speaker 01 So like a fathom and a half.
17:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A fathom and a half.
17:10 Speaker 01 Um, so, low frequency sound is what we think of as low pitch. And it means that there's a longer wavelength. So wavelengths actually have distance, you know, distance and velocity. And so, your voice, Neil, is lower than mine, so you'll have a lower frequency voice. Which means theoretically underwater, your voice would travel further than mine would. And that has to do with the physics of the situation, with loss of energy. High frequency sounds have very short wavelengths and they're used for short distance communication.
17:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And by the way, that's true in the air too.
17:39 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
17:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I mean, uh, that's why lightning sounds very snap, crackle and poppy when it's right near you. But if it's on the horizon, you only hear the slow rumble. It lost all the high frequencies.
17:49 Speaker 01 Exactly.
17:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah.
17:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, so with whales, depending on, you know, with cetaceans in general, depending on what the sound is used for, it might be lower frequency for long distance communication. Or it might be very high frequency to be used for things like echolocation or for short distance communication. And then because of the physics of sound underwater, because of pressure in the ocean and temperature, there's actually something called the so far channel, the sound fixing and ranging channel, um, which is an area of sound speed minimum. And sound can get trapped in this underwater channel and travel for thousands of kilometers.
18:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. Oh, because otherwise it'll just escape and then you lose it. So if you keep it contained, it'll just reflect back and forth from these layers. I love it. Yeah. I love it. There's a similar layer in the atmosphere. Um, it's called the ionosphere and uh, AM radio waves, when they hit the ionosphere, they actually reflect back down. So you can, you can detect AM radio, who has an AM radio anymore, uh, beyond the horizon, whereas FM goes straight out and it doesn't uh, reflect. So I'd like these parallels between Earth's atmosphere uh, and the ocean. So you're sticking with, you got, both of y'all sticking with sound on this one.
18:59 Chuck Nice? Sound is it, huh?
19:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. Yeah.
19:01 Chuck Nice? So can I ask a question, speaking of sound? Um, when we speak, we force air past our cords, they vibrate, and it creates the sound. How, how do these cetaceans do it? Do they force water through the way we do, or how are they producing the sound?
19:20 Speaker 04 I'm gonna throw this to Michelle, cause she has a fantastic answer for this.
19:24 Speaker 01 I do. Um, so uh, whales use air just like we do. They have something um, that's analogous to vocal cords, which are called vocal folds, so different folds. And um, they pass air back and forth through different sinus cavities in their brain. So unlike you or I, when we exhale, you know, air comes out of our mouth and then we have to take another inhale. Um, cetaceans will actually take the inhale at the surface, go underwater, and then move that air around, back and forth across these vocal folds in order to produce sound. So, no.
19:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I gotta say Chuck, they would make excellent jazz musicians.
19:59 Chuck Nice? Yes.
20:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just think about that.
20:01 Chuck Nice? Yeah, cause they could hold a note forever.
20:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You could just move it back and forth in the saxophone. Oh my gosh, we need that. In Sebastian's band in, um,
20:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? in The Little Mermaid, was, was there a whale? No, there wasn't a whale in his band.
20:17 Chuck Nice? No.
20:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sebastian's hermit crab band.
20:20 Speaker 01 They were missing out.
20:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're totally missing out, oh my gosh.
20:23 Speaker 01 It should have been Sebastian and the bioacoustics.
20:26 Speaker 04 Exactly.
20:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Had you been around, okay, you might not have been born yet when that movie came out, but uh, so very cool.
20:34 Chuck Nice? Wow, that's amazing.
20:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, give me another question, keep it coming.
20:38 Chuck Nice? All right, here we go. This is Elliot Frost. Uh, do you believe we could utilize the electromagnetic spectrum uh, to attempt to communicate with these marine mammals in a way to sort of replicate what it would be like to try to communicate with a cosmic society that may not know how to use the electromagnetic spectrum in the same way that we do? So. Can we talk to them and they not know that we're talking to them, but somehow we let them know we're talking to them? Which I believe he just described the whole premise of your documentary.
21:15 Speaker 01 Sort of. So I'm gonna take a stab at this, but I'm hoping that those of you who understand the electromagnetic part of that will do a little bit better. I think that what we are trying to do is not to communicate with whales the way that we want to be communicated with. We're trying to understand how they communicate with each other, which means that we need to work on their terms. We are adopting their way of perceiving the world, their way that they're acting. So if I was gonna extract-
21:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? By the way, this is a famous quote from Carl Sagan. He was saying, "Why isn't we judge animals' intelligence by whether they can communicate with us? When maybe we should judge our intelligence by whether we can communicate with them."
21:55 Speaker 01 Exactly. That is exactly what we are working on. So when you think about what might be beyond our Earth's or extraterrestrial intelligence, why is it that we have such an enormous ego that we assume that everyone must speak our language instead of learning to speak theirs? We have intelligent life right here on this planet, and we have not yet interpreted how it is communicating with itself. That is a really lovely analog for perhaps trying to understand something otherworldly.
22:22 Chuck Nice? And there's a lot of those animals. There's a lot of those animals. Elephants, dolphins, you know, whales.
22:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Any animal with a brain bigger than ours is on that list. So the audacity of us to declare that we could speak with another animal elsewhere when we can't speak with the other animals on our own planet. So I'm embarrassed by that fact. Let me just say that right now. Okay.
22:43 Chuck Nice? Wouldn't that be great, though, if they actually, because they do have bigger brains, they all spoke our language? Like, but then when we're around, they're just like, "Everybody shut up."
22:59 Chuck Nice? Yo, here come the dummies, here come the dummies, shut up, shut up, shut up.
23:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just make some sounds.
23:04 Chuck Nice? Right, alright guys, back to our other language, guys.
23:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Get a PhD off of this sound.
23:08 Speaker 04 Oh my goodness.
23:09 Chuck Nice? Back to our other language, guys.
23:12 Speaker 04 Look, we don't even, like, we don't even know what, um, half the communication is, is for. Even though I, I studied the song, which is the male display. We, we don't actually know exactly what it's for. And, and that's where we're at, so there's.
23:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so Ellen, do you get together with, with bird people? Because they try to understand bird songs. How different is this, really?
23:35 Speaker 04 It, it's, it's like a slowed down bird song in some respects. So, if you slow down a bird song, it can sound like a whale. And if you speed up a whale song, it can sometimes sound like a canary. Um, so, yeah, we, we definitely spend a lot of time with, with bird people, with bird song people. And a lot of the classification and that understanding of the structure of song comes from bird song. Because that was far more established before whale song, at least humpback whale song. So, we really draw on.
24:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's harder to chase a whale around than it is a bird, right?
24:09 Speaker 04 Yes, tell me about it. Very much tell me about it, just trying to get these recordings of these males singing their little hearts out.
24:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, just one point relative to the question, and I don't know if this is what he intended, but I don't know where else it could go. If you're gonna use electromagnetic energy, you're using light of some frequency. And that would mean you would be showing the whale and its eyeballs would be seeing some kind of electromagnetic information. So, that would be like writing or something, or some symbol. And by the way, that's, is that any different from the, the septopus, or whatever you guys call it, in the movie Arrival? Um, that was not sound. That, and it, technically, it was sort of the absence of light, because it was making these ink drawings. And the ink is absorbing light, but that then becomes the symbol. So, have you ever thought of communicating with them not by song, but just by giving them something to look at? Ellen, have you thought about that?
25:02 Speaker 04 Um, I try.
25:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or you're just so song biased that that's not even a thought?
25:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm on that side of the communication spectrum. So, I, I just, I, I'm, do passive acoustic, so I record what they're saying. Um, and what they're singing, I don't try and, uh...
25:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can't record what they're writing because they don't.
25:25 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, I think there are aspects there with the, if we think about the song is really has a lot of repetition in it. It's really repetitive and redundant. So you think about whether if you're trying to get a signal out, you'd want that redundancy built in because you may only catch the end of that signal at some point because if the songs are spreading out, you may just hear the last little faint bit of a particular theme or a particular phrase and you'll think, oh, there's, you know, there's a whale, another whale out there.
25:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is the SETI philosophy where you don't want to give a long dissertation because they might, they might not know that you began it yesterday and might end it in three days. So you're sending a repeating signal.
26:09 Speaker 04 Exactly.
26:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it's not that it's redundant, it's that you're just being sensible about when they might come into the, uh, come into the eavesdropping.
26:17 Speaker 04 Yeah.
26:18 Chuck Nice? So that, that with that in mind, how do you determine what is this, whatever phrase or word or whatever you want to call it, how do you determine what sound to try to, uh, decipher? Like, you know, uh, like for instance, there are certain things that we know mean something like, "Help!", right? So even if you've never spoke English, right? If you never spoke any language and you heard somebody go, "Help!", like you would know that is a distress call, right? Just by, if you keep listening over and over, you're like, oh, that person's in trouble. So how do you find out like what the one thing is that you want to identify?
27:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, first, Chuck, did you become a Patreon member yet? Because you just stole a Patreon slot there.
27:09 Chuck Nice? I know.
27:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm just, I'll cut, I'll cut your Slack this one.
27:12 Chuck Nice? All right, I'm not gonna ask anymore now. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
27:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Please proceed.
27:16 Speaker 01 I can answer that question. Um, you, you spend, you spend a decade listening first. So that's exactly what we wanted to do was to find out what is the essential. When somebody screams at you, it's because there is something essential that is shared among all people. So for whales, we looked to find out what is a sound that is essential to humpback whale communication.
27:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Like the whale boat is chasing me, help.
27:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right? The whalers want my blubber, you know?
27:42 Speaker 01 We wanted to know what is a sound that all whales produce? That male whales produce, that female whales produce, old whales, young whales, baby whales? Any population? Animals that will never, that have been separated by three million years of genetic isolation, still produce the same sound. So that was the sound that we decided to start with. We said, okay, this is probably foundational. This is essential. So in order to figure out what that sounds means, now that we've identified that there's something important, we're gonna play it back to them and see how they respond. So if you scream help and I scream help, we're both in trouble. Luckily, the sound doesn't appear to mean that. It it's more of a way of saying to the ocean, you know, I am, and I am here, and I am me.
28:25 Speaker 01 And then other whales will respond with, and I also am, I am here, I am me.
28:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh my god. I just got chills. I think. Ah, that's so crazy. Therefore, I am. Yes. It's like the decorum of whales. It's the decorum of whales. Therefore, I think.
28:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That that would freak, that would freak us out. If we found out that that philosophy class. That's so cool. Oh my god, that's so cool.
28:53 Speaker 01 Do you wanna hear what it sounds like?
28:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
28:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I mean, yes.
28:59 Speaker 01 And this is important for Ellen's work too, because this is a sound that appears in song pretty regularly. But the call is.
29:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You mean Ellen DeGeneres imitating a whale? You mean Ellen Garland, your colleague?
29:10 Speaker 01 My very respected and esteemed colleague.
29:17 Speaker 01 The call is called a whoop call, and it sounds
29:23 Speaker 01 is what the sound sounds like. So that is a sound that humpback whales worldwide all produce.
29:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, do that again?
29:32 Chuck Nice? Wow. Wow. It sounds like a voice warm-up before you go in an audition.
29:40 Speaker 01 Yes.
29:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what they're doing underwater. Wow. So, so, a quick, we gotta wrap this segment and come back with more questions from our audience if Chuck doesn't keep stealing those slots. Um, is a couple of things. Underwater, a particular vibrational frequency underwater is now vibrating in a denser medium so that its frequency will change. So you just gave me a sound that I'm hearing in air. Or is that, is that what it sounds like underwater and you're giving it an air version of it? Or do you need that underwater and it's gonna take on its own frequency profile?
30:12 Speaker 01 So that's what it sounds like underwater at close range.
30:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Got it.
30:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, and so, I thought there was a clever, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a whale person. Maybe you guys thought this was the stupidest thing ever. But I thought it was a clever element of, of the Star Trek IV. Okay, uh, the voyage home, which is otherwise known as save the whales, right? And I know you've seen those movies, the, the series. And in it, there's a sound they can't interpret. And was it Spock who figured out, let us immerse the sound underwater? And then everyone said, that's a whale sound. And so, uh, do you give him credit for thinking that far through on that plotline?
30:49 Speaker 01 Sure. Yeah, absolutely.
30:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Um, okay. Yeah, I'm just, just checking.
30:54 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, i- i- the way that sound propagates through a medium, like how sound propagates through water is very different than sound, how sound propagates through air. You, and in this case, the medium is very closely coupled with the sound producer. So if you make a sound in water and if that same animal were to even attempt to make it in air, it probably wouldn't work.
31:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And to your point, the sound propagation changes according to density and temperature.
31:16 Speaker 01 Yes.
31:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And hence you get these, what do you call it, the so far lane or something?
31:19 Speaker 01 The so far channel.
31:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So far channel, I love it.
31:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, you have to be in the so far channel for that to work. So if you were to vocalize under it or above it, your sound wouldn't travel as far.
31:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Very, very cool. Let's take a quick break and when we come back, Chuck, shut up.
31:31 Chuck Nice? Okay.
31:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, no.
31:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, we need you to tell, we give the question.
31:35 Chuck Nice? Oh, okay.
31:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We'll get as many as we can, uh, when we return, when we figure out how to talk to whales. Let's start talking.
31:55 Chuck Nice? All right, it's time to shout out our Patreon patrons. Timothy Dalby, Mick Malchenko, and Bolfur. All right, I guess it's like Cher, just one name, Bolfur. "Hey, guys, thanks so much for your support. Without you, how would we make our way across the cosmos?" And anybody else listening who would like to get on the Patreon shout out action, please go to patreon.com/stargtorkradio and support us.
32:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back, StarTalk, third and final segment. We're trying to find out how to talk to animals if you're not Dr. Dolittle. But we have our own version of Dr. Dolittle's here in Michelle Fournay and Ellen Garland, and their expertise is precisely what we need to have this conversation. So, let's do this, Chuck. You collected questions about talking to whales.
32:56 Chuck Nice? Yes, let's continue. I love this question from Chris Plots. And Chris says, "How big of a problem is noise pollution in the oceans? Is there something we can do to mitigate the effects while keeping our supply lines intact?" And then I'll put an addendum on it because it's his question. "How great was the last year when all the shipping and everything ground to a halt?"
33:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But it's also true, Ellen, isn't it right that most commerce travels on shipping lanes? So that, in principle, maybe the whales could adjust to that?
33:35 Speaker 04 Exactly. There's a lot of low-frequency sound being put into the ocean, which can interfere with the communication range of particularly the big baleen whales, which communicate over those long distances. And of course, there are shipping lanes, so those can be... Moved a little bit if it's on a migratory route. At least we can understand where the whales are starting to go and when. And trying to minimize these overlaps and this interference in their sound space between the whales and our shipping. Because we do need to move stuff around the world, but we also need to provide quieter locations at particular times of the year. That's really important for the whales.
34:20 Speaker 04 Say when they're giving birth, in particular carving grounds and mating grounds, just to make sure that they're able to hear each other so that they can find each other. If you can't find them, if you can't hear a mate, you can't find a mate to actually reproduce.
34:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I can tell you this, it seems to me you don't want to piss off a whale. Because whatever boat you're in, the whale's gonna win. That's what it seems to me.
34:47 Speaker 04 Yeah.
34:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm thinking, I'm just thinking, I don't know.
34:49 Speaker 04 If you're in a small boat, you really do not want to irritate a whale. That's, I mean, you don't want to do that. That's not good.
34:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I've seen, I saw, I saw a YouTube video of a whale. It was, it did something out of spite. I know it. It was like, they were poking at it and stuff. And this whale came up and just, just slapped it. Slapped its tail down and it didn't quite capsize the boat. But you know, even if it's not true, let me keep thinking that. Because it was, it was a beautiful thing.
35:17 Speaker 01 They used to call gray whales devilfish in the Sea of Cortez. Because if you would separate a cow from her calf, she would actively go after the boat. So it was this horrible tactic where they would try to do that to draw the bigger whales in. So yes, they, they don't mess with a mama whale.
35:33 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
35:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Nice.
35:34 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah. Do not mess with them.
35:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I like it. That's very mammal of them. That's what mammals do, right? We protect our young.
35:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, I have a comment about the COVID thing because we just wrapped up some really cool new research on this. We dropped hydrophones in Alaska during COVID and the year before. So we had a total.
35:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What is that? What is a hydrophone?
35:51 Speaker 01 Oh, an underwater microphone. It's how we listen to the whales.
35:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, hydro as in water and then phone as in phone. Okay, hydrophone.
35:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A new word for me, I like that.
35:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, so we put hydrophones down in 2019 to listen to whales. And also just to document ship traffic so that we could answer that noise question that your caller had about it. Um, but what we did when the pandemic hit was we dropped another hydrophone. And in certain parts of Alaska, we documented a three-fold decrease in noise associated with the pandemic. But this is even, this is even a bigger deal. There was a 25-fold decrease in the loudest part of the day. So when ships would pass over our hydrophone in 2019, it was 25 times louder than the loudest moments during the pandemic. And we noticed a change in how humpback whales communicate in quiet
36:42 Speaker 01 versus how humpback whales communicate in noise.
36:46 Chuck Nice? Well, that makes sense.
36:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:48 Chuck Nice? I mean, we do the same thing. I mean, anybody who's been to a nightclub knows that you don't, you don't come home from work and go, "So honey, how was it? How was your day?" Like, you don't do that.
37:02 Speaker 01 Yep, exactly.
37:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
37:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:04 Chuck Nice? Wow.
37:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good.
37:06 Chuck Nice? Wow, cool, man. That is really cool stuff.
37:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, keep going Chuck.
37:10 Chuck Nice? Let's keep going.
37:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cause this is the last segment, I want to make sure I get as many questions as we can.
37:14 Chuck Nice? All right, yeah, well, that'll take... They'll have, they'll have another chance. They'll have another chance on another show.
37:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How often do we have whale whispers on the show? Just...
37:25 Chuck Nice? All right, point taken. Okay, here we go. This is our friend Violetta and her mom, uh, Izzy, who says, uh, other animals communicate using sound.
37:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Violetta, this is a 12-year-old Violetta? Ain't she 13 yet? She's been asking questions for like the last 20 years.
37:43 Chuck Nice? That's hilarious. Okay, so Violetta, uh, who wants to be a astrophysicist, by the way, let's not forget that. She says other animals communicate using sound frequencies and wavelengths of light that humans can neither see nor hear. So what is the coolest, craziest means of communication that you guys have ever encountered in any other species? Ooh.
38:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I love it.
38:07 Chuck Nice? I have my, I have my vote. I know what my vote is, but go ahead.
38:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so Ellen, why don't you start that? Ooh, I'm, that's a great question.
38:16 Chuck Nice? Isn't that an awesome question?
38:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I, I am kinda stumped. I, I, I mean... Violetta, you're not supposed to stump the expert.
38:23 Speaker 04 I know, I know, I know.
38:25 Chuck Nice? Hey guys, let's remember, this is a 12-year-old asking, alright? Let's just keep that in mind.
38:31 Speaker 04 Alright.
38:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Violetta, you keep stumping the experts, we're gonna have to cancel you.
38:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, so I reckon I've heard some really strange sounds be made by a humpback. Because whenever anyone's like, "Oh, can you play me some song?", they want this gorgeous, really harmonic, what you guys used to hear on records and, you know. They can make some horrifically screechy, horribly groany, high-frequency sounds as well. And they're really just not, I was incredibly surprised when I actually started listening to humpback song, that they make this whole variety of sounds, from the lower frequencies through to the, they almost whistle.
39:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, maybe some of it is just simply not songs, that's all.
39:17 Speaker 04 Well, it's all in the eye of the beholder.
39:20 Chuck Nice? Or, maybe, I mean, when you listen to our songs, and maybe it's just like, "Hey, welcome to WHALE radio, now we got some, we got some cetacean death metal coming your way."
39:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what it is.
39:34 Chuck Nice? Right?
39:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what it is. It's heavy metal and cetacean music, whoa.
39:39 Speaker 04 It's more like Michael Buble, I reckon. There's a Michael Buble going on in there.
39:43 Chuck Nice? Right on, okay. We know where Ellen's taste lie now.
39:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Michelle, do you have, what's the weirdest form of communication you've seen? Whales or otherwise?
39:55 Speaker 01 I've got two. So, I think the one that always blows my mind, I don't study and I've never seen, but anyone who was a beekeeper could, is the waggle dance.
40:05 Chuck Nice? The dance.
40:06 Speaker 01 The dance, yeah, so bees communicate the location of their food by dancing. So they do this sort of waggle, and they waggle their little bee butts, and they do it in such a specific way that they can actually convey all this crazy information to the other members of their hives. And, I'm a terrible dancer, if I were to do a waggle dance, you wouldn't get far. And I think that is just one of the coolest ways that animals communicate.
40:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Your whole colony would go extinct, they'd have to depend on you to waggle dance.
40:30 Speaker 01 Sure, sure, I mean, my sense of direction is bad, when I'm using words, even worse when I'm muddling it with them.
40:35 Chuck Nice? Well, let me tell you something, bee twerking is gotta be up there with the best, okay? Bee twerking.
40:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what they're doing.
40:43 Chuck Nice? That's what they're doing.
40:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's the best waggle that's actually going.
40:45 Chuck Nice? Cardi B.
40:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We devoted a whole episode in Cosmos on the bee waggle dance.
40:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:53 Chuck Nice? What's the other one?
40:55 Speaker 01 The other one is, it's a sound, but we can't hear it. Um, elephants produce something called a rumble, which is an infrasonic sound. So we all, you know, there's really wavelengths too high for us to see. These are sounds too low for us to hear.
41:08 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
41:09 Speaker 01 And so people for a long time didn't even think that they were communicating at all. And Katie Payne, who's a researcher and also my neighbor, um, she actually started thinking about the fact that these elephants were communicating with sound that that actually transmitted through the ground. Yes. And then could be detected. So those elephants.
41:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Again, those long, the low frequency goes farther in the same way than in air and in water. So that's, that's.
41:31 Speaker 01 And, and through solids. So, cause I mean, sound travels further through water than air, but it travels even further through a solid than it does through water, the denser, the medium.
41:40 Chuck Nice? Right. That's cool.
41:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That makes putting your ear on a railroad track very effective.
41:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh, you can hear from very far away.
41:46 Chuck Nice? Until you fall asleep.
41:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. Chuck, I'm morbid. Chuck. Oh, let me nestle up against this cold steel track. All right, keep it, see how many more we can get in here.
42:01 Chuck Nice? All right, here we go. All right. By the way, mine was chemical, uh, communication through the way ants do.
42:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
42:08 Chuck Nice? So cool. All right, here we go. Uh.
42:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? My favorite would be when the aliens come and then we communicate telepathically. That'll be my, that's what I'm looking forward to.
42:17 Chuck Nice? Get out of my head, Belzak. All right.
42:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that what your alien is called? Mine's called? All right, keep it coming.
42:25 Chuck Nice? Here we go. Zach Metcalf wants to know this. Good morning from Atlantic Canada. Austrian philosopher Ludwig Witting, uh, Wittenstein.
42:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wittenstein.
42:36 Chuck Nice? Said, if a lion could talk, we could not understand him. His point was that consciousness has taken radically different forms in different animals. Is this a valid concern when conversing with intelligent marine mammals such as dolphins and whales? Um.
42:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me, let me, let me shape that a little differently. I'd like that question, but I want to sort of focus it a little differently. We, when we study human brains, we can isolate the language center.
43:04 Chuck Nice? Right.
43:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, you know, the communication centers. So is there similar sort of, uh, you know, EKG or MRIs done on whale brains to?
43:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You need a machine big enough to stick them in to do this. But do they have language centers as we do? And if that's the case,
43:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? do they have the same motives as we would when, as we try to communicate?
43:29 Speaker 01 I can take a stab at that unless Ellen, you want to go for it?
43:32 Speaker 04 I'm happy for you to take a stab at that. That's, it's pretty hard to fit a whale brain in the MRI.
43:38 Speaker 01 That's the first part, yeah. We humpback whales' heads are 15 feet long and we're 8,000 pounds. So getting them in an MRI is tricky.
43:46 Speaker 01 But, I mean, it has similar-
43:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You just squeeze it in. That's what, brain matter's pretty squeezy, I think. That is amazing.
43:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, but the skull perhaps is not.
43:55 Speaker 01 But one of the big differences in how cetaceans communicate and how humans communicate, we have language and that we have representational acoustic signals. I, this is my hand. I have a hand. A whale doesn't have a word for flipper. A whale doesn't have a word for fish. All of the sounds that whales make to our knowledge, again, we don't, we don't know how a whale perceives the world or even really how it hears very well. But the way that they communicate and interpret is through action function and motivation. And so they might have a sound that is associated with foraging. They might have a sound that's associated with reproduction. But it's true that you can't translate whale because it's not representational speech.
44:37 Speaker 01 Now, there is this really great principle called motivation structure theory, that, or motivational structure theory, that mammals and many terrestrial vertebrates share, that fearful sounds are sort of high and shrieky.
44:51 Speaker 01 Scary sounds are low and growly and roar. And that we can translate the different sounds of pitch and timber to understand something about motivation, which is a real, like a scientific, it's like a science-friendly way of saying emotion. We don't know-
45:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's like Chuck saying, "Help!" That's kind of, you know, that gets around even if you don't interpret the word.
45:11 Speaker 01 Exactly, exactly. So there will be commonalities in how mammals produce sounds when they are feeling a certain way. And we probably share some of that with whales. But in terms of being able to say, our language can- be translated into whale. That's not true. They're not, they're not tool users. They're not holding things.
45:30 Chuck Nice? Right. By the way, I mean, it wouldn't make sense for them to be in that position anyway. When you think about it, all of our existence is predicated upon being able to make associations and references. We, we couldn't survive if we didn't do that. Whereas whales, I mean, their environment, they are, they are one with their environment, you know?
45:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
45:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, slip in a few more. Oh, wait, wait. Ellen, did you want to add to that?
45:59 Speaker 04 I just, I was gonna add in that, you know, we, we still don't completely understand the communication system. We're only starting to scratch the surface, surface of trying to understand what some of these displays are, what some of these particular sound types mean. Or if exactly, if they're just associated with a particular behavioral setting. We are only just scratching the surface, so.
46:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, we got time for one more question. Bring it on.
46:25 Chuck Nice? This is Byamiselli, uh, says, or Michelli says this. I'm just gonna be the person to ask it. Nobody else will.
46:37 Speaker 01 Alright.
46:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
46:38 Speaker 01 Great.
46:38 Chuck Nice? Is there even a slight possibility that merpeople have ever existed?
46:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, somebody had to go there.
46:49 Chuck Nice? Somebody had to go there.
46:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Somebody had to go there. Oh, let me ask it another way.
46:54 Chuck Nice? Go ahead.
46:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I learned embarrassingly late in life that whales didn't evolve in the ocean. They, their ancestors were land mammals that somehow decided they'd rather swim for a living. And so at some point, you might have had the mammal that could just do both.
47:13 Speaker 01 Well, I might, I might go the opposite way on that and say, um, merpeople don't currently exist, but some of us could start our, our way back.
47:22 Chuck Nice? Wow.
47:24 Speaker 01 If, if, I mean, if evolution brought, brought mammals into the ocean, you know, we, we had fish and then fish eventually came to land and then we had all these evolutionary divergence. Um, and in the same way that whales returned to the ocean, um, give it enough time and enough impetus and enough evolutionary drift and random genetic drift and merpeople perhaps might exist at some point in the very, very, very, very, very far future.
47:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, sounds like she's got a plan.
47:50 Chuck Nice? I gotta tell you.
47:52 Speaker 01 The first thing, of course, is to learn the language of the whales so that you know how to say hello when you get there.
47:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, all right, right.
47:57 Speaker 01 I agree.
47:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And here's something, a little bit of trivia in, what's the Tom Hanks movie with,
48:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Splash, in Splash, with Daryl Hannah as the mermaid, all scenes underwater, there are no bubbles coming out of her at all.
48:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So this was an attempt to show how natural she was underwater and that she's not trying to just hold her breath or anything, that's just where she hangs out.
48:24 Chuck Nice? Right.
48:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so apparently she has gills, they didn't otherwise make that clear.
48:28 Chuck Nice? Right.
48:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But, yeah, so that's, that's.
48:30 Chuck Nice? And then there's always the shape of water where, you know, you just, there's, you know, there's gotta be some sexy people in the ocean, so.
48:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so here's my last point that I was gonna make. So let's say you guys succeed and you figure out how to communicate with whales in their language in ways that they understand. Wouldn't this completely freak them out? See, suppose we were unwittingly being studied by cats, okay, let's say, and then, that's not a stretch, and then one day they all decide it is time, and then a cat just goes up the White House lawn and says, pardon me, I'd like to speak with your president. I'm pretty sure we would shoot the cat, all right? We would kill the cat, we don't want any talking cats here.
49:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So is there, are you okay doing this? They'll see a different species giving them information that they give each other and that.
49:35 Speaker 01 The answer is no.
49:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How about their psychological health?
49:38 Speaker 01 No, the goal is for the whales to never know we're there. We only, we only do this work so that we can understand them. The goal is not to start a conversation that we're gonna have for ages and ages. The goal is not to start a relationship.
49:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is like, this is very Star Trek.
49:53 Chuck Nice? It is, you have a prime directive.
49:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Prime directive.
49:56 Speaker 01 That is the best example, yes. We have a prime directive not to interfere. But we do want to understand. To conserve something, to protect its existence, we have to, we have to demonstrate to the scientific community and to everyone that it has value. It has to be important. So the only reason that we are doing something as audacious, as talking to a whale, is so that we can understand what they say to each other. Not to have this concept that they are supposed to talk to us. And if we do our job well, they will have what seems to be a completely natural, unobtrusive interaction with a sound that they experience every day. And that they will continue living their totally natural lives, oblivious to our existence.
50:38 Chuck Nice? That is beautiful.
50:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, wait, wait. In our world, it's called eavesdropping. It's called wiretapping.
50:43 Chuck Nice? Nice.
50:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's called. We have to.
50:46 Chuck Nice? Yeah, that's true. Uh, wait, wait a minute. One, one, one quick thing, though. Let's say, um, you do figure out, you decode, you see, this is, you're able to understand with great clarity. And what you find out is that what they're really talking about is, or let's just say you hear this. Uh, the plan to exterminate all human life is on track, going well. And will conclude in the next six months. What do you do then?
51:20 Chuck Nice? They.
51:21 Speaker 01 Ellen? I'm, I'm getting thrown, yeah. I mean, I, I, I would be very surprised if that, if that was what, what was being communicated. We, we just.
51:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm glad you'd be surprised by that, because if not, that would be.
51:33 Speaker 01 No, we're.
51:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But Ellen, why don't you take us out with some concluding reflections? On what you do and what we can look forward to.
51:40 Speaker 04 So I I'm trying to investigate how songs are shared across ocean basins. How whales are learning these really complex vocal displays that only the males are doing. So they're trying to understand who they're singing to, whether they're singing to females or to other males to say, hi, I'm a big mature male and I'm ready to mate or I'm big and strong, go away. And how these population level cultures are then shared between these populations across an entire ocean basin. So we have these really amazing vocal cultures, all of these incredible vocal cultures in the oceans.
52:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Unbelievable, man. That is. Well, you know, there's more ocean than land. And so, and the ocean goes really deep and land is pretty flat. So maybe we shouldn't have not, we should not be surprised by any of this. Yeah. That the ocean is where it's at. And I like Michelle's plan to breed mer people. So we'll check back in on you, Michelle, see how they're coming along there.
52:49 Speaker 01 Yep, new career trajectory for me. I just discovered it now.
52:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
52:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So guys, we've got to call it quits there. This has been a delight to have both of you on this Cosmic Queries. And the subject is so rich and so scientifically and culturally interesting that I'm sure we haven't seen the end of this. Uh, watch for this documentary. If you want to catch that documentary, Fathom, and you missed it at the film festival, you can check it out on Apple TV Plus. Uh, that's where you can, uh, go to learn something for a change, given all the time we're spending binging sitcoms, uh, throw in a documentary every now and then and, uh, get a little closer to our own planet. This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries. You're the guest Tyson. Keep looking up.
Previous Cosmic Queries – Robot Ethics with Dr. Kate Darling Next Gender in Sports with Joanna Harper and Heather Berlin, PhD (Re-release) Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
