Could we learn to talk to whales?

In today’s The Big Story podcast, there’s a chance that one day, we humans could have a conversation with whales. Seriously. Scientists are working on a way to make it happen.

Ross Andersen is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he wrote about the efforts to decipher whale communication patterns. “The idea is if we could record enough sperm whale clicks … you could them dump them into a large-language model basically, and get them to start generating the clicks,” says Andersen, “that would be the first step, in potentially decoding their language.”

If technology does eventually allow us to talk to these majestic mammals, what should we say? And what message might they send back?