Hi, it's Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Listening and really deeply listening is the key to communication, right? But what if listening smarter meant we could communicate beyond our own species and translate the language of marine life? Can technology crack the interspecies communications code?

In his TED 2020 talk, marine biologist David Gruber lays out the work of his team at Project

SETI, which is working to understand sophisticated sperm whale communication and ideally to talk back.

You are about to hear the sounds of the largest tooth predator on the planet.

An animal bigger than a school bus with perhaps the most sophisticated form of communication that has ever existed.

You know, These are the sounds of the mighty sperm whale, a fellow

mammal that can dive almost a mile,

hold its breath for more than an hour, and lives in these amazingly complex matriarchal societies.

These clicks you heard, called Codas, are just a facet of what we know of their communication.

We know these animals are communicating.

We just don't yet know what they're saying.

Project SETI aims to find out.

Over the next five years, our team of AI specialists, roboticists, linguists, and marine biologists

aim to use the most cutting-edge technologies to make contact with another species

and hopefully communicate back. We believe that by listening deeply to nature, we can change our

perspective of ourselves and reshape our relationship with all life on this planet. This, of course,

seems like an impossible goal. People have been

trying to make contact with other animals for hundreds of years. How could we do what others could

not? Especially given that I'm sitting here on my couch in New York City in the middle of the pandemic

and protests. I spent the last 20 years as a marine biologist and oceanographer

setting the ocean from all different perspectives, from microbes to sharks. I've assembled

interdisciplinary teams that have built the first shark eye camera to see the world from a shark's

...