There are 7,000 languages in the world – hold that thought.

There are 7,000 human languages in the world. But we are not the only ones speaking. 

From bats to elephants, plants to fungi – the non-human world speaks secret languages we don't understand. Yet. 

But one audacious initiative – the global non-profit Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) – is trying to crack one such language. That of sperm whales. 

Sperm whales have the largest brains in the universe – 6x the size of ours – and they are closer to us in more ways than one. Their ancestors used to live on land, to begin with. But their land-roaming ancestors headed back to the sea about 47 million years ago. (For context, modern humans evolved about 200,000 years ago.) Now they populate waters from the Pacific to the Caribbean, living in tight-knit, matriarchal families. They sing, socialise, make group decisions. Take part during births. Babysit for each other. And they communicate with each other, have long exchanges, in patterns of "clicks" that we call codas – complete with accents and dialects. 

Over 50 scientists across different disciplines – marine biology, linguistics, acoustics, cryptography, computer science, robotics – have been tracking sperm whales since 2020 to record these codas under Project CETI. They’re using cutting edge tech – from drones and underwater microphones to shark-sight cameras and swimming robots. Even an underwater recording studio. 

And they’re using AI to try and understand sperm whales. In fact, CETI researchers analysed over a database of 9,000 recordings built over a decade. to discover 156 distinct codas – up from 21 types we knew beforehand. And identified a sperm whale phonetic language. 

But how close are we to connecting sound to context and meaning? Could we one day break the cross-species barrier – and talk back to them? At SYNAPSE 2025, meet Giovanni Petri – one of the whale whisperers at Project CETI. A cosmologist turned particle physicist turned complex system scientist, this professor of Northeastern University London and AI researcher at CENTAI will take us into the inky depths of the midnight zone to meet the sperm whale – and dissect how his team and colleagues are decoding how it speaks. What they’ve learnt, what they’re hoping to. How AI is providing the solution. What happens the day after we crack the code. And he’ll unpack the bigger questions. About intelligences beyond the human kind. The ethics of eavesdropping on a non-human species. And whether tech could bridge the human-Nature barrier. 

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