I realize you can just answer, “mysterious aliens beyond our understanding,” but why would a space probe have a mandate of either talk to a whale for 30 seconds or destroy Earth and disable everything in its path on the way to Earth?
Why? What does that achieve?
I believe the probe was not destroying anything intentionally, but this was rather a side effect of whatever it was doing to attempt to communicate with the not-the-hell-your-whales. Once it did so and was satisfied it shut off its transmitter and went about its merry way.
I don’t know why it specifically needed whales. Maybe some other similarly whale-like alien species would also have sufficed.
I’m pretty sure Spock actually said this and this is the way I always understood it. Spock went on a hunch that it wasn’t intentionally destroying the planet, it was a byproduct of looking for the whales. Maybe it had to look harder than expected and turned up the transmit power which is why things got weird.
“Hell of a way to say hello.” - Bones, probably.
Edit: Yeah, “I find it illogical that its actions would be hostile.”
Second edit: I just saw a thread the other day about the weakest sonar pings from Navey subs being strong enough to vaporize people’s insides. Context I guess.
I think the long and the short of it was that the writers and Leonard Nimoy were going to drive home An Aesop about environmentalism, no matter what it took.
There is also some parallelism here with the real world in addition to your sonar ping observation. For instance, I always recommend anyone to read “Last Chance to See,” by Douglas Adams (yes, that Douglas Adams) and in this case the chapter on the Yangtze river dolphin wherein Adams and his crew (or rather, the crew with Adams tagging along) go to China to observe said creature. The Yangtze river dolphin was – it is now believed to be extinct, but was not at the time the book was written – functionally blind and relied on echolocation to navigate and, you know, not bump into things. Just through the course of normal river navigation there is so much noise in the Yangtze from engines and boat propellers that the dolphins were just about deafened as well as blind, which was probably a contributory factor to their extinction.
Humans didn’t set about to blast the dolphins clean out of the water via noise pollution on purpose, but nevertheless that’s exactly what we did just as a result of how our vehicles worked and without thinking about it.
That is my favorite Douglas Adams book and I have read everything he wrote. I wish more people would read it.
I thought they found more Yangtze River dolphins in a lake not that long ago? Did they not?
I haven’t been following closely, but the last couple of potential sightings I’ve read about have been unconfirmed and certainly nobody’s captured one or even a picture of one sufficient for a positive ID lately.
Its status is officially “functionally extinct” which does not necessarily rule out that some individuals may remain somewhere, but researchers are pretty much agreed that however many might be left in hiding (if any) probably aren’t enough to sustain any kind of ongoing population.
As Granny Weatherwax famously observed, just one of anything doesn’t work. If you only have e.g. one dolphin left, maybe it’s not technically extinct, but that doesn’t do you any good without a mate. Same deal if there are enough of them in nooks and crannies to theoretically breed but they’re all geographically disparate and can’t reach each other.
Or if you prefer:
Yeah, even Wikipedia goes with “probably extinct.” How sad.
Anyway, it’s an amazing book. There was also a radio series which is decent (I believe you can get it on the Internet Archive) and Stephen Fry did a follow-up TV series around 15 years go.
This is a good take.
One hell of a side effect. You’d think its creators would understand the whole ‘destroy the planet’ aspect of their ‘must communicate with a whale for a very brief period of time unless there aren’t any and then I just stick around’ plan.
Well, you know how Starfleet admirals are all insane?
Turns out, that’s not species specific.
Now that makes sense!
Maybe they didn’t expect no answer and they are just meh at programming.
It’s been a minute for me - did they ever establish that it absolutely had to be whales or were whales just sea creatures that qualified?
What if this thing was sent to harvest water from planets lacking intelligent cetaecian life forms like humans might harvest a resource from an “uninhabited” world?
Not did it just have to be whales, it had to be humpbacked whales. And don’t ask me why they couldn’t fake it.
Space whales would know. You know they would.
Spock explained that they could mimic the sounds, but not the language. They would be responding in gibberish.
And yet, 100 years later: Cetacean Ops.
Maybe we can parallel it like this…
You’re out in your backyard playing with your dog. You’re both running around in the grass, rolling around, the dog digs for a moment at a spot in the yard. You think nothing of it.
But in those few minutes, you both stomped on and destroyed a couple ant mounds, squashed some other bugs and insects in the grass (their habitat) and the dog dug up and obliterated another creatures nest in the grass.
The problem here is that it wants to talk to the whales but it is also destroying the ocean. That doesn’t really match your scenario.
It’s just an overgeneralization. It’s doing something it thinks is harmless and possibly considering humans to be lesser beings like the insects
It’s doing something it thinks is harmless that would directly harm the thing it’s wants to talk to?
Are its programmers morons?