Moby Dick

I recently read the opening pages of Herman Melville's great American novel, so I was delighted this morning to see in the March 28 New York Times Book Review a review of Philip Hoare's non-fiction book, The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea, which among much else apparently talks about Melville's novel at length.
    But what arrested me in the review (by Nathaniel Philbrick and titled "What Lies Beneath") was the paragraph that begins by talking about "whaling's 'historical crescendo' during the second half of the 20th century, when more than 72,000 whales were killed in a single year," then continues:

Elsewhere [Hoare] evokes a possible future in which the rising sea levels associated with global warming will allow the whale to become the planet's dominant species "with only distant memories of the time when they were persecuted by beings whose greed proved to be their downfall." As it turns out, whales have already ventured beyond this paltry planet. Unlike any other known substance, sperm whale oil works as a lubricant in the extraordinarily cold temperatures of outer space. "The Hubble space telescope is wheeling around the earth on spermaceti," Hoare writes, "seeing six billion years into the past." But that's not all. The scientists who fitted out the Voyager probe decided that the song of the humpback was the best way to greet any possible aliens. This means that long after all of us are gone, the call of the whale will be traveling out into the distant reaches of the universe. [p. 13]