If you climb to the top, and just wait there, you will be the first to be on top when it finally becomes the world's tallest.

The 230 dB vocalizations are not for communication, they are for locating prey in the deep ocean. They are directed down, and used to locate the optimal location for the whales next dive. Communication clicks are considerably less energetic (Though still powerful).

I am not saying decibels aren't the right measurement, I am saying comparing the two on a 1 to 1 basis doesn't paint a useful picture of what is happening.

Mostly because it is in water.

Trying to compare decibels in air to decibels in water is not really a useful measurement of anything, since the nature of sound changes dramatically in different materials. Also, directed sound, like this, would only hit the peak amplitude in the exact center of the cone, and would drop off rapidly towards the edges, as opposed to a radial effect like an explosion, where it would be consistent across a wide front. This enables much higher amplitudes, but in an extremely small area, with a lot less energy overall.

So yeah, for a lot of reasons, saying gunshots are ~150 decibels, and Sperm Whales can hit 230 decibels is technically accurate, but not really what it sounds like. For instance, a pistol shrimp can hit ~220 decibels, but is almost completely harmless to anything bigger than a minnow, because it has such a short duration, and tiny scale.

If you were right next to it, I would assume it would be a very unpleasant experience. The force might be moving away from you, but the water won't stop moving once the sound goes through, and you would get a really nasty shockwave going through your body.

It would probably be a similar level of disorientation to being in a fairly high speed car crash.

Around 230, which is massively more than gunshots, jet engines, and even bomb explosions.

That said, decibels aren't really a good way of measuring sounds like that. It is a tightly focused long range sonar "Beam" that is used for scanning the ocean depths for prey, not a radial blast like the others mentioned. It is also in water, and compression effects in water are massively more dangerous, because the water doesn't compress like air is, so a human body gets hit by the full force.

So yeah, if a whale aimed it a human and did it at full force, it would kill the human. But they don't use it as a weapon, and the whale is very unlikely to do that. Especially since they seem to like people, and act curious and friendly to divers, and never hostile unless you spear them.

Pretty much, yeah. Very unlikely to happen, and not a real risk. I mean until you meet that one whale that thinks it is funny.

The energy is enough to do it, and water transfers well. It is possible, but it isn't likely to happen even if whales didn't deliberately avoid doing it near us.

Now if a whale wanted to do it, it totally could. Several whale species do it to prey species, and a Sperm Whale has more than enough potential to make it happen. But they use it for detecting food in the very deep ocean prior to making their deep dives, they don't really have any interest in using it to flex on humans.

It won't kill you at all. Because whales are bros, and won't do it when you are nearby. They will do it near microphones and such, but they won't do it with human swimmers in the water.

That said, they do a lot of lower volume clicks. Which are still powerful enough to cause serious medical problems. Which has happened.

The key word is "can". In theory. It has never happened, because although certain humans have decided that swimming right next to the largest predator that ever lived is a rational thing to do, no human has ever been killed by it.

... Because for some bizarre reason, whales like us. I am not sure exactly what we did to deserve this, but they don't do their high volume clicks when humans are in the area. They get away from humans before they resume clicking. Sperm Whales have killed a lot of people, but exclusively people that were hunting them at the time.

General Electric was the largest manufacturing company in the world for more then half a century, and was the most valuable company in the world as recently as 2005.

Defining them as an "Appliance Company" is perhaps one of the most dramatic oversimplifications I have seen on here.