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?
They may not be explaining things very well on that page but this basically ignores half of what the probe did in the movie and why it needed 30 seconds to talk to a whale.
spoiler
Spock successfully mind melds with the probe, learning that it did not seek to be destructive to other races, instead they were so different from its creators that they were ignored as “mites” in “metal bubbles”,
Yeah I’m not saying it makes sense, I’ve just always had a soft spot for that book. I didn’t quite remember that part.