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?
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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.
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?
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.
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.
Space whales would know. You know they would.