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This makes me strike upon an idea seeing as petroleum is leaking from the whale - might whales be used as a renewable oil resource in the same way as renewable lumber? Whale farms and such (not referring to online dating here, but literally a whale farm). The oil of whale might be used for many things such as lighting of lamp or lubrication of machine.

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Whale oil used to be used for the things you mentioned, but you run into a lot of sustainability issues on top the ethical issues. (I mean FFS if the probe did what it did in star trek 4, imagine what they would have sent instead for your scenario.)

Practically speaking, you can't easily just let the whales go out into the open due to the risk of someone else hunting them down vs cost of captivity or having them be 'monitored' in the wild.

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