Wed 28 May 2008
It occurred to me that if we do find some kind of life on another planet, our first instinct is probably going to be try and communicate with it.
What if it is an animal with the intelligence equivalent of a dolphin, horse, or a cat?
It seems to me we have an extremely long way to go with “communicating” with cats and the like, how in the world can we expect to converse with an equivalent alien being?
Would it behoove us to make more of an effort on human to animal communication?
Posted by drewbody6 answers so far!
Okay, let's hear it.
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If we encounter a race as intelligent as cats, well then we haven’t really found “intelligent life” as far as I understand the traditional concept. Even dolphins, as intelligent as they are, do not have any level of technological civilization.
The interesting aliens to talk to are those building spaceships, or at least those that have civilization. Making contact and communicating will be possible when both sides understand the context and are making an effort to understand the other.
Communicating with a truly alien intelligence would be next to impossible, it seems to me, unless there’s some sort of anthropic principle in effect that leads intelligent life down very similar evolutionary pathways. We have exactly one model of consciousness, and it is woefully incomplete. How many more models exist? Hive minds? Minds that operate on timescales down near the Planck time boundary or up in the millions of years? How would we even recognize a truly alien mind, much less communicate with it?
Perhaps, like on the plaques carried on Pioneer 10 & 11 and on the golden record carried by Voyager, math and physics are a foundational medium that will allow us to share information across space-faring species. But given that we pancaked a Mars probe because our best and brightest didn’t bother converting feet to meters, it seems doubtful that an alien data-bursts encoded in base-144 would even be comprehensible as data.
Fortunately, come the Singularity, we can test these problems because we’ll be figuring out how to communicate with aliens of our own creation — transhuman AI.
Quite appropriate that it’s just the two of us wanting to communicate with aliens, pass the bong BOP.
Carl Sagan addressed a lot of these concerns in Contact (great book, kind of a crappy movie)… the time scale problem is mentioned, of course. If the aliens were of comparable intelligence to humans, I would despair of ever communicating with them. It would probably be impossible. However, if they are significantly more intelligent than us, then I could see them coming up with a way to talk down to us; then again, would they recognize us as intelligent if even their most moronic citizen was 100x smarter than Isaac Newton? It would be like (as mentioned above) humans encountering an alien species as intelligent as cats.
*rips on bong*
Wevs, I hope it’s cats.
It seems to me we have an extremely long way to go with “communicating” with cats and the like, how in the world can we expect to converse with an equivalent alien being?
That’s a big question (heh), but I think it implies something interesting besides: how much more effort would we spend trying to commicate with Alien Cat compared with what we’re willing to expend on Earth Cat?