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Comment by IkmoIkmo | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded by an idea from deGrasse Tyson, not sure if it's his... on worms, who share 70% of their DNA with us. Yet they're completely oblivious even to our presence as we walk by, forget being able to communicate with us, or grasp the intricacies of human civilisation and its history.

What are the odds then, that there may be a species not even insanely different from ourselves, which we simply cannot even observe or be cognisant of. If true, it'd make all our efforts to seek out, let alone communicate, with aliens, naively cute.

It's a fascinating idea, although I've never explored whether it has any merit. It may just be one of those ideas that sounds amazing but falls apart if more closely inspected.

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I don't think "amount of shared machine code" (DNA) is a good metric for functional similarity? What percentage of machine code do two small UNIX binaries (statically) linked against libc share? Potentially a lot. But obviously they would have next to nothing in common, functionally?

That we share so much DNA with primitive creatures is just another way of saying that amount of shared DNA is not closely related to functionality similarity.

I'll try. It's a lot easier to be hidden from the perception of something that isn't even capable of perceiving itself or its surroundings, only reacting to simple stimuli.

A lot of animals are smart enough to at least get a pretty decent picture of us.

It could maybe follow that there are beings that we would be unable to really comprehend the way we comprehend other humans. But it would also be pretty likely that we could develop models, heuristics and statistical analysis to extract meaning about these theoretically confusing aliens.

We understand quite a bit about our society- which is basically a hyper complicated animal. We deal with the gaps in absolute knowledge pretty well.

Not only that, but without careful study, we really have no idea what is going on in the worms' heads, and we can't even easily tell them apart. Even with lots of study, we still don't understand the worm's perspective.

If aliens visited us, we probably would not even recognize that they arrived, or we might see their arrival as some natural phenomena.

We best start with dogs, who at least, we can bond with.

We have a very good idea of what is going on in the heads of at least one worm species: C. Elegans. It has 302 neurons and we have mapped how they are connected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans#Researc...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/c-elegans-connecto...

Yet we have no clue what it's going to do next. Which is a serious indictment of the whole obsession with "brain mapping" and localization in neuroscience, IMO.

That seems mostly to be because we don't know the current state of a live worm very well.

I think Dr. Who and Star Trek both looked at those types of aliens. I'd guess the only type of alien we would really find hard to understand would be one that lived on a vastly different scale to us, either planet sized or nano sized. Anything from about 05.m to 20m we'd understand. Especially if it turned up in a spaceship. It would have engineering and technology and language. Work in teams, have team members etc etc.

Not necessarily. What if its a singular entity, or a hive mentality without language? What if they use a medium for communication that we do not physically possess (or even have access to via technology)?

The majority of the aliens in Star Trek always fit into the humanoid model, treating them as basic re-skinned humans with the same motivations and ideas, which is a dangerous assumption out here in the real world.

I can't imagine (maybe you can and you can comment here) that a species that can make a spaceship and cross the universe can do so without a language that we could understand.

Just to mine minerals and manufacture metal, computers, fuel, etc etc would mean co-operation on a massive scale -- millions of individuals.

Nan-bots sure, they would be talking alien wifi and machine code. Giant creatures (AIs?) that live slower than us and manufacture each component themselves without the need of help.... like spaceflight from first principles.

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