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Comment by zeroer | Hacker News Reader

> They are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.

I've often thought that while we say we would want peaceful relationships with any aliens we might find, our history of interactions with "alien" life forms on Earth paints a different picture. I'm pretty sure if we meet alien life and it's not stronger than us, somebody's going to try to eat it.

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The flip side of that is, if they are stronger than us, many would take it for granted that they would attempt to communicate with us, even though we've made no such attempt to do the same with species on our own planet.

Peter Gabriel has though tbf

http://petergabriel.com/news/the-interspecies-internet/

https://www.ted.com/talks/the_interspecies_internet_an_idea_...

We have too made lots of attempts.

Dr Doolittle style anecdotal stories and anecdotes, lots of people who talk to their pets, moving up in seriousness to attempts to teach gorillas about sign language, attempts to give animals cards they can point to to request things, or react to verbal prompting, to attempts to decode meaning from animal calls like Dolphin calls or elephant body language.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/09/dolphins-conversa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)

What we're assuming with space travelling aliens is not just that they'd want to communicate with us, but that the attempt would be obvious - a patterned radio signal - but the content not obvious.

(And if we did blanket an area with nuanced pheromones and insects responded in bulk, is that communication or is it overriding and giving compelling orders?)

It's a cookbook!

- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/TheTwilightZoneS...

and Cordwainer Smith's "From Gustible's Planet" -> http://www.vb-tech.co.za/ebooks/Smith%20Cordwainer%20-%20Fro... has humans eating the aliens.

Also: Popplers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_with_Popplers

True, at first. But then things may change.

On the other hand, they might want to eat us too, so be careful.

If I were some kind of intergalactic alien consultant, I'd definitely advise the aliens to eat us or at least bomb us from orbit.

Isn't that the advice you give to all your intergalactic clients fellellor?

Yes. I tell them all to eat me.

I hope one day the in-joke world of startup job titles will produce an "intergalactic alien consultant" :)

It's just a shame all the probes we've sent extrasolar have been roughly in the ecliptic. Otherwise we might've seen some sign of the warning beacons that girdle the system, advising travelers to stay well clear of the inner planets and on no account approach the third, lest its natives attempt to eat and/or copulate with all aboard, and possibly also steal your FTL drive. As the universe has learned from the experience of one itinerant journalist in particular, of all the places in any galaxy where you might find yourself marooned, among the very last you'd choose is the kind of planet where the locals named it "dirt".

> where the locals named it "dirt"

Well, I mean. It IS mostly dirt. At least the parts where humans lived the most when it was being named. It also had a god or demigod status for many early cultures (and some current ones, I'm sure). It's not like we never realised the importance of dirt.

I don't have a problem with that, provided that the eating is not preceded by any slaughtering.

I can even imagine death rites wherein the deceased is consumed by high-prestige members of the other species as a final status symbol, or fed to low-prestige individuals as an act of charity, or by friends and co-workers, or by one's most effective enemy or rival--maybe as host for a brood of the other's larval offspring.

There are a variety of reasons why cannibalism may become taboo, and plenty of examples in non-cannibal cultures where dead people are allowed to be consumed by other species, whether those are carrion birds, sharks, arthropods, or fungi and bacteria. If your body isn't embalmed or mummified when you die, it's pretty much going to get eaten by something.

Why not get eaten by something that can appreciate your flavor and communicate its satisfaction?

OTOH there are non-human lifeforms we already spent quite some time together.

Sure, cats and dogs and other pets have always been the junior partners in those relationships.

Which made me wonder how well humans would do in a relationship as a pet with an alien master.

I expect we'd be perfectly happy, not realising that we are the pet. Cats and dogs seem to be.

Of course that's my human arrogance, assuming the cats and dogs don't know.

The communication barrier is enough to ensure that the nature of the relationship is not necessarily agreed upon by both parties. It's like that trope in movies where someone visits another (generally less developed) culture, spends some time with them, and then discovers that they've been married into the group without realizing it.

Cats in particular are clearly not in agreement in regards to who is in charge in our relationships with them. They'll tolerate our paternalism on account of our superior size and power, but once you're no longer in the immediate vicinity compelling them they pretty much do whatever they want. They're teachable, but not really trainable.

Reminds me of the old Heinlein novel "The Star Beast", which centers around a boy and his alien pet that has been in his family for generations. It turns out that the alien is actually royalty and from her perspective she's been pursuing her hobby of raising "John Thomas's"

Cats and dogs are engineered¹ to be happy as pets. I wouldn't like the same to happen to us.

1 - By selection. I don't really know what to call the "engineering" where the "engineer" doesn't know he is doing it.

> Cats and dogs are engineered to be happy as pets.

Cats and dogs have evolved to be happy as pets.

Let's leave the use of 'engineered' to the creationists :)

Well, evolved due to human interference.

They were created by intelligent beings.

Like the octopus, we test for danger, then try to eat, then play. I would expect this behavior from any creature that evolved in an environment with a contest for scarce resources, alien lifeforms included.

Or more generally, test for danger, then try to use most efficiently as a resource.

Whether that resource is as food, economic benefit, recreation, friendship, etc.

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