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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I find it amusing to think dolphin/human is a prototype for communicating with ET. Seems to me ant/Toyota would be more likely... and we're the ants.

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We've only been capable of even low earth orbit for 52 years from a recorded history of civilisation of a good few thousand years, archaeological evidence pointing at a few hundreds of thousands of years of species existence and hundreds of millions of years of advanced multicellular life forms.

The technology that enabled us to reach LEO also enabled incredibly destrictive wars including a near-apocalypse in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It also required resource use in such a way to sigificantly alter the natural environment and, in some scenarios, significantly threaten our survivability.

I've no idea if there's other worlds out there capable of supporting advanced multicellular life (though it seems far from impossible). I've no idea if any of them are presently inhabited with such life. Based on the timings alone though, it seems far from impossible that the level of advanced civilisation to enable interstellar communication is sufficiently short-lived and accident-prone as to entirely preclude it from happening.

Or - we might as well just enjoy working out how to chat with Dolphins.

Personally I think that's assuming too much. We know so little about what life is like even if sentience has evolved on other planets that pretty much everything is pure speculation.

Also, slightly contradictarily, natural selection/evolution don't provide much pressure for a species to change after it's gotten wildly successful. Have we had any physiological brain changes since agriculture? Not really. And now that medicine is becoming so effective, natural selection doesn't really work on the fitness of people, just their ability to have more children.

So, I don't think ET will be vastly more intelligent than us without having to resort to redesigning itself.

> I don't think ET will be vastly more intelligent than us

I'm not so sure. In that scenario, there's something that we're communicating with, right? Given humanity's limited capacity in that regard, the mere fact that we've found something that can reciprocate would, to me, indicate that it's likely to be a little further along than we are.

It's really a matter of who goes to whom. If we meet aliens on our turf, well, they had to get here somehow. And since we can't really get there too easily, they must be a bit better off.

Distance travelled can be a measure of many things (technology, wealth, ambition) but not intelligence.

We can't say that X achievement in distance shows intelligence higher than ours just because we haven't matched it yet.

Extremely valid point. Though isn't it possible they could have advanced in certain fields that we never or haven't advanced in and vice versa?

I think the fact that he used "Toyota" as the alien was kind of a nod at the idea that they would probably be a self-designed sentience a la your "redesigning."

Also, re: "ability to have more children"--that is exactly what the evolutionary definition of fitness is. Your concept of fitness as an animal that's strong and smart and whatever else is purely a byproduct of that definition.

I thought Toyota as a corporation would make for a more interesting example.

>Also, slightly contradictarily, natural selection/evolution don't provide much pressure for a species to change after it's gotten wildly successful.

It provides pressure for the species to change to adapt to its wild success (e.g. to become "fat and lazy"). That development of the wild success may also lead to significantly changed conditions (e.g. global warming as a result of the wild success of homo sapiens)

>Have we had any physiological brain changes since agriculture?

it is only 10000 years, and yes, we had. The physiological changes are observable even for the last 100 years.

>And now that medicine is becoming so effective, natural selection doesn't really work on the fitness of people, just their ability to have more children.

that phrase sounds like oxymoron.

Anyway, natural selection is like Newton's laws - it can't be turned off. It works non-stop. It ensures fitness to whatever current conditions are. In particular, right now, it ensures fitness of human species to the condition of "medicine is becoming so effective".

I'd counter with: Natural selection in the classic sense ceases to have any meaning in an environment where all members of a species survive into adolescence, and reproduce.

Now natural selection is still occurring, but it may be leading to specization rather than intra-species evolution.

>I'd counter with: Natural selection in the classic sense ceases to have any meaning in an environment where all members of a species survive into adolescence, and reproduce.

That just even more shifts the weight of human species selection machinery from r-selection (muliple, and thus more diverse, offsprinfgs, i.e. selection mainly by the best static fit) to K-selection - selection mainly by the best ability for behavioral adaptation. Ie. the natural selection, in the classical sense, is still there. It is the most important traits for defining best fit that are changing.

"natural selection/evolution don't provide much pressure for a species to change after it's gotten wildly successful"

Define "wildly successful". Humans have clearly changed overtime. Look at the color of skin relative to geography. The closer to the equator you get the darker people get. That's natural selection. Another example is sickle cell and malaria. Natural selection in action!

Look at modern domesticated dogs. They've all evolved from wolves in a fairly short time frame.

Practically the existence of other extraterrestrial life forms can't really affect humanity that much.The closest star is over 4 light years away. I doubt communication would be very successful with a 4 year gap between any response. Any physical travel would be incomparably slow, so I doubt any life form would be able to intentionally visit Earth. So we are pretty much limited to searching for life in our solar system.

I dunno. Empires have been built where it took months to communicate with the outer edges. Until pretty recently, it might have taken years for news of a scientific discovery to reach another country.

Instant communication is a nice luxury, but it's by no means essential.

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