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Comment by szany | Hacker News Reader

Neil deGrasse Tyson brings up a good point about ETI though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-uZZ7RdL5E

"When was the last time you stopped to have a conversation with a worm?"

He's a brilliant guy, but this is a terrible example. Worms can't communicate with us, so obviously we're not going to try to have a conversation with them. If we found a worm-like species on another planet and their vocabulary consisted of nothing more than a couple hundred words, I can guarantee you we would stop and try to have a conversation with them. If a vastly superior race came upon us and we were the first species they ever found that they could communicate with, I'm pretty sure they'd do the same.

Tyson's entire point is that alien life, even life that appears to do things we associate with intelligence and language, may be so different from us that we are fundamentally unable to communicate, just like us and worms. What if their language is undetectable (or even absent) and their intelligence is inscrutable? He's assuming radical differences rather than assuming any similarity.

His point is not that we might be unable to communicate, but that we might be so comparatively stupid that communication would be laughably pointless.

Fallacious. If worms would actually reply, and converse even with very limited intelligence about their state of mind, it would lead to an entire new branch of science and new sectors of entertainment and industry.

Pets are cool.

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