Hacker News Reader

Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Cetaceans are considered sentient, the way humans are sentient, by a wide scientific consensus, e.g. [1]. Some degree of sentience is also assumed by the scientific community to be present in a lot of other animals [2].

Still the successes in contacting these nonhuman sentient beings, even if they gladly support such contacts, like dolphins, is very limited at best. And those are our close relatives, fellow mammals, sharing the planet with us.

Now imagine an attempt to contact a sentient being which developed and lives in an environment totally alien to humans.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-17116882 [2]: http://www.animalcognition.org/2015/03/25/the-declaration-of...

View on HN

This concept of sentience is too broad to be relevant. For there to be linguistic communication between species, both must have language.

When the issue is interstellar communications, the minimum requirements are language and the technology to send and receive information between stars.

But Cetaceans do have language? And we do have communication to some level.

> Experiments have shown that they can learn human sign language and can use whistles for 2-way human–animal communication. Phoenix and Akeakamai, bottlenose dolphins, understood individual words and basic sentences like "touch the frisbee with your tail and then jump over it" (Herman, Richards, & Wolz 1984). Phoenix learned whistles, and Akeakamai learned sign language. Both dolphins understood the significance of the ordering of tasks in a sentence. [0]

Maybe this definition of sentience is too broad, but it is worth evaluating what you can hope to achieve, by looking at the closest approximation available and what you are achieving there. And in this case, I would say "not much". We know e.g. dolphins have a language and communicate, we can very coarsely decipher it, and they can learn to broadly decipher a language we engineered for them. But the most we are achieving with this communication are party tricks in a circus.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetacean_intelligence

These sorts of discussions are bedeviled by the problem that, in English and other languages, ‘language’ has a sufficiently broad usage that one could make a case for calling cetacean vocalizations a language in some sense. I am pretty sure, however, that if they had a human-like capability for language, it would be as obvious as if chimpanzees used power tools in the wild.

The only reason that most people do not accept the obvious sentience of many animals is that they want to keep killing and eating them. It's as simple as that.

What are the expectations that a space alien race would have a language in any way similar to ours?

It only has to be able to express abstract ideas, with a power at least close to ours. Presumably, we are not going to communicate with alien species unless they have a sufficiently developed science and technology, and it is hard to imagine that without a language.

And by “a language like ours”, do you mean English? (The one language that we know you and I both have in common.) Noam Chomsky has spent a career looking for a common deep grammar for all human language, and it turns out that there is not much in common, except at the most fundamental and abstract level. Despite this, there are no human populations divided by having mutually incomprehensible languages, and maybe that is so throughout the galaxy.

Communication is easier if they developed math too.

In order for someone on another planet to be detectable by us humans with our present tech they would have to broadcast radio signals. We developed this tech a little over a century ago. And as a civilization we had plenty of opportunities to self destruct, from nuclear and biological warfare, to destroying the environment. We also have the chance of developing a "better than radio" communication method that's completely obscure to us at this point.

The window of of that civilization being detectable is squarely between them developing radio and them dying off or using some tech that we cannot discern as artificial signals. The window for us detecting them has been ~50 years so far. Given the size of the galaxy and the minuteness of that window overlap it's pretty clear the chances of communication are slim. And indeed even if we do detect something, calling it communication might really be pushing our definition of that.

We are pretty good at communicating with our pets.

Are we? Most people have no clue that their two cats hate each other (which they are most likely to do if they did not grow up together) or that their dog has chronic backpains (which many breeds do because they have overly long backs like the Dachshund) or difficulty breathing (like all breeds with short noses) or that their horse is bored to death (which they tend to be because they are kept in a much to small lot). We are pretty terrible with our pets. We just like to imagine we are not since we consider ourselves emphatic and don't hear a complaint so all must be good.

True! and you didn't even talk about fish or birds here

Reply on news.ycombinator.com