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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Ants can live in the middle of a city and have no idea what a city is, what humans are, or what human culture is - including the Internet.

They're physically surrounded by a far more advanced civilisation and it's literally invisible to them because it's incomprehensible to the ant mind, and it doesn't communicate by leaving scent trails.

We could be living inside the alien equivalent and we'd have no idea either, because we wouldn't be able to see it - never mind understand it. Maybe once every few million years something random and inexplicable would happen, but that would be all the evidence we'd get.

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Ants aren’t capable of meta cognition though. While I agree the analogy is useful it sort of falls down when you apply it to something else. Like birds or dogs. They clearly know humans exist and how they can be manipulated or contacted. The species difference argument at that level then results in a different conclusion, that yes we can communicate but we are probably not all that interesting. Expanding on this birds and dogs don’t know human motivations. We probably don’t understand how alien aliens are. We can barely understand the motivations of others in our immediate social circle. The question we should ask ourselves then is what motivates aliens and how do we trigger that motivation to initiate contact (carefully).

I think OP chose ants because of the scale involved. Ants form full-fledged civilizations which occupy relatively small volumes of space compared to human civilizations (population size non-withstanding) and even when building around man-made structures, they might not be able to recognize these structures as non-natural.

Yeah it could be a one and/or combination of things. We can’t really know. It’s hard to think of aliens that are so advanced that couldn’t conceptualise us, do they not have fiction? If a species were born post physical or with capabilities that seemed advanced though then I think the ants analogy does apply. Something like space whales in Star Trek to us it’s intergalactic travel to them it’s swimming.

Hot take: Dark matter is space whales.

"Eksperiment" by Janusz A. Zajdel. Polish sci-fi titan equal to Lem of 'Solaris' fame :

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&tl=en&u=h... google translated ebook rip

and similarly themed "He Who Shrank" by Henry Hasse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Who_Shrank

Single ants don't have any idea, but anthills as a system probably have some kind of a working model of human activity.

For example ants often feed off garbage cans so they know how the amount of garbage changes daily and weekly. I don't know how good ant systems are at generalizing and noticing patterns but if they are any good they probably know at least that about human civilization.

Do they "think" of humans as another kind of anthill - probably not. But they certainly notice and react to changes in environment caused by human activity.

The ants have built pretty impressive detectors. Nevermind the humans. Where the heck are all the other anthills? It's quite scary there is only one in a very large detection radius.

The detectors still trying to find the distinctive scent. Which gets lost in all the fumes, dust, whatnot produced by humans...

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