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Comment by hans1729 | Hacker News Reader

Ants are interesting because of the complex behavioral systems emerging from their comparatively simple biological systems, reminiscent of the game of life.

Seeing the insane complexity of the human condition (look at the amount of scientific disciplines we come up with) and thinking "nay, this won't be interesting to a higher mind" feels awfully dismissive.

sure, depending on the leap of sophistication we may appear like... rocks, I guess? But I can't even begin to conceptualize to what in comparison we'd appear like rocks. Anything of that complexity probably is multiple magnitudes beyond our comprehension anyway, and therefore not really part of the discussion

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Recently I had a bunch of snails appear out of nowhere all over the garden. And I spent a whole lot of time, trying to figure out what they were feeding on, cuz some were getting really big. The whole thing was quite fascinating...like how the hell were they producing these huge ass shells without tearing all the plants apart? So I call a good buddy over (PhD in bio something or the other) thinking he would be as fascinated. And guess what...he shows up and all he wanted to do was cook them. So much for higher minds. (we didn't btw)

“Listen: I’m fascinated 23 hours a day. When I go over to a buddy’s house I just wanna eat things. Yaknow?”

How did you know they were edible? I mean, I know people eat snails in certain parts, but how did you know these were safe?

That is what you have the bio something PhD for :-)

In Germany I only ever eat helix pomatia[1]. Nowadays, they are under nature protection. Only the consumption of cultivated snails is allowed. They are related to mussels and taste similar. I can especially recommend snail cream soup.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_pomatia

I used to think I loved escargot but it turns out I actually just loved them as a delivery vessel for garlic, butter and cheese.

Snails might host Angiostrongylus cantonensis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiostrongylus_cantonensis) which can kill people

Maybe he already knew about how the snails did their thing.

Did you try talk with them? They are probably much more like us than we are like 100 billion year old civilizations. They might find us interesting to look at but the proverbial bird watcher doesn't try to sit in the nest.

I seriously doubt the human condition seems complex to a species that went through this stage a billion years ago.

Or even a million years ago.

If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals.

So the horizon of interest where an encounter would be fascinating and worth the time and effort but not devastatingly disruptive to either side is probably only a few millennia.

But let's call it +/- 10k years, to be generous.

Compare with the age of the universe, or even of the galaxy. It's really not a big proportion of the available time.

"If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals."

That's only your opinion, and it's most probably wrong. These guys were capable of feats you can only dream of. And you could be very surprised at their level of sophistication, which might appear higher than us on many levels - if not on all levels.

Quite. It’s an insult to our ancestors to dismiss their ability to use their technology.

The ruins we find around the world from previous civilisations tell us they were very smart.

> There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals.

Generally speaking, about once a year, archeologists find something that completely challenges their theories on human evolution.

https://www.livescience.com/biggest-archaeology-discoveries-...

Just the amount of engineering the Egyptians did is enough to warrant our continued fascination with their culture, some 5,000 years later.

To be fair to rocks, we also study them ...

Is astrogeology (as etymologically oxymoronic as that is) already a subject?

That's basically what asteroid science is. It's such a big field that we're even sending probes to collect rocks.

Maybe aliens will be interested in Earth for Astrogastronomy.

Sorry, no - only the consumption of cultivated humans is allowed.

How would you know that you are being cultivated?

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

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