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Comment by ballenf | Hacker News Reader

The point is that we're one of (large number) of ant colonies and there's nothing particularly interesting about us vs. any other ant colony.

Even if ETs study ants generally, there's nothing unique about us to give us a greater than 1/(large number) chance of being studied.

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This. And to add my own expansion to this, the number of ants studied by humans is effectively zero.

First, out of all the ant biomass, humans have only seen a very, very tiny amount. Ants are so numerous, and so ubiquitous, Google claims 10 billion billion. Yet this number seems incredibly low, for apparently (wikipedia) some ant colonies have 100s of millions of workers.

Regardless, as a human, can you imagine trying to visit each ant colony? How about if you lived just as long as an ant, or thereabouts? Say, a few years?

How about ant colonies which appear, die off? And how about the fact that ants have been around since the dinosaurs, and our modern civilisation has been around for a few hundred?

And how about if you are a researcher? Let's say you stand back, and watch the ants. Do the ants even notice? Especially the main colony?

Or are you looking at a few out of endless numbers? What do they report when they get back. Do you even need to be near the ant colony to watching them?

And after you've looked at 100 ant colonies, do you need to look at another 1000? Million? We keep discovering subtle branches of insects, so why would a.. I dunno, being comprised of energy, find different (after the first 1000) in a species with a bunch of meaty limbs?

You just made me feel a little sorry for all those millions of ants who get back to their colonies and get ostracized for wild stories of giant aliens stomping on their brothers and lighting them on fire with concentrated beams of light.

On the bright side, their version of "Ancient Aliens" is probably a lot more factual and based in reality.

We have devoted large amounts of time and resources to studying the differences between seemingly similar ant colonies, and we have lived alongside ants for our entire existence as a species.

Imagine now that we had never seen an ant, had a totally different biological origin to the ants, and had no idea why they did what they do because we had no cultural conception of them as an entity.

We’d only be more interested in ants.

We might not be unique in those senses. If DNA and carbon based life is the standard then we are likely more similar to most life in the universe even if we have small differences in physiology or culture. We don’t share a direct biological origin but we are still made of the same stuff, probably originated under very similar conditions, etc. Unique forms of life likely develop under equally rare conditions in exotic environments. We’re probably just run of the mill meat bags.

I disagree that Aliens even if we share the exact same building blocks would look similar to us. For example even for planets that would be habitable for us would have minor differences in atmospheric pressure, gravity, the types of radiation their star produces would result in drastically different evolutionary paths. Also even if there was a clone of our solar system evolution would be random and the life would look different from each other, I mean look at Australia, or even look at Earth's history the fauna during the Jurassic looks way different than what we have today.

Every snowflake is unique [1]. That doesn't mean you study every snowflake that means you study the system that makes snowflakes.

[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atm...

Small differences here means within the realm of what’s possible to build out of organic molecules. We’re talking about averaging life across the span of a galaxy. By unique and exotic I meant unlikely life forms like Boltzmann brains or sentient planets. We are probably one out of a million sentient, organic, sexually reproducing species. Once you’ve seen a few thousands of these you’re probably bored.

This is missing the point. We might be interested in ants, but the ants would not be interested in us, because ants cannot understand us.

We can prod and research ant hills all we want. But all ants will ever see are some unexpected occurrences - maybe a very unusual scent which they can't place, or some food which wasn't there earlier, or an unexpected plague of ant death - which they will forget almost instantly.

It will never occur to ant-kind that they're even being studied, because ants have no concept of what "being studied" means.

There is nothing at all in the ant (hill) mind capable of understanding that a creature like a human might exist, never mind how to communicate with it.

So we can do what we like, and we will remain not just invisible, but unthinkable - forever.

I don't know about that - we don't have any real scale equivalence in actual life forms so I'll use celestial objects as an example. The movement of other planets has almost no impact on our daily lives - the moon may impact the tides and the sun leads to our day night cycle but we can't effectively impact that and so, for the average person, life goes on without more than a momentary thought given to how things are going on up there. Though, we are all vaguely aware that we could suddenly and arbitrarily be killed by an asteroid impact (much like a colony being arbitrarily chosen to become some kid's ant-farm - or being run over by a truck) it isn't in the front of our minds because we need to get back to filling out that TPS report.

Still, as a society, we have a number of dedicated individuals that do study celestial movements and would try and prevent a sudden asteroid impact, and we all do remain vaguely aware of what's going on up there. So I'm not certain how much I agree with the fact that ants cannot understand us. Sure we can't sit down and have tea with an ant and talk about the weather, but if the moon was a gigantic dragon that just moved really slowly in a mostly predictable manner then how we interact with it might not be particularly distinguishable from how we interact with it when it's just a chunk of rock.

A good parallel to think of here is probably Discworld, I might suggest reading The Light Fantastic if you never had to get a bit of a sense of how we might interact with celestially sized lifeforms and just how one-sided that relationship could potentially be.

Last time a new mammal was discovered here it was international news.

If an alien civilisation has trillions of trillions individuals, there must be quite a bit of them interested in any possible niche. This assumes that an interstellar species would be naturally curious.

There are, literally, millions of planets that can sustain life as we know it. Assuming a human-like mind, that alone is enough to reduce the interest in alien life as something mundane.

>There are, literally, millions of planets that can sustain life as we know it.

There are probably x amount of planets that can sustain life as we know it. We haven't even verified the existence of millions of planets.

https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/counts_detail... shows only 4331 confirmed exoplanets, of those we've visited 0 and are still largely guessing as to their atmospheres, weather, temperatures, seismic activity, etc. Not to mention some we've found in the "goldilocks" zone are likely regularly sterilized due to the conditions of their orbit and their stars.

There are literally millions of species on Earth, and each one has a scientist interested in it.

That would imply that there are also lots of alien worlds that are similarly developed to us and those might be interested.

We don’t seem likely to leave the solar system any time soon, so that could easily be the case. Especially if there is any lag between detecting say radio waves or whatever they find interesting and a ship showing up.

The other consideration is visiting other stars may be possible and extremely expensive. Colonizing at say 0.001c is possible, but very slow and likely requires generation ships. Hardly worth it so your descendent can visit some primitive culture who might not be around when they get there.

> There's nothing particularly interesting about us vs. any other ant colony.

I'd hope not. 'Interesting' ant colonies sometimes get molten aluminium poured down them to make a cast of the nest.

But if there are so many ant colonies like us (and I would say we're very interested in alien life) then I would assume at least some of them would be interested in us too.

we are an ant colony on our own island.

we may not study all ant colonies on the planet, but we certainly check all islands, and if there are ants, we will at least check if those ants are the same as other ants we have already seen.

Our ant colony might be sitting inside a terrarium on some aliens desk...

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