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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

I love ideas like that, but I'd expect us to learn North Sentinelese from passive remote drone observations before we can manage a different species.

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I don’t know. I’m very much waiting for the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) to release their first set of results.

Disagree. Animal training and behavior is a vast field of research humans have studied for hundreds of years. We're not starting from scratch. And we already interact with orcas constantly, based on these reports. It would be straightforward to experiment.

Interacting in any way with the North Sentinel folks is forbidden.

I mean, apart from a few kidnapped ones in the 1800's, few Sentinelese have ever interacted with the rest of us.

Human-Orca contact, on the other hand, is relatively common.

And the main way the Sentinelese prefer to interact with the rest of the world is with hails of arrows.

Quite possibly for the same reason as the orcas…

So why would we expect to learn to communicate with the Sentinelese first, rather than the species we're already in contact with?

Contact is not the same as communication and understanding of language, which is what the original commenter was referring to.

Yes, but we already communicate with orcas, and with the Sentinelese we can't communicate with them because we can't contact them. Communication and understanding of language are two different things. I have great communication with my dog, both ways.

> but we already communicate with orcas

Not really. And again, the person was referring to Sentinelese the language and not the people and thus was referring to orcas' languages.

Because every time in history a new group of humans was discovered we could eventually communicate, but have so far managed to talk to exactly zero fish despite constant contact?

This might be stunning news, but Orcas aren’t fish, they are mammals

Haven't talked to any non-domesticated mammals either, and even the domesticated ones are a bit of a stretch.

I've talked to a non-domesticated animal.

The wolf didn't even look up, much less reply.

Joking aside, between this and Neuralink, how close are we to cybernetic uplifting?

I'm pretty sure the orcas can understand a message of "not here" or "not boats like this".

Apparently humans do not understand a message of "stop taking our food or the boat gets it".

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