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Comment by theamk | Hacker News Reader

Here is my long thought:

People have been trying to talk to animals for thousands (tens of thousands?) of years, and no "animal myths" were discovered. Some researchers have dedicated their live trying to understand the animals (story mentions one of them), but still got nothing useful. I think it's fair to assume there is nothing to find there at all.

And alien life is not special in that regard - if we are able to successfully contact aliens, and then many thousands of people spend a century or two interchanging the messages with them, and all this would yield same artifacts that most Earth's 5-year-old kids can produce... then people would lose interest in aliens as well, and stop building things like Arecibo.

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> but still got nothing useful. I think it's fair to assume there is nothing to find there at all.

It's a good thing people who accomplish great things don't think like that or we'd have no science at all, because for millions of years we didn't. If they did, they would have had to conclude it isn't possible to predict the future. Yet here we are, knowing why apples fall (or whatever.)

Some people searched for structure of the atom, and found great things. Other searched for perpetuum mobile, and found nothing. We know that they will never find anything, but it does not stop them, there are still youtube videos being made today.

It's important to tell former from latter. Unexplored things are not the same as things that have been explored and found false.

People started searching for the structure of the atom in like 400 BC and didn't make any progress until they knew how. We know why perpetual motion isn't going to be found, so there's no reason to look for it in the first place. This isn't a relevant argument.

Searching for animal intelligence certainly feels like an exhaustive search of all possible perpetual motion machines, and similarly, people keep on enthusiastically nearly finding it. And of course this is plagued by a lack of a good definition, and crows unlocking puzzles and other animals doing other scraps of smart stuff.

It seems like nonsense to be searching for things without perfectly clear criteria. Don't look for things if you don't know what you're looking for, or at least don't call it "looking for", just call it what it is: "poking around and brainstorming."

Though perpetual motion is reasoned to be false, rather than declared false because statistically we never had any luck trying, or by an exhaustive search of all possible perpetual motion machines.

It isn't just statistics and bad luck for PM inventors. There are physical reasons arguing strongly that it's impossible.

That is what the person you're responding to meant.

That's what I said. How are you reading the opposite?

You're right: you said "statistically we never had any luck trying, or by an exhaustive search of all possible perpetual motion machines." as an antithesis.

I took "reasoned to be false" as sort of a weak and refutable statement.

There's plenty to find. Ask any dog or cat owner.

I think if your 4-year-old aliens were found, many humans would find them charming and fun pen pals (assuming they're not dangerous).

It would be useful as the fly by of Pluto, where we finally found out things we couldn't possibly have known looking from here.

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