@bored said in Life... in outer space!:
@arkandel said in Life... in outer space!:
@bored said in Life... in outer space!:
@arkandel I have some issues with the anthill thing. Human explorers may not have stopped to talk to ants, but they knew that they were there, alive, and in some way part of the same existence. Fast forward only a very short while, and we sure try talking to apes, whales... dogs, cats (and some entomologist, probably, yes, ants).
That's kind of the point though. To an alien life form capable of reaching out to us in the first place we would be the ants in that scenario, not the apes or dogs and cats.
I get the analogy, but I think its scale is incorrect. It seems improbable that a sentient, type II+ civilization would be technologically incapable and/or disinterested in communicating with a sentient, type .7 civilization, particularly having gone through the very same process and questions. It only real works with some arbitrary, Star Trek prime directive style narrative, or if the other life form is incomprehensibly alien.
At the same time, we scrutinize every grain of dust we recover within our own solar system. We're not just looking for ants, but microbes.
I would say the chance is very high that we might miss a theoretical life form when we first (or second or third...) encounter it because we are looking for a paradigm similar to our own. It could be anything - and as for any communication, a good example from that OP article was taking ten years to say 'hello'; to us it would sound like white noise.
I feel like this hits the same problem. Their tech is vastly better, they probably understand (and have previously used) something analogous to our tech. They can surpass ridiculous, possibly absolute limits like relativity, but they can't work out how to communicate with a lesser life form that nonetheless possesses structured language, EM communication technology, etc?
This presumes that advancement in technology comes qwith a consistent and uninterrupted understanding of how that advancement came to be, but we're talking about a hypothetical civilization/species that has thrived technologically for (if we're using the hypothetical Planet X from the OP link) billions of years. It's easy for mne to imagine them communicating in a way that makes our communication seem painfully and impossibly primitive, much the same way we see ants communicating. Ants communicate via pheromones, IIRC, something that the ancestors of humans may or may not have done--we certainly didn't always communicate via verbal speech and writing.
I feel like your assumption also includes that the civilization stops evolving biologically once it starts developing technology, but that's probably not right either. In the past, what, million years, we've evolved quite a lot--imagine what we might look like, be like, how we might communicate and process basic thought in a billion years.
Humans today might seem as incomprehensibly basic to those future "humans" as ants seem to us now.
