The idea for this thread wasn’t really about what an actual confrontation between earthlings and aliens would look like. It’s more about government in general. Is the whole idea to ludicrous or is it an issue? In the past, organizations like the US Air Force and the FBI did investigate alleged sightings of UFOs.
At the time, they could as well have said: Look, people, there are much more important things to deal with. There is no time for such nonsense. Instead, they did investigate these “cases”.
Alien attack, Zombie attack whatever it maybe. I am actually happy to say I live in “redneck” ville. Someone comes into my neck of the woods that does not look like they belong here, folks are on their front porch with their shot guns. Never thought I would say i would happy living in an area like this, but it has its perks!
Well since you posted that at 12:16 P.M. PST and it’s now about 3:22, they’re right outside the orbit of your anus. Which means they’ll be knocking on the door any second now. I hope they have beer.
Jimmy Carter, the man who actually saw UFOs, and we won’t even mention the killer swamp bunny. Uh huh. Using his name to make something UFO-related seem “reasonable” has all the makings of a joke.
Dr. John C. Lilly (the guy famous for dolphin communication research, isolation tanks, and LSD) did some of his early dolphin communication research in the early 1960’s with U. S. government grants (from the DoD I think). His thesis was that we should learn to talk to an intelligent alien species (alien meaning non-human here), namely dolphins, as “practice” for the day we might suddenly need to have a chit-chat with visiting real alien aliens.
Somewhere in one (or both) of those books he mentions his rationale of using this research to develop prototype methods for communicating with the extraterrestrials when they came. (To be sure, he was already into LSD at the time, although I didn’t learn that until years later. He acknowledges in one of his books that he also gave LSD to the dolphins, to see what they would do.) Still, he apparently did make a good enough of a case (or a sales job) to get that government funding for his work, for a while.
The dolphin communication work (his brand of it, that is) eventually fizzled out, and the grants dried up. But he became and remained a well-established “New Age” figure for all his work, which he continued with the help of his private foundation and private donations, I guess.
ETA: From the review of Lilly on Dolphins at the Amazon page, linked above:
(I’m not sure which is the “earlier book” mentioned here. But I know I’ve seen this idea mentioned, of using the dolphin work toward communication with extraterrestrials.)
I agree with the posters that are certain that something is in place to deal with the situation, if aliens do ever show up. After all, once they’re here, it’s a little late to say: “errr, this is kind of a bad time…mind coming back next week?”
One possibility is that some nasty exterminator type species is wiping out likely competitors while keeping its own profile as intentionally low as possible. We don’t ride through shady neighborhoods shouting our address, our low level of security, and how much cool stuff we have. Yet, at the first possible chance, we start doing exactly that on a galactic level. I’m surprised we didn’t put our planetary credit card number with security password on the Voyager as well.
Of course, the best defense to (3) is that, quite honestly, we don’t really have that much cool stuff to take. Anything an alien species could take from us, they could just as easily take from a gazillion asteroids without even bothering to say “Hi.”
Unless they saw Jersey Shore and decided that, on the whole, the galaxy just doesn’t need any more dumb.
I think his premise is flawed. Dolphins and humans evolved on the same planet as carbon-based lifeforms and from the same ancestry with much of the same environment (air, water, carbon dioxide, etc.). Lifeforms from other planets share absolutely nothing in common with this one; for all we know, they may be silicon-based, and unlikely to have the same influences and environmental factors.
Expecting aliens to have anything in common with us is pure fantasy at this stage.
It might be like a linguist who was never exposed to Chinese, but was thoroughly familiar with many European languages. Encountering a new European language would pose few problems to analyze and learn, but seeing an Oriental one for the first time would be a totally new experience and the linguist would have to start from scratch.
The way I see it is this: The universe has been around for billions of years.
Now, there are some limits on how early life could have started – probably only a second-generation star would have planets rich in heavy elements, for example. And who knows what is a “typical” amount of time for intelligent life to evolve (or the probability of it happening).
But still, given the billions of years timescales it is incredibly unlikely that an extraterrestrial species will happen to be within a few millenia of human technological progress. They will much more likely be unimaginably far ahead of us, or still in their stone age (or earlier).
If a given species can travel interstellar distances, then they will likely belong to the former group.
The premise is certainly imperfect, but I don’t think we can rule out all usefulness. While dolphins and humans do have more in common than we’re likely to have with a random alien, our ability to practice learning alien languages is pretty limited right now. A dolphin is about as alien as we have access to at the moment. Might as well do what we can.
Even if it turns out to be lousy practice for talking to aliens, there are certainly uses for knowing how to talk to dolphins.
(All that said, I do fundamentally agree with your key points. Language appears to be driven by certain brain structures developmental milestones. If a human baby is deprived of language, they will never learn normal language skills because they missed the window. With so much specialized dependencies just in human-to-human communication, human-to-alien communication will require a lot of work and cooperation on both sides.)
While dolphins may be our virtual cousins and aliens are, well, alien, I still think we will be able to communicate very quickly indeed.
Firstly, what they’ll have in common is sentience. They’ll have a history of solving complex, abstract problems in their environment, and accumulating knowledge.
They’ll be damn good at it, because they’ve mastered problems as tough as interstellar flight.
Trying to understand some primitive carbon-based organism that hasn’t even opened a standard Smell Channel would be one such abstract problem for them.
Because also, secondly, such an endeavour as interstellar travel and all the other technology to support it will have required a great deal of collaboration. They will be a communicative species used to challenges like deciphering other languages or symbolic forms.
Thirdly, we will actually have some common frames of reference such as knowledge of natural laws, atomic relationships etc. So straight away there is a framework for basic communication.
Finally, and frankly, as I pointed out in post#30, they will be extremely unlikely to be near to us development-wise. Chances are, they would be godlike from our POV.
I would happily bet money (if there was any prospect of the bet being tested) that not only would they be able to decipher all human languages in no time, they’d be able to understand what (if anything) dolphins are saying as well, as well as know more about our history than we do.
