Just something I have been wondering about. I was torn between GQ and GD.
Hypothetical: Both earth and Mars support life, and both planets develop intelligent life on roughly the same timescale, such that their life is in something equivalent to hunter-gatherer at about the same time as humans on earth; development of written language on roughly the same time scale, large cities develop at around the same time, etc.
Assuming the scenario above, what do people think:
-At what point in our development do we notice that there’s people on that there planet?
-Given this clear drive, how soon can we make contact (via radio, presumably)? Can any linguists comment on whether we could learn each others languages with only radio contact?
-How much sooner can we get something to Mars? (Could be a probe, not necessarily a person)
-How soon could we get a person there? Would we rush into it, or would we have the forethought to think about things like sharing microbes (=maybe really bad)?
-Do you think we develop a friendly neighbors relationship, or given our nature, do we find a way to go negative?
-How do you think this impacts international relationships here on earth? Does it drive us to a single unified government?
Any other thoughts?
I recognize this is a bit of self-indulgent daydreaming, but it’s just something I wonder about sometimes. I also recognize that this is extremely speculative; this knowledge would likely alter the arc of technology, and we can probably only attempt to answer from the earth’s perspective.
About the time we develop telescopes powerful enough to see Martian cities – say, the late 19th Century, the time in our timeline when Percival Lowell “saw” what he interpreted as “canals” on Mars – or perhaps the early 20th, because spotting a Martian city would probably take a better telescope than Lowell had.
Communicating with strange humans is easy because there are so many human universals. Ways of thinking, you point at something I look, facial expressions, emotions, mouth noises, similar taboos. Aliens might not even have faces, or bilateral symmetry, or make noises, or have our sense organs. They might echolocate, communicate with chemicals, or tactile touch. They might want to talk by rubbing a sense organ across your body, then they realize humans are abominations that should be destroyed. Or maybe they’d insist we start worshiping their lord and savior. She is very particular on how you exchange spermatophores and arrange your egg sacs.
We couldn’t even see the craters on Mars before we got a probe there. I doubt that we’d see any evidence of civilisation until the development of interplanetary rockets.
Well, I’d posit any intelligent life capable of building civilization on par with 19th or 20th century human civilization would need to be able to interact with the universe visually. Only being able to communicate via physical touch would be a big limiter on development of industrialized civilization.
I think there’s necessities in interacting with the physical world required to reach a certain level of technological sophistication which would be difficult and maybe impossible for a species that could only communicate via echolocation, touch, or through chemical reactions of some sort. Now, it might be possible for them to become some sort of terrifying spacefaring amoeba like people that infect other planets or something, but the OP posits civilization equivalent to that found on earth in terms of technology.
So given an assumed ability to communicate visually, we’d be able to establish some form of meaningful communication first by expressing universal constants, like geometry and its properties. For them to have developed up to a 19th or 20th century technology they’d need to know geometry, and shapes are universal and their mathematicians and scientists would know basic universal geometric principles from which they could probably extrapolate the meaning of notations we sent along with diagrams of those basic principles.
But if Percival Lowell spotted clouds and oceans, then there would be a lot of speculation about civilization. And invasion.
Running with the OP, I’d imagine the 2 societies would not be in perfect sync. (He assumes the 2 planets are within, say, 1000 years of each other -don’t fight the hypothetical!- but it’s easy to imagine them or us being 50-500 years offset from one another in the 20th century. So maybe they would have orbiters around Earth when Lowell published his sketches.
Are shapes universal ? Or are they a product of the human brain ? I believe there are all sorts of edge detection capabilities in primate brains, what if the Martians simply haven’t got that ?
Yes, geometry is universal, as are shapes. That being said yes, some intelligent beings would be unable to recognize them. But again, the OP posits a civilization “like to our own” in technological development.
Higher level civilization, to me, must require the ability to view the world in the visual spectrum. Look at all the stuff the ancient Romans and Greeks built, those engineering feats represent early civilization and we can assume a civilization “like to our own” would have similar early milestones. All of those require basic engineering, and basic engineering requires the ability to plan out your construction in advance, which requires visualization. I don’t see a way that a species which have no edge detection, or who only “see” via physical touch or smell, would be able to create diagrams complex enough to manage big construction projects involving dozens of designers and manage thousands of workers. The Roman Empire, gone some 1500 years, ran on mountains of paperwork. I don’t see how complex societies run without it, and it’d be difficult to transmit written information efficiently in a species without visual recognition.
Some animals do learn a ton more from smell than we ever could (dogs on a walk stop to sniff interesting areas specifically because they learn a lot from smells that we could never comprehend), but that’s not the same as being able to encode information about length, width, and other properties of a proposed piece of construction for planning purposes. I think that it’s just simply not possible without human like ability to view and diagram the physical reality to reach a civilization “like to ours.”
Transmit a series of prime numbers*, or of whole numbers followed by their squares and cubes. If the Martians are advanced enough to have radio technology, they’re bound to recognize those things as evidence of intelligent minds.
Got that one from 2001: A Space Odyssey – the book, that is, by Arthur C. Clarke.
It might be possible to make out city lights, but maybe not given that Earth only sees a thin sliver of the post-dusk or pre-dawn Martian night side when the planets are at quadrature.
But, as soon as the Martians get as far as electric lighting, wouldn’t city lights be visible whenever Earthling telescopes are trained on the night side of the planet?
Shapes are pretty much universal, yes. There’s no arrangement of three lines with touching endpoints that isn’t a triangle. Parallel is a property only if two lines extended to infinity will never intersect. Perpendicular lines will always define a 90-degree angle, and perpendicular is the only way for two intersecting straight lines to have the same angle on every side of the intersection.
Even a species without a sense of sight wouldn’t get anywhere technologically unless they had a way to recognize basic geometry.
It would be pretty hard to do any serious engineering without a solid basis in geometry. Some of that may not impact the sciences directly, but a society that can’t build a working bridge is going to be limited in an economic sense, and the sciences all depend to some degree on a certain surplus of economic activity. In a computer game sense, it’s just one of the prerequisites on which the rest of your society depends.
I would also question the intelligence of any species that never formulated geometry. A geometric proof is logic, math, spatial reasoning all in one. Even if it’s useless as a stand-alone skill, it’s part of the fundamentals.
Anyway, where would trigonometry be without geometry? And where is electromagnetism without a sine function? Where is chemistry without electromagnetic tools like NMR? Maybe you could get those things without ever figuring out Euclid, but I’m not convinced.
