5 ms·

This makes me think of primitive humans working together to kill large animals for food. Super dangerous and only possible when working together. Perhaps one

by custos 10y ago

This makes me think of primitive humans working together to kill large animals for food. Super dangerous and only possible when working together. Perhaps one day, thousands of years from now, technologically advanced dolphins will one day watch us doing the same thing again, and they will have a similar article about us!

npongratz 10y ago
> Perhaps one day, thousands of years from now, technologically advanced dolphins will one day watch us doing the same thing again, and they will have a similar article about us! I'd be curious to know how much of human technical advancement was thanks to the ability to relatively easily smelt metal, and whether the inability to easily smelt underwater creates an impediment to technical advancement of species living underwater.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Humans were doing pretty good already in the late stone age.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    An ocean environment would wreak havoc or greatly inconvenience on all of the materials of stone age technology.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  Seawater also plays hell with ropes and hide. You can't construct with stone, because it sinks to the bottom, and the silty bottom is a rotten foundation. You can't build with wood because it floats away, it will soften and weather quickly, and things will eat it quickly. You can't wear tools, as that ruins your streamlining, and fast swimmers will generate high drag forces on anything they wear. The ocean isn't a good place for tool building!
  - landryraccoon 10y ago
    Perhaps in a future age, spacefaring civilizations will say the same thing about primitive life forms living at the bottom of gravity wells. How can you get anywhere with so much gravity holding you down?
    - stcredzero 10y ago
      You can still build edged tools, weapons, clocks, and computers at the bottom of a gravity well. Being aquatic is completely different -- the environment often keeps you from evolving manipulators for building tools. Even if you evolve the manipulators, the environment automatically degrades the value of the tools.
  - xherberta 10y ago
    Interesting thought! On the other hand, what is the point of building stuff if you don't need protection from rain and snow, vast swaths of ocean are just the right temperature for you, you can sleep with half your brain at a time while swimming, and you are not interested in stockpiling food for later? I have a feeling that what dolphins lack in material culture, they make up for in social life, poetry, philosophy, and music. They're probably looking at us with pity: "Their pod dynamics wouldn't be such a mess if only they didn't waste so much time and effort building stuff..." (Okay, okay, I know a lot of you people love building stuff...) If anyone's interested, I really enjoyed Voices in the Ocean by Susan Casey as a look into how advanced dolphins may actually be. She explores scientific facts and even interviews "kooky" new-age people who swim with dolphins daily to get their POV. I was convinced that at least there are dimensions to dolphins' lives that traditional marine biologists are totally unprepared to touch.
- eru 10y ago
  Humans were already pretty handy with wood, leather and stones. No underwater species has made it that far. (No idea whether there's any wood equivalent underwater.)
  - douche 10y ago
    > Humans were already pretty handy Having opposable thumbs is a pretty big deal. One Arthur Clarke short story that has always weirdly stuck with me is "Second Dawn" - which revolves around super-intelligent telepathic horse-like aliens, who have sadly limited technology because they only have hooves.
- dom0 10y ago
  Eh, smelting metal isn't easy. Even primitive smelting and forging is complex and needs a lot of experience to get right.
maxxxxx 10y ago
I think this very possible. Maybe not a thousand years but give it a few million.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
We will be able to speak with dolphins within 40 years because of augmented reality. 20 for the hardware/software foundation and 20 to raise adolescents who are adapted the augmentation. The only reason we haven't been able to communicate with them is we haven't found a good mutually comprehensible input medium for them. HMDs could be it, positional audio might help. But either way VR as a metaphor for UI will get researchers thinking in new ways about input as we go deeper into VR ourselves. Presence will be the Rosetta Stone for animal language. "You are here and this is happening" is orders of magnitude harder to ignore as an atom of communication than a computer screen on the wall of a talk. We will be able to record entire naturalistic experiences of a dolphin, and then give them an AR keyboard to play back arbitrary slices of it in sequence, and do the same for their friends. Early dolphin language will look like hip hop music or poetry in structure (a pastiche of samples), and we will quickly find out whether they have the neuroanatomy for grammar.
- coldcode 10y ago
  Then they will take our spaceships and leave the solar system and thank us for the fish.
- xherberta 10y ago
  You say "the only reason," but I'm not sure. I think one barrier may be that we're not that interesting to them. Perhaps, rather than sending literal-minded scientists to attempt communication, we ought to send poets and musicians. I read of a recording of an upset, irate dolphin's sounds. When slowed down significantly, it was clear the dolphin was mimicking it's trainer's reprimands. So, one clue is that their processing speed is way higher than ours. I also read of a researcher who set out with a box that could make dolphin sounds, and she wanted to teach dolphins to say names she has made up for three objects, with disappointing results. But I'm wondering... these are creatures that can be taught a command that means "innovate" - do something different that you haven't shown me yet today. A rule of their language might be never to use the same word twice. Also, dolphins are aware of one another's sonar. So, they would never need to vocalize "Look at that over there." They already know what pod-mates are paying attention to. Possibly they wouldn't find it interesting to use nouns to refer to things that are already obvious on the pod's echolocation radar. Their verbal channel might deal with less concrete things like mood, nuance, intuition, and humor.

by custos 10y ago

npongratz 10y ago

> Perhaps one day, thousands of years from now, technologically advanced dolphins will one day watch us doing the same thing again, and they will have a similar article about us! I'd be curious to know how much of human technical advancement was thanks to the ability to relatively easily smelt metal, and whether the inability to easily smelt underwater creates an impediment to technical advancement of species living underwater.

maxerickson 10y ago
Humans were doing pretty good already in the late stone age.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  An ocean environment would wreak havoc or greatly inconvenience on all of the materials of stone age technology.
stcredzero 10y ago
Seawater also plays hell with ropes and hide. You can't construct with stone, because it sinks to the bottom, and the silty bottom is a rotten foundation. You can't build with wood because it floats away, it will soften and weather quickly, and things will eat it quickly. You can't wear tools, as that ruins your streamlining, and fast swimmers will generate high drag forces on anything they wear. The ocean isn't a good place for tool building!
- landryraccoon 10y ago
  Perhaps in a future age, spacefaring civilizations will say the same thing about primitive life forms living at the bottom of gravity wells. How can you get anywhere with so much gravity holding you down?
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    You can still build edged tools, weapons, clocks, and computers at the bottom of a gravity well. Being aquatic is completely different -- the environment often keeps you from evolving manipulators for building tools. Even if you evolve the manipulators, the environment automatically degrades the value of the tools.
- xherberta 10y ago
  Interesting thought! On the other hand, what is the point of building stuff if you don't need protection from rain and snow, vast swaths of ocean are just the right temperature for you, you can sleep with half your brain at a time while swimming, and you are not interested in stockpiling food for later? I have a feeling that what dolphins lack in material culture, they make up for in social life, poetry, philosophy, and music. They're probably looking at us with pity: "Their pod dynamics wouldn't be such a mess if only they didn't waste so much time and effort building stuff..." (Okay, okay, I know a lot of you people love building stuff...) If anyone's interested, I really enjoyed Voices in the Ocean by Susan Casey as a look into how advanced dolphins may actually be. She explores scientific facts and even interviews "kooky" new-age people who swim with dolphins daily to get their POV. I was convinced that at least there are dimensions to dolphins' lives that traditional marine biologists are totally unprepared to touch.
eru 10y ago
Humans were already pretty handy with wood, leather and stones. No underwater species has made it that far. (No idea whether there's any wood equivalent underwater.)
- douche 10y ago
  > Humans were already pretty handy Having opposable thumbs is a pretty big deal. One Arthur Clarke short story that has always weirdly stuck with me is "Second Dawn" - which revolves around super-intelligent telepathic horse-like aliens, who have sadly limited technology because they only have hooves.
dom0 10y ago
Eh, smelting metal isn't easy. Even primitive smelting and forging is complex and needs a lot of experience to get right.

maxxxxx 10y ago

I think this very possible. Maybe not a thousand years but give it a few million.

erikpukinskis 10y ago

We will be able to speak with dolphins within 40 years because of augmented reality. 20 for the hardware/software foundation and 20 to raise adolescents who are adapted the augmentation. The only reason we haven't been able to communicate with them is we haven't found a good mutually comprehensible input medium for them. HMDs could be it, positional audio might help. But either way VR as a metaphor for UI will get researchers thinking in new ways about input as we go deeper into VR ourselves. Presence will be the Rosetta Stone for animal language. "You are here and this is happening" is orders of magnitude harder to ignore as an atom of communication than a computer screen on the wall of a talk. We will be able to record entire naturalistic experiences of a dolphin, and then give them an AR keyboard to play back arbitrary slices of it in sequence, and do the same for their friends. Early dolphin language will look like hip hop music or poetry in structure (a pastiche of samples), and we will quickly find out whether they have the neuroanatomy for grammar.

coldcode 10y ago
Then they will take our spaceships and leave the solar system and thank us for the fish.
xherberta 10y ago
You say "the only reason," but I'm not sure. I think one barrier may be that we're not that interesting to them. Perhaps, rather than sending literal-minded scientists to attempt communication, we ought to send poets and musicians. I read of a recording of an upset, irate dolphin's sounds. When slowed down significantly, it was clear the dolphin was mimicking it's trainer's reprimands. So, one clue is that their processing speed is way higher than ours. I also read of a researcher who set out with a box that could make dolphin sounds, and she wanted to teach dolphins to say names she has made up for three objects, with disappointing results. But I'm wondering... these are creatures that can be taught a command that means "innovate" - do something different that you haven't shown me yet today. A rule of their language might be never to use the same word twice. Also, dolphins are aware of one another's sonar. So, they would never need to vocalize "Look at that over there." They already know what pod-mates are paying attention to. Possibly they wouldn't find it interesting to use nouns to refer to things that are already obvious on the pod's echolocation radar. Their verbal channel might deal with less concrete things like mood, nuance, intuition, and humor.