4 ms·
Apes use very similar senses, but our brain gives us the advantage of deriving more from those same senses. Similarly, aliens might be able to process the data
by state_less 8y ago
Apes use very similar senses, but our brain gives us the advantage of deriving more from those same senses. Similarly, aliens might be able to process the data better, or gather and process more data than we can.
In a sense, we are alien compared to our ancestors of hundreds of years ago. Our technology extended our natural sensors and we started to learn more about our place in the solar system, galaxy, super cluster and so on. We learned more about physics too. I suspect there is more to the story and more advanced aliens would have some surprising things to say about the nature of our universe. We might have difficulty understanding it if there is a large knowledge gap though.
- lisper 8y agoWe really have only one significant evolutionary advantage over apes and that is our ability to reason symbolically, i.e. to use language and math. We got that hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that, plus the invention of writing, turned us into Turing machines. That's as far as you can go in this universe unless you can somehow evolve a quantum computer, but that seems exceedingly unlikely. It's hard to imagine an environment where there would be an evolutionary advantage to being able to factor large primes. Aliens might have made significant scientific and social progress over us (most likely) but we will have no trouble coming up to speed if we get access to their libraries. It's a lot harder to figure something out for the first time than it is to learn it once someone else has figured it out.