10 ms·

>We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along ou

by nend 6y ago

>We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path. Not really the most convincing argument. There are professions that study ants. And I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum that has a casual interest in observing ants. Pretty sure aliens would still be interested in us even if we were as primitive as ants.

hans1729 6y ago
Ants are interesting because of the complex behavioral systems emerging from their comparatively simple biological systems, reminiscent of the game of life. Seeing the insane complexity of the human condition (look at the amount of scientific disciplines we come up with) and thinking "nay, this won't be interesting to a higher mind" feels awfully dismissive. sure, depending on the leap of sophistication we may appear like... rocks, I guess? But I can't even begin to conceptualize to what in comparison we'd appear like rocks. Anything of that complexity probably is multiple magnitudes beyond our comprehension anyway, and therefore not really part of the discussion
- PartiallyTyped 6y ago
  To be fair to rocks, we also study them ...
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    Is astrogeology (as etymologically oxymoronic as that is) already a subject?
    - Denvercoder9 6y ago
      That's basically what asteroid science is. It's such a big field that we're even sending probes to collect rocks.
    - kridsdale1 6y ago
      Maybe aliens will be interested in Earth for Astrogastronomy.
      - liotier 6y ago
        Sorry, no - only the consumption of cultivated humans is allowed.
        madia_leva 6y ago
        How would you know that you are being cultivated?
      - jrd259 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man
- op03 6y ago
  Recently I had a bunch of snails appear out of nowhere all over the garden. And I spent a whole lot of time, trying to figure out what they were feeding on, cuz some were getting really big. The whole thing was quite fascinating...like how the hell were they producing these huge ass shells without tearing all the plants apart? So I call a good buddy over (PhD in bio something or the other) thinking he would be as fascinated. And guess what...he shows up and all he wanted to do was cook them. So much for higher minds. (we didn't btw)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - joshspankit 6y ago
    “Listen: I’m fascinated 23 hours a day. When I go over to a buddy’s house I just wanna eat things. Yaknow?”
  - 7thaccount 6y ago
    How did you know they were edible? I mean, I know people eat snails in certain parts, but how did you know these were safe?
    - evilsetg 6y ago
      That is what you have the bio something PhD for :-)
    - Archelaos 6y ago
      In Germany I only ever eat helix pomatia[1]. Nowadays, they are under nature protection. Only the consumption of cultivated snails is allowed. They are related to mussels and taste similar. I can especially recommend snail cream soup. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_pomatia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_pomatia
      - randycupertino 6y ago
        I used to think I loved escargot but it turns out I actually just loved them as a delivery vessel for garlic, butter and cheese.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  I seriously doubt the human condition seems complex to a species that went through this stage a billion years ago. Or even a million years ago. If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals. So the horizon of interest where an encounter would be fascinating and worth the time and effort but not devastatingly disruptive to either side is probably only a few millennia. But let's call it +/- 10k years, to be generous. Compare with the age of the universe, or even of the galaxy. It's really not a big proportion of the available time.
  - soufron 6y ago
    "If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals." That's only your opinion, and it's most probably wrong. These guys were capable of feats you can only dream of. And you could be very surprised at their level of sophistication, which might appear higher than us on many levels - if not on all levels.
    - OnlyMortal 6y ago
      Quite. It’s an insult to our ancestors to dismiss their ability to use their technology. The ruins we find around the world from previous civilisations tell us they were very smart.
  - at-fates-hands 6y ago
    > There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals. Generally speaking, about once a year, archeologists find something that completely challenges their theories on human evolution. https://www.livescience.com/biggest-archaeology-discoveries-2019.html https://www.livescience.com/biggest-archaeology-discoveries-... Just the amount of engineering the Egyptians did is enough to warrant our continued fascination with their culture, some 5,000 years later.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
Do the ants in your example know they're being studied? When the European powers explored the pacific they wrote off a lot of islands as being devoid of anything useful. Now a few hundred years later these islands, mostly untouched by humans, are a gold mine for various niches of biology. Human presence is still infrequent enough that the seagulls don't seem to notice.
teekert 6y ago
Indeed, Ants do some pretty fascinating stuff, TIL we have stuff like "Ant colony optimization algorithms" [0]. Even if we are as the aliens were 2 millions years ago, there must be something of interest in what we do? I mean, we'd be interested in life 2 billion years ago. I find it more likely that they just don't want to interfere. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algori...
- bluGill 6y ago
  Perhaps, but I think it is far more likely they can't overcome the limits of the speed of light to do any useful observing. They can't cross the distance to observe us, even robots take so long to arrive that their star dies before it gets here (not to mention our star was still forming when they sent the probe out...) They cannot observe us directly, light just doesn't have that resolution at the distance. They can't observe our radio waves because our radio waves are only 100 light years out, not to mention the signal strength fades with distance.
  - sliken 6y ago
    Quite a few stars and usable solar systems started out 1 billion years ahead of ours. The sun is relatively late to the game. If a race was curious it could well seed the galaxy with small, smart probes, that could watch for certain signs life, record, and report back to the galaxy wide cloud, sure speed of light means that takes a long time. Sure that may take 50k years for light speed communications to reach a central location, but it would collect whatever was of interest. Might even just be a few 100 bytes of info along the lines of somewhat evolved bipedal warm blooded beings with a basic grasp of electronics, quantum, chemistry, and atomic sciences. Haven't transitions to artificial life forms, and unlikely to succeed because of short sighted environmental policies that are systemically causing a extinction event by destroying the food chain and decreasing fertility world wide. Check back in 10,000 years and see if they surprise us.
ballenf 6y ago
The point is that we're one of (large number) of ant colonies and there's nothing particularly interesting about us vs. any other ant colony. Even if ETs study ants generally, there's nothing unique about us to give us a greater than 1/(large number) chance of being studied.
- yoz-y 6y ago
  Last time a new mammal was discovered here it was international news. If an alien civilisation has trillions of trillions individuals, there must be quite a bit of them interested in any possible niche. This assumes that an interstellar species would be naturally curious.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    There are, literally, millions of planets that can sustain life as we know it. Assuming a human-like mind, that alone is enough to reduce the interest in alien life as something mundane.
    - ryanmercer 6y ago
      >There are, literally, millions of planets that can sustain life as we know it. There are probably x amount of planets that can sustain life as we know it. We haven't even verified the existence of millions of planets. https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/counts_detail.html https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/counts_detail... shows only 4331 confirmed exoplanets, of those we've visited 0 and are still largely guessing as to their atmospheres, weather, temperatures, seismic activity, etc. Not to mention some we've found in the "goldilocks" zone are likely regularly sterilized due to the conditions of their orbit and their stars.
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      There are literally millions of species on Earth, and each one has a scientist interested in it.
- Caprinicus 6y ago
s_dev 6y ago
>There are professions that study ants. Not only that we've incorporated armies of scientists in to the public realm to advise on such envoirnmental/biodiversity policy issues. It's possible an Interstate Freeway project may not happen because an bunch of endangered ants live along its planned route.
- addicted 6y ago
  This makes me think that one possible reason we havent observed any alien life is that similar to how we may avoid any sort of development or encroachment in an area containing an endangered species, we may have been marked off as too fragile to interact. And humans are an incredibly fragile species from the perspective of a space faring civilization. If a meteor hits our planet, we are basically done. And even if that doesn't happen, we can only acquire raw materials and energy from our own planet, so we may basically just tap out all our resources before we learn to acquire it from somewhere else. And then there is the fact that we love blowing each other up, which may not be a common trait amongst intelligent species.
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  > an bunch of endangered ants As best as I can tell, there are no ant species on any endangered list, so this is a hyperbolic point. (In general, we don't even study ant species enough to know whether they are endangered)
  - s_dev 6y ago
    Theres a few species classified as endangered ants on the IUCN Red List. However didn't aliens crush humanity to make space for a Intergalactic Super Highway in Hithchikers Guide to the Galaxy? We aren't even endangered according to those ruling fictional aliens who epitomise the "not interested in humanity" aspect.
donatj 6y ago
Let’s say though it took several generations to travel to the ants, would we bother?
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I think so. Not that long ago, humans spread across the world, first organically, then intentionally. We're at the infancy of spaceflight at the moment, the equivalent of putting food and water in a raft to go to the next island over. We'll see humans on Mars in our lifetime, like the previous generation saw humans on the moon. Assuming the development and interest in spaceflight continues, we'll be seeing generation ships departing for the next solar system within the next 500 or so years (rough armchair prediction based on nothing at all). Of course, we have some massive problems to solve first, like biology, self-sustenance in deep space, cultural, financial, etc. Anyway, my theory that we haven't seen other species yet is that space is vast and science fiction tech for light speed and beyond does not exist. If you have technology that can reach 1% of light speed, it'll take 10 million years to fly across just our galaxy. Humans evolved somewhere within that bracket. Even if the technology is there, you're seeing not just generations but entire species develop in the timescales of traveling the milky way.
kypro 6y ago
It's also not true that the only time ants come into contact with humans is when they're being observed. Even if aliens were uninterested in us, it wouldn't necessarily mean we'd expect not to see any signs of alien life. In the same way an ant might stumble across a human building or notice a human above the grass, you would think if life was so prevalent in our galaxy that there would be some sign of their technology.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  I wouldn't expect any given alien culture to be easily detectable and/or willing to make large scale objects we could detect. I would, however, expect at least one such civilization would develop within our detection range. As our range increases, both in distance and in breadth, chances should get increasingly better.
- ryanmercer 6y ago
  >you would think if life was so prevalent in our galaxy that there would be some sign of their technology. There's a big problem though, I've written about it here https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2014/11/30/this-just-in-you-dont-matter https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2014/11/30/this-jus... Basically time + the vastness of space = an insanely low probability that any two intelligent civilizations would overlap within a detectible sphere, especially with our current level of technology. If we assume 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets exist in 100 billion galaxies and that 1 in 100 of those host single cellular life, that 1 in 1000 of those host multi-cellular life, that 1 in 1000 of those have animal life, that 1 in 10 of those has sentient tool-building species you then have 10 trillion planets with tool-building species. If we assume an even distribution that's 100 tool-building species per galaxy spread out over 12-13 billion years. Oof. Even if you make far more generous assumptions, and that 1 in 2 planets has single cellular life and that 1 in 2 of those have tool-building life. That gives you an average of 25,000 tool-building worlds per galaxy, something like a 1 in 20 million change any star in our galaxy has a tool-building civilization. If you remove the first billion years of the galaxy you get 12.21-12.51 billion years. Again if we assume an even distribution and assume 140,000 light-years in diameter for a galaxy, that gives you something like 1 tool building civilization per 600,000 square light-years spread out over 12 billion years. :( :( :(
philliphaydon 6y ago
I subscribe to Ant Canada on YouTube. Fascinating stuff. https://youtube.com/user/AntsCanada https://youtube.com/user/AntsCanada
DeusExMachina 6y ago
And, after that, the article proceeds listing all the reasons why our sun, planet, and species might be very different from what you might find in other parts of the universe. Which is actually what would make us more interesting, not less.
xwdv 6y ago
Even if we study ants, that doesn’t mean aliens will be able to secure enough funding to launch an expedition across the gulf of space to study humans up close. Telescopes and radio waves may be the most they could invest in.
throwaway2245 6y ago
> I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum that has a casual interest in observing ants From Wikipedia for "ant": "More than 12,500 of an estimated total of 22,000 species have been classified." From our human perspective, we are interested in ants. Everybody has seen ants. Everybody is curious about ants. From an ant perspective, humans scarcely exist. There are 10,000 ant species that don't have a relationship with humans sufficient to deserve classification, let alone a name. (I also want to wonder aloud why extra-terrestrials would be more interested in humans than in ants)
- ruined 6y ago
  and not only this, even among classified species, most colonies will never interact directly with a human. when ants do come into contact with things we have made, they do not comprehend it. and when they interact with us directly, even in a mode where we are identifiable to them as an entity, they can't identify much about us beyond the practical facts that we are dangerous or perhaps edible.
  - patcon 6y ago
    And further, to the extent that we might say "a lot of ants experience people now", it's perhaps more a function of us being way overextended beyond the sustainable carrying capacity of our system. In a world where humans somehow kept themselves from risking their own existence through limitless growth (which I'm assuming wiser intelligences would navigate better), the vast majority of ants colonies would never have any human take notice of them through their whole existence.
    - mcbits 6y ago
      Even as we expand our presence and every random ant has a better and better chance of encountering some kind of evidence of human existence, it still has to know how to evaluate what it's seeing. An ant finds a peanut. Being a smart ant, it recognizes that something is strange about this peanut. It appears to be roasted. After thinking for a while, it develops a theory to explain how lightning can ignite fires capable of roasting peanuts. Simple and obvious explanation in hand, no further inquiry or speculation about the existence of "advanced peanut roasting technology" is needed. I mean, why would supposedly advanced creatures intentionally reduce the nutritional quality of the peanut by roasting it, anyway? Yes, definitely lightning.
simonh 6y ago
It's hard to be sure what a 10 or 100 million year old civilisation might still find interesting. I certainly wouldn't think a few hundred years of industrialisation, and a few decades of the information technology age gives us any real idea.
- behnamoh 6y ago
  This. Plus, who says those ETs are of biological form anyway? Even we are thinking about AI doing most of the work, transhumanism and uploading our minds to machines, and finally, integrating with technology. Why think that a 10 million year old civilization still has flesh bodies, needs, and curiosities? Another comment also mentioned that ETs don't necessarily share the same interests and thought process as we do, and I agree. For an insanely sophisticated civilization, mental representations and the abstract concepts they can think about are just unimaginable for us.
  - inDigiNeous 6y ago
    This. The assumption that these ETs would appear in the same form as us, or even in the same dimension, shows us how limited our thinking is. If a lifeform has gone through let's say million times the evolving that we have, wouldn't their consciousness and expression of life have developed probably into something alltogether different. Maybe even something that we cannot see or hear with just our physical senses or instruments. There are many theories about this if you read on the subject, people being in contact with different species, but explaining that they came from between dimensions from example.
rixrax 6y ago
I also casually deploy diatomaceous earth and other methods to exterminate ants when I come across them in or around the house. I’m glad the wandering aliens have not yet decided to use this strategy. Especially if they would find earth a desirable location for some colonial purposes.
me_me_me 6y ago
There are also people that pour liquid metal into ant colony to cast its internal structure. It doesn't end well for ants.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
px43 6y ago
Maybe there's a much more interesting colony of ants nearby and we're just boring?
nkrisc 6y ago
If there are aliens as advanced compared to us as we are to ants, that would imply to me that life is actually fairly abundant in the universe. However just as not every anthill gets studied by entomologists, perhaps there are simply too many planets with life for a galaxy-traversing civilization to study.
devilduck 6y ago
It's more interesting to me that it seems like many egos can not accept the idea that maybe they aren't that interesting after all.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
it is sort of funny that the argument for lack of intellectual curiosity in aliens is being made in Scientific American.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
BlueTie 6y ago
A better version of that argument might be: "if ants evolved to have higher than human intellect and technology - would they be interested in studying us humans?" I think the answer is far less clear in that scenario.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Why wouldn't they?
  - BlueTie 6y ago
    It's possible they would, possible they wouldn't. The point is that if you project things about human intelligence i.e. "but humans like ants so why wouldn't the reverse be true? "or "most humans don't pay attention to ants so why would aliens care?"on to other types of intelligence, you're making a big assumption. A superintelligent ant colony with an "of ant" intellect is going to be so alien to our kind of intellect that the goals are just impossible to compare. Probably same for aliens unless there are many humanoid ones for some reason.
jjk166 6y ago
You look at ants, you don't look at every ant. It would be absurd to conclude the absence of entomologists just because most individual ants go unobserved.
lhorie 6y ago
I also think the argument isn't put forward in the best logical way, but for a different reason: another potential reason why aliens might not choose to come to visit us is that they physically can't: imagine a lifeform whose chemistry is based on liquid methane instead of water. They'd literally vaporize in Earth's atmosphere! They could also operate on a completely different timescale. For example, shrews' metabolism is way faster than ours. Sequoias are way slower. There's no reason an alien should perceive time on the same scale we do.
vuciv1 6y ago
I find this point weak because we literally study ants and sell ant colonies for interested parties
harryf 6y ago
We like to assume they are many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us. But it might be that the human brain represents the optimum size and capability possible for a living organism to sustain, based on requirements for energy consumption and evolutionary competitiveness. We know that Neanderthals may have had bigger brains, and may have been pushed to extinction by homo sapiens. A bigger brain will require more food and take longer to develop, potentially putting Neanderthals at an evolutionary disadvantage to humans. Assuming the laws of Physics do not vary throughout the universe and that evolution, if "run more than once" will eventually lead to similar outcomes, that could mean aliens capable of space travel are not significantly more intelligent than us, they've just had longer to develop technology. And given their apparent tendency to crash their spaceships while visiting earth, you might have a reasonable case for "alien idiots"...
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Evolution has been a mostly unimportant part of human development since at least 2 centuries ago. An intelligent species engineers itself, not evolves itself.
- theli0nheart 6y ago
  > We know that Neanderthals may have had bigger brains, and may have been pushed to extinction by homo sapiens. A bigger brain will require more food and take longer to develop, potentially putting Neanderthals at an evolutionary disadvantage to humans. Where are you getting this data? Per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal), Neanderthal brains were similar to those of modern humans: > The braincases of Neanderthal men and women averaged about 1,600 cm3 (98 cu in) and 1,300 cm3 (79 cu in) respectively, which is within the range of the values for modern humans.
carusooneliner 6y ago
Avi Loeb's technical work is commendable but I'm left wondering if some of the reasoning in this article counts for thoughtful contemplation. >"We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path." Is it helpful to ascribe human-like motives to an alien species? Projecting our thought patterns on an alien species will not get us anywhere. There could be numerous reasons or no reason in particular why an alien lifeform might visit us: they are cataloging lifeforms, they are interested in 'ants' like EO Wilson, they might want to harvest resources on our planet, etc. > "But better yet, we could get in touch with Proxima b and entice the locals to visit and share a water-based drink with us." There's humor mixed in this statement, so I'm not sure if Avi Loeb is being entirely serious. I take the opposite stand of "don't broadcast our presence to aliens". It's common sense that if you're out in the wild, you don't draw attention to yourself.
mrmonkeyman 6y ago
We have studied (exactly) 0.00000000000001% of the total ant population. Also, no ant ever has understood he is being studied (which is the more interesting point). We would experience superior beings as "natural experience" and be totally oblivious to them.
jkingsbery 6y ago
Agreed. Taking the "ant" argument to it's logical conclusion and based on https://xkcd.com/1610/ https://xkcd.com/1610/, there very well might be some alien who is part of a very advanced society and struggling in grad school, and that alien's advisor (unhelpfully) is suggesting how cool it is that we earthlings manage to do what we're able to do despite how primitive we are.
grahamburger 6y ago
I think the argument is that while ants are indeed interesting to us as a subject, not every single anthill gets our attention. There are probably lots of anytime anthills in out of the way places that have never had human interaction.
- psadri 6y ago
  Maybe not humans, but they probably do get visits from other insects and animals.
  - volkk 6y ago
    an interesting point which begs the question of what is a threshold of intelligence required to lose interest in a species. and if intelligence isn't the only parameter, what are the others? predation is an obvious one, curiosity comes with a form of intelligence, what else is there?
    - psadri 6y ago
      I think a sense of curiosity is a pre-requisite or perhaps co-emergent with technological advancement. They also need to be advanced enough to be send an interstellar probe or ship to visit other disntant planets.
bostonsre 6y ago
I think the important part of that statement is "examine _every_ ant". I don't think our ant professors have the bandwidth to investigate every ant hill on earth. We could very well be one of millions or billions of inhabited planets. Also if there are millions or billions of inhabited planets, then chances are a large proportion would have more advanced inhabitants than us. I would guess that just like here on earth, scientists would gravitate more towards investigating the more advanced species with very few interested in ants like us.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
Even more common than those who study ants? Exterminators, ant eaters, and kids who stomp on ants for fun. I don't like our chances...
devoutsalsa 6y ago
Look how excited scientists get when they discover organic compounds in a comet or something that looks like microorganisms in a Mars rock. I'm pretty sure aliens would be interested in studying why I drink Diet Coke instead of water & what consuming 4L a day does to me. Maybe I should also be wondering what it does to me...
thotsBgone 6y ago
But what percentage of ants find themselves the subject of human curiosity? We look at a few ants, but not most of them. Maybe it's the same with aliens. We're just another mound of monkeys; nothing they haven't seen before.
drbojingle 6y ago
Do you think the ants notice it much?
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
Would you visit every single anthill? What if an advanced alien civilization just doesn't care after passing by thousands or millions of primitive civilizations?

by nend 6y ago

hans1729 6y ago

Ants are interesting because of the complex behavioral systems emerging from their comparatively simple biological systems, reminiscent of the game of life. Seeing the insane complexity of the human condition (look at the amount of scientific disciplines we come up with) and thinking "nay, this won't be interesting to a higher mind" feels awfully dismissive. sure, depending on the leap of sophistication we may appear like... rocks, I guess? But I can't even begin to conceptualize to what in comparison we'd appear like rocks. Anything of that complexity probably is multiple magnitudes beyond our comprehension anyway, and therefore not really part of the discussion

PartiallyTyped 6y ago
To be fair to rocks, we also study them ...
- guerrilla 6y ago
  Is astrogeology (as etymologically oxymoronic as that is) already a subject?
  - Denvercoder9 6y ago
    That's basically what asteroid science is. It's such a big field that we're even sending probes to collect rocks.
  - kridsdale1 6y ago
    Maybe aliens will be interested in Earth for Astrogastronomy.
    - liotier 6y ago
      Sorry, no - only the consumption of cultivated humans is allowed.
      - madia_leva 6y ago
        How would you know that you are being cultivated?
    - jrd259 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man
op03 6y ago
Recently I had a bunch of snails appear out of nowhere all over the garden. And I spent a whole lot of time, trying to figure out what they were feeding on, cuz some were getting really big. The whole thing was quite fascinating...like how the hell were they producing these huge ass shells without tearing all the plants apart? So I call a good buddy over (PhD in bio something or the other) thinking he would be as fascinated. And guess what...he shows up and all he wanted to do was cook them. So much for higher minds. (we didn't btw)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- joshspankit 6y ago
  “Listen: I’m fascinated 23 hours a day. When I go over to a buddy’s house I just wanna eat things. Yaknow?”
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  How did you know they were edible? I mean, I know people eat snails in certain parts, but how did you know these were safe?
  - evilsetg 6y ago
    That is what you have the bio something PhD for :-)
  - Archelaos 6y ago
    In Germany I only ever eat helix pomatia[1]. Nowadays, they are under nature protection. Only the consumption of cultivated snails is allowed. They are related to mussels and taste similar. I can especially recommend snail cream soup. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_pomatia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_pomatia
    - randycupertino 6y ago
      I used to think I loved escargot but it turns out I actually just loved them as a delivery vessel for garlic, butter and cheese.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
I seriously doubt the human condition seems complex to a species that went through this stage a billion years ago. Or even a million years ago. If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals. So the horizon of interest where an encounter would be fascinating and worth the time and effort but not devastatingly disruptive to either side is probably only a few millennia. But let's call it +/- 10k years, to be generous. Compare with the age of the universe, or even of the galaxy. It's really not a big proportion of the available time.
- soufron 6y ago
  "If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals." That's only your opinion, and it's most probably wrong. These guys were capable of feats you can only dream of. And you could be very surprised at their level of sophistication, which might appear higher than us on many levels - if not on all levels.
  - OnlyMortal 6y ago
    Quite. It’s an insult to our ancestors to dismiss their ability to use their technology. The ruins we find around the world from previous civilisations tell us they were very smart.
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  > There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals. Generally speaking, about once a year, archeologists find something that completely challenges their theories on human evolution. https://www.livescience.com/biggest-archaeology-discoveries-2019.html https://www.livescience.com/biggest-archaeology-discoveries-... Just the amount of engineering the Egyptians did is enough to warrant our continued fascination with their culture, some 5,000 years later.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

Do the ants in your example know they're being studied? When the European powers explored the pacific they wrote off a lot of islands as being devoid of anything useful. Now a few hundred years later these islands, mostly untouched by humans, are a gold mine for various niches of biology. Human presence is still infrequent enough that the seagulls don't seem to notice.

teekert 6y ago

Indeed, Ants do some pretty fascinating stuff, TIL we have stuff like "Ant colony optimization algorithms" [0]. Even if we are as the aliens were 2 millions years ago, there must be something of interest in what we do? I mean, we'd be interested in life 2 billion years ago. I find it more likely that they just don't want to interfere. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algori...

bluGill 6y ago
Perhaps, but I think it is far more likely they can't overcome the limits of the speed of light to do any useful observing. They can't cross the distance to observe us, even robots take so long to arrive that their star dies before it gets here (not to mention our star was still forming when they sent the probe out...) They cannot observe us directly, light just doesn't have that resolution at the distance. They can't observe our radio waves because our radio waves are only 100 light years out, not to mention the signal strength fades with distance.
- sliken 6y ago
  Quite a few stars and usable solar systems started out 1 billion years ahead of ours. The sun is relatively late to the game. If a race was curious it could well seed the galaxy with small, smart probes, that could watch for certain signs life, record, and report back to the galaxy wide cloud, sure speed of light means that takes a long time. Sure that may take 50k years for light speed communications to reach a central location, but it would collect whatever was of interest. Might even just be a few 100 bytes of info along the lines of somewhat evolved bipedal warm blooded beings with a basic grasp of electronics, quantum, chemistry, and atomic sciences. Haven't transitions to artificial life forms, and unlikely to succeed because of short sighted environmental policies that are systemically causing a extinction event by destroying the food chain and decreasing fertility world wide. Check back in 10,000 years and see if they surprise us.

ballenf 6y ago

The point is that we're one of (large number) of ant colonies and there's nothing particularly interesting about us vs. any other ant colony. Even if ETs study ants generally, there's nothing unique about us to give us a greater than 1/(large number) chance of being studied.

yoz-y 6y ago
Last time a new mammal was discovered here it was international news. If an alien civilisation has trillions of trillions individuals, there must be quite a bit of them interested in any possible niche. This assumes that an interstellar species would be naturally curious.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  There are, literally, millions of planets that can sustain life as we know it. Assuming a human-like mind, that alone is enough to reduce the interest in alien life as something mundane.
  - ryanmercer 6y ago
    >There are, literally, millions of planets that can sustain life as we know it. There are probably x amount of planets that can sustain life as we know it. We haven't even verified the existence of millions of planets. https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/counts_detail.html https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/counts_detail... shows only 4331 confirmed exoplanets, of those we've visited 0 and are still largely guessing as to their atmospheres, weather, temperatures, seismic activity, etc. Not to mention some we've found in the "goldilocks" zone are likely regularly sterilized due to the conditions of their orbit and their stars.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    There are literally millions of species on Earth, and each one has a scientist interested in it.
Caprinicus 6y ago

s_dev 6y ago

>There are professions that study ants. Not only that we've incorporated armies of scientists in to the public realm to advise on such envoirnmental/biodiversity policy issues. It's possible an Interstate Freeway project may not happen because an bunch of endangered ants live along its planned route.

addicted 6y ago
This makes me think that one possible reason we havent observed any alien life is that similar to how we may avoid any sort of development or encroachment in an area containing an endangered species, we may have been marked off as too fragile to interact. And humans are an incredibly fragile species from the perspective of a space faring civilization. If a meteor hits our planet, we are basically done. And even if that doesn't happen, we can only acquire raw materials and energy from our own planet, so we may basically just tap out all our resources before we learn to acquire it from somewhere else. And then there is the fact that we love blowing each other up, which may not be a common trait amongst intelligent species.
throwaway2245 6y ago
> an bunch of endangered ants As best as I can tell, there are no ant species on any endangered list, so this is a hyperbolic point. (In general, we don't even study ant species enough to know whether they are endangered)
- s_dev 6y ago
  Theres a few species classified as endangered ants on the IUCN Red List. However didn't aliens crush humanity to make space for a Intergalactic Super Highway in Hithchikers Guide to the Galaxy? We aren't even endangered according to those ruling fictional aliens who epitomise the "not interested in humanity" aspect.

donatj 6y ago

Let’s say though it took several generations to travel to the ants, would we bother?

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I think so. Not that long ago, humans spread across the world, first organically, then intentionally. We're at the infancy of spaceflight at the moment, the equivalent of putting food and water in a raft to go to the next island over. We'll see humans on Mars in our lifetime, like the previous generation saw humans on the moon. Assuming the development and interest in spaceflight continues, we'll be seeing generation ships departing for the next solar system within the next 500 or so years (rough armchair prediction based on nothing at all). Of course, we have some massive problems to solve first, like biology, self-sustenance in deep space, cultural, financial, etc. Anyway, my theory that we haven't seen other species yet is that space is vast and science fiction tech for light speed and beyond does not exist. If you have technology that can reach 1% of light speed, it'll take 10 million years to fly across just our galaxy. Humans evolved somewhere within that bracket. Even if the technology is there, you're seeing not just generations but entire species develop in the timescales of traveling the milky way.

kypro 6y ago

It's also not true that the only time ants come into contact with humans is when they're being observed. Even if aliens were uninterested in us, it wouldn't necessarily mean we'd expect not to see any signs of alien life. In the same way an ant might stumble across a human building or notice a human above the grass, you would think if life was so prevalent in our galaxy that there would be some sign of their technology.

rbanffy 6y ago
I wouldn't expect any given alien culture to be easily detectable and/or willing to make large scale objects we could detect. I would, however, expect at least one such civilization would develop within our detection range. As our range increases, both in distance and in breadth, chances should get increasingly better.
ryanmercer 6y ago
>you would think if life was so prevalent in our galaxy that there would be some sign of their technology. There's a big problem though, I've written about it here https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2014/11/30/this-just-in-you-dont-matter https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2014/11/30/this-jus... Basically time + the vastness of space = an insanely low probability that any two intelligent civilizations would overlap within a detectible sphere, especially with our current level of technology. If we assume 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets exist in 100 billion galaxies and that 1 in 100 of those host single cellular life, that 1 in 1000 of those host multi-cellular life, that 1 in 1000 of those have animal life, that 1 in 10 of those has sentient tool-building species you then have 10 trillion planets with tool-building species. If we assume an even distribution that's 100 tool-building species per galaxy spread out over 12-13 billion years. Oof. Even if you make far more generous assumptions, and that 1 in 2 planets has single cellular life and that 1 in 2 of those have tool-building life. That gives you an average of 25,000 tool-building worlds per galaxy, something like a 1 in 20 million change any star in our galaxy has a tool-building civilization. If you remove the first billion years of the galaxy you get 12.21-12.51 billion years. Again if we assume an even distribution and assume 140,000 light-years in diameter for a galaxy, that gives you something like 1 tool building civilization per 600,000 square light-years spread out over 12 billion years. :( :( :(

philliphaydon 6y ago

I subscribe to Ant Canada on YouTube. Fascinating stuff. https://youtube.com/user/AntsCanada https://youtube.com/user/AntsCanada

DeusExMachina 6y ago

And, after that, the article proceeds listing all the reasons why our sun, planet, and species might be very different from what you might find in other parts of the universe. Which is actually what would make us more interesting, not less.

xwdv 6y ago

Even if we study ants, that doesn’t mean aliens will be able to secure enough funding to launch an expedition across the gulf of space to study humans up close. Telescopes and radio waves may be the most they could invest in.

throwaway2245 6y ago

> I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum that has a casual interest in observing ants From Wikipedia for "ant": "More than 12,500 of an estimated total of 22,000 species have been classified." From our human perspective, we are interested in ants. Everybody has seen ants. Everybody is curious about ants. From an ant perspective, humans scarcely exist. There are 10,000 ant species that don't have a relationship with humans sufficient to deserve classification, let alone a name. (I also want to wonder aloud why extra-terrestrials would be more interested in humans than in ants)

ruined 6y ago
and not only this, even among classified species, most colonies will never interact directly with a human. when ants do come into contact with things we have made, they do not comprehend it. and when they interact with us directly, even in a mode where we are identifiable to them as an entity, they can't identify much about us beyond the practical facts that we are dangerous or perhaps edible.
- patcon 6y ago
  And further, to the extent that we might say "a lot of ants experience people now", it's perhaps more a function of us being way overextended beyond the sustainable carrying capacity of our system. In a world where humans somehow kept themselves from risking their own existence through limitless growth (which I'm assuming wiser intelligences would navigate better), the vast majority of ants colonies would never have any human take notice of them through their whole existence.
  - mcbits 6y ago
    Even as we expand our presence and every random ant has a better and better chance of encountering some kind of evidence of human existence, it still has to know how to evaluate what it's seeing. An ant finds a peanut. Being a smart ant, it recognizes that something is strange about this peanut. It appears to be roasted. After thinking for a while, it develops a theory to explain how lightning can ignite fires capable of roasting peanuts. Simple and obvious explanation in hand, no further inquiry or speculation about the existence of "advanced peanut roasting technology" is needed. I mean, why would supposedly advanced creatures intentionally reduce the nutritional quality of the peanut by roasting it, anyway? Yes, definitely lightning.

simonh 6y ago

It's hard to be sure what a 10 or 100 million year old civilisation might still find interesting. I certainly wouldn't think a few hundred years of industrialisation, and a few decades of the information technology age gives us any real idea.

behnamoh 6y ago
This. Plus, who says those ETs are of biological form anyway? Even we are thinking about AI doing most of the work, transhumanism and uploading our minds to machines, and finally, integrating with technology. Why think that a 10 million year old civilization still has flesh bodies, needs, and curiosities? Another comment also mentioned that ETs don't necessarily share the same interests and thought process as we do, and I agree. For an insanely sophisticated civilization, mental representations and the abstract concepts they can think about are just unimaginable for us.
- inDigiNeous 6y ago
  This. The assumption that these ETs would appear in the same form as us, or even in the same dimension, shows us how limited our thinking is. If a lifeform has gone through let's say million times the evolving that we have, wouldn't their consciousness and expression of life have developed probably into something alltogether different. Maybe even something that we cannot see or hear with just our physical senses or instruments. There are many theories about this if you read on the subject, people being in contact with different species, but explaining that they came from between dimensions from example.

rixrax 6y ago

I also casually deploy diatomaceous earth and other methods to exterminate ants when I come across them in or around the house. I’m glad the wandering aliens have not yet decided to use this strategy. Especially if they would find earth a desirable location for some colonial purposes.

me_me_me 6y ago

There are also people that pour liquid metal into ant colony to cast its internal structure. It doesn't end well for ants.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

px43 6y ago

Maybe there's a much more interesting colony of ants nearby and we're just boring?

nkrisc 6y ago

If there are aliens as advanced compared to us as we are to ants, that would imply to me that life is actually fairly abundant in the universe. However just as not every anthill gets studied by entomologists, perhaps there are simply too many planets with life for a galaxy-traversing civilization to study.

devilduck 6y ago

It's more interesting to me that it seems like many egos can not accept the idea that maybe they aren't that interesting after all.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

it is sort of funny that the argument for lack of intellectual curiosity in aliens is being made in Scientific American.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

BlueTie 6y ago

A better version of that argument might be: "if ants evolved to have higher than human intellect and technology - would they be interested in studying us humans?" I think the answer is far less clear in that scenario.

alisonkisk 6y ago
Why wouldn't they?
- BlueTie 6y ago
  It's possible they would, possible they wouldn't. The point is that if you project things about human intelligence i.e. "but humans like ants so why wouldn't the reverse be true? "or "most humans don't pay attention to ants so why would aliens care?"on to other types of intelligence, you're making a big assumption. A superintelligent ant colony with an "of ant" intellect is going to be so alien to our kind of intellect that the goals are just impossible to compare. Probably same for aliens unless there are many humanoid ones for some reason.

jjk166 6y ago

You look at ants, you don't look at every ant. It would be absurd to conclude the absence of entomologists just because most individual ants go unobserved.

lhorie 6y ago

I also think the argument isn't put forward in the best logical way, but for a different reason: another potential reason why aliens might not choose to come to visit us is that they physically can't: imagine a lifeform whose chemistry is based on liquid methane instead of water. They'd literally vaporize in Earth's atmosphere! They could also operate on a completely different timescale. For example, shrews' metabolism is way faster than ours. Sequoias are way slower. There's no reason an alien should perceive time on the same scale we do.

vuciv1 6y ago

I find this point weak because we literally study ants and sell ant colonies for interested parties

harryf 6y ago

We like to assume they are many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us. But it might be that the human brain represents the optimum size and capability possible for a living organism to sustain, based on requirements for energy consumption and evolutionary competitiveness. We know that Neanderthals may have had bigger brains, and may have been pushed to extinction by homo sapiens. A bigger brain will require more food and take longer to develop, potentially putting Neanderthals at an evolutionary disadvantage to humans. Assuming the laws of Physics do not vary throughout the universe and that evolution, if "run more than once" will eventually lead to similar outcomes, that could mean aliens capable of space travel are not significantly more intelligent than us, they've just had longer to develop technology. And given their apparent tendency to crash their spaceships while visiting earth, you might have a reasonable case for "alien idiots"...

alisonkisk 6y ago
Evolution has been a mostly unimportant part of human development since at least 2 centuries ago. An intelligent species engineers itself, not evolves itself.
theli0nheart 6y ago
> We know that Neanderthals may have had bigger brains, and may have been pushed to extinction by homo sapiens. A bigger brain will require more food and take longer to develop, potentially putting Neanderthals at an evolutionary disadvantage to humans. Where are you getting this data? Per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal), Neanderthal brains were similar to those of modern humans: > The braincases of Neanderthal men and women averaged about 1,600 cm3 (98 cu in) and 1,300 cm3 (79 cu in) respectively, which is within the range of the values for modern humans.

carusooneliner 6y ago

Avi Loeb's technical work is commendable but I'm left wondering if some of the reasoning in this article counts for thoughtful contemplation. >"We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path." Is it helpful to ascribe human-like motives to an alien species? Projecting our thought patterns on an alien species will not get us anywhere. There could be numerous reasons or no reason in particular why an alien lifeform might visit us: they are cataloging lifeforms, they are interested in 'ants' like EO Wilson, they might want to harvest resources on our planet, etc. > "But better yet, we could get in touch with Proxima b and entice the locals to visit and share a water-based drink with us." There's humor mixed in this statement, so I'm not sure if Avi Loeb is being entirely serious. I take the opposite stand of "don't broadcast our presence to aliens". It's common sense that if you're out in the wild, you don't draw attention to yourself.

mrmonkeyman 6y ago

We have studied (exactly) 0.00000000000001% of the total ant population. Also, no ant ever has understood he is being studied (which is the more interesting point). We would experience superior beings as "natural experience" and be totally oblivious to them.

jkingsbery 6y ago

Agreed. Taking the "ant" argument to it's logical conclusion and based on https://xkcd.com/1610/ https://xkcd.com/1610/, there very well might be some alien who is part of a very advanced society and struggling in grad school, and that alien's advisor (unhelpfully) is suggesting how cool it is that we earthlings manage to do what we're able to do despite how primitive we are.

grahamburger 6y ago

I think the argument is that while ants are indeed interesting to us as a subject, not every single anthill gets our attention. There are probably lots of anytime anthills in out of the way places that have never had human interaction.

psadri 6y ago
Maybe not humans, but they probably do get visits from other insects and animals.
- volkk 6y ago
  an interesting point which begs the question of what is a threshold of intelligence required to lose interest in a species. and if intelligence isn't the only parameter, what are the others? predation is an obvious one, curiosity comes with a form of intelligence, what else is there?
  - psadri 6y ago
    I think a sense of curiosity is a pre-requisite or perhaps co-emergent with technological advancement. They also need to be advanced enough to be send an interstellar probe or ship to visit other disntant planets.

bostonsre 6y ago

I think the important part of that statement is "examine _every_ ant". I don't think our ant professors have the bandwidth to investigate every ant hill on earth. We could very well be one of millions or billions of inhabited planets. Also if there are millions or billions of inhabited planets, then chances are a large proportion would have more advanced inhabitants than us. I would guess that just like here on earth, scientists would gravitate more towards investigating the more advanced species with very few interested in ants like us.

Dumblydorr 6y ago

Even more common than those who study ants? Exterminators, ant eaters, and kids who stomp on ants for fun. I don't like our chances...

devoutsalsa 6y ago

Look how excited scientists get when they discover organic compounds in a comet or something that looks like microorganisms in a Mars rock. I'm pretty sure aliens would be interested in studying why I drink Diet Coke instead of water & what consuming 4L a day does to me. Maybe I should also be wondering what it does to me...

thotsBgone 6y ago

But what percentage of ants find themselves the subject of human curiosity? We look at a few ants, but not most of them. Maybe it's the same with aliens. We're just another mound of monkeys; nothing they haven't seen before.

drbojingle 6y ago

Do you think the ants notice it much?

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

Would you visit every single anthill? What if an advanced alien civilization just doesn't care after passing by thousands or millions of primitive civilizations?