4 ms·
I can't remember where I heard this theory, but essentially it goes like this: If you see an ant on the sidewalk when you're walking down the street, you don't
by prawks 14y ago
I can't remember where I heard this theory, but essentially it goes like this:
If you see an ant on the sidewalk when you're walking down the street, you don't stop to communicate with it, or teach it how to build a television. The theory goes that a civilization with the ability to travel through interstellar space would have a similar knowledge gap to us as we do to ants.
Granted, you also don't stop to ask it if you can build a house on top of its ant hill, so I suppose the analogy works both ways.
- nooneelse 14y agoBut if ants could and did paint little ant-paintings and murals, I bet someone would be collecting said paintings. Also, some website would have people arguing about the nuances of them. If aliens are to us as we are to ants, they might not need to care much about us to spawn a few instances of their minds and cross interstellar distances so as to chat with us as much as we care to. It might be so little effort for them so as not to need much reward. Just as kids have ant-farms.
- S4M 14y agoThat is true, but the analogy stops as we are very familiar with ants. On the other hand, a totally new specy of insect would be worth being studied, and thus preserved - at least partially.
- ladzoppelin 14y agoI think the knowledge gap between humans and ants is less then humans/ alien species that traveled to earth. Hawking is right and we should avoid making contact with any alien species...Security through obscurity actually works well in this situation.
- prawks 14y agoThis is a pretty naive view of the universe. Humans have been civilized as we know it for what, 4000, 5000 years? In a little over 100 years we've gone from horse-and-buggy to detecting dark matter and building particle accelerators. The universe operates on a time scale incredibly more significant than that, and so it's conceivable that there are intelligent beings that have been around for millions of years. Their technology and the form that they take would likely be so far beyond what we know that a similar gap in evolution would be entirely plausible.