A parrot has a question for humans
nautil.us
A parrot has a question for humans
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Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#2> If humans ever detect the Arecibo message being sent back to Earth, they will know someone is trying to get their attention.
Pretty much the plot of Contact (or at least its inciting incident). Both the book (by Carl Sagan) and the movie (with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey) are really good.
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#3If I had billions I would retreat to an island somewhere and try to bring back the dinosaurs by breeding super ostriches or something like that.
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#4> If humans ever detect the Arecibo message being sent back to Earth, they will know someone is trying to get their attention. Pretty much the plot of Contact (or at least its inciting incident). Both the book (by Carl Sagan) and the movie (with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey) are really good.
We often miss all the ways animals right here on Earth try to get our or each other's attention.
A truly alien species might communicate in ways we cannot even detect, or think of detecting, like say magnetic fields or some other medium that almost nothing on Earth uses.
Furthermore, even if they used the same "channels" and frequencies as us, their minds may just be too different. Even fundamental concepts like time and numbers or the notion of self may be perceived too differently by them for their languages to have any convenient analogues to ours.
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#5The author, Ted Chiang, recently released his book of short stories, Exhalation. This story is included in the book.
It's good, but not as good as his first book, imo, "Story of Your Life and Others". Story of Your Life was the inspiration for the movie "Arrival". That book was amazing.
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#6Parrots get the attention because they are the classic imitators of human voices, but among birds, corvids (crows and their relatives) are the ones that have been shown to have mammalian-level intelligence.
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#7Parrots get the attention because they are the classic imitators of human voices, but among birds, corvids (crows and their relatives) are the ones that have been shown to have mammalian-level intelligence.
They aren’t bad speakers either.
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#8> If humans ever detect the Arecibo message being sent back to Earth, they will know someone is trying to get their attention. Pretty much the plot of Contact (or at least its inciting incident). Both the book (by Carl Sagan) and the movie (with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey) are really good.
We often miss all the ways animals right here on Earth try to get our or each other's attention. A truly alien species might communicate in ways we cannot even detect, or think of detecting, like say magnetic fields or some other medium that almost nothing on Earth uses. Furthermore, even if they used the same "channels" and frequencies as us, their minds may just be too different. Even fundamental concepts like time…
I think we're hoping (even if it's a double edge sword) that the aliens are smart enough to communicate with us not the other way around. We have been unable to fully decipher the "language" of dogs beyond some body language. And they have lived with us for millennia.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/638/
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#9Years and years ago, there was an aol live chat with Koko, the gorilla who could sign. An early experimental cross species AMA.
The crowd mostly asked questions like "is there a god?"
The ape generally replied that she was bored and wanted food.
Gray parrots and corvids and dolphins and squids are exceptionally fascinating and worth studying. They aren't the same as the mythologized first contact people are hoping for. The precise expectations we have for such an exchange may say something about the Fermi paradox. Very similar intelligences can still be so different as to render communication, a real exchange of ideas, impossible.
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#10The author, Ted Chiang, recently released his book of short stories, Exhalation. This story is included in the book. It's good, but not as good as his first book, imo, "Story of Your Life and Others". Story of Your Life was the inspiration for the movie "Arrival". That book was amazing.
The first story though, in Exhalation, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", is one of my favorites. It's also available standalone.