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by totalZero 3559 days ago
Yeah, I'd care about that octopus. I would want to study it and see what else it does.

Prime numbers are a consequential concept. Maybe that octopus knows about another consequential concept that we haven't been thinking about for many hundreds of years.

Also, maybe the smartest thing to do if an unknown entity tries to contact you, is to play dumb.
1 comments
uxcn 3559 days ago
Yeah, I'd care about that octopus. I would want to study it and see what else it does.

Sure, I mean intelligent life is interesting to us because it's novel. If there is other intelligent life in the galaxy (universe), it probably implies that intelligent life is relatively common. So, more (less) intelligent life would be extremely inconsequential to them. Why waste resources studying something already well understood?

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x1798DE 3559 days ago
That seems remarkably incurious. There are like, tens of thousands of species of bee on earth, and there are tons of people who are out there looking into cataloguing them, studying their behavior, etc.

I suspect that if life is common enough that we're boring to most other forms of intelligent life, we'd probably find at least one or two other species that are interested in us, and if it's rare enough that there's only one or two other species out there, then chances are we're interesting enough that some of their folks would want to visit us and find out our deal.

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uxcn 3559 days ago
I personally think life is probably common in the universe. We've only been able to prove exoplanets exist within the last few decades, but the evidence is already that there are a number of planets that are hospitable to life (our kind at least). We've only just started scratching the surface and we've already found things like Tabby's Star [1].

Obviously I think there's a point to us trying to communicate with whatever is out there, I just think we shouldn't be surprised by the lack of response.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852

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totalZero 3559 days ago
I'm not saying I'd have an emotional attachment to the octopus.

My point is that intelligent life may have discovered something we don't know already, even if it's dumber than us.

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