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Comment by throwaway2245 | Hacker News Reader

> 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)

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Yes but there's a difference between being unable to study all ant species due to a lack of resources, and being uninterested in doing so.

I expect we'll continue studying ant species with the goal of studying all of them we can (assuming we don't wipe ourselves out or ant species out before we have a chance to).

Similarly I also expect we (or an advanced alien species) would attempt to study as many other alien species as they can as well, and wouldn't stop simply because they don't want to.

We've studied 12,500 out of an estimated 22,000 so far. It's not like we've stopped and said "ok we're good, no need to study other ant species."

> being unable to study all ant species due to a lack of resources, and being uninterested in doing so.

Of course! That's my point.

Back to the alien analogy: if we believe that human-like life is as common across the universe as ants are on earth, then more-advanced aliens might well be philosophically interested in studying us, but not have yet bothered to reach us.

They might be busy "contacting" their local human-ish specieses who they see everywhere, all the time, and not think it is important to spend time contacting similar planet #12358 on the list, that's a bit further out of the way, and could take them a million years of dedicated effort.

The lack of resources devoted to the counting of ant species is a reflection of it being very uninteresting to most people. Relative to the entire universe, our world really doesn't have many places to look for ants, and we don't need to travel faster than the speed of light to find them.

This is a good supporting point. If you actually quantified the effort and resources it would take to study every species of ant it would likely be quite small although not trivially so. Yet it is still left up to the personal interests of professional biologists to lobby for research programs. It could play out similarly on a galactic scale in which case our first point of contact might be a grad student from the biology department of the local Uni.

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.

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.

To an ant, I am a mountain/ thunderstorm/earthquake/quasar.

Chances are ETs have transformed into a physical form that is undistinguishable from, say, planets, energy, even stars. After all, the ultimate level of technology design and sophistication is when it is not distinguishable from its surroundings.

Agreed - we do not even possess the instruments to define the nature of dark matter, and it is only by inference that we can suppose it exists.

It is amazing that Fermi, Einstein, et al were able to predict what they did without readily available modern computing hardware and search engines.

Some things are out of the realm of our perception.

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