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Comment by mkr-hn | Hacker News Reader

You're anthropomorphizing a hypothetical alien civilization. You can only speculate at what ideologies and motivations drive them, and those drives might (for example) involve maintaining military and technological superiority relative to other civilizations so they can make peaceful contact without risk. Imagine a Borg that seeks out and adapts technology and accumulates knowledge quietly while leaving civilizations to continue developing to a point where they're worth talking to.

There's a long history leading up to those events. I find it unlikely another planet will share it.

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There need not be any nefarious intent. Just being around a civilization which is much more advanced is risky: if they operate nearby, they can hit you by mistake or negligence, and whatever consequences are tiny for them may be significant for you. They can just see you as a nuisance and want you to stay sufficiently away, no matter what your opinion is. Think about an anthill near a human settlement. (Don't think about a wasp nest near a human settlement; may be too depressing.)

From Babylon 5, a quote from G'Kar:

>> "There are things in the universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless. And if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants…and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know. We've tried. And we've learned we can either stay out from underfoot, or be stepped on."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLZW8Deq8vE

> if they operate nearby

I think my favorite variation on why we seem alone was how Earth exists in a space version of the Bermuda Triangle, called the Veil of Madness, that all spacefaring civilizations avoid: https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Mankind

We can’t even go as far to assume that an alien species has anything resembling an ideology! even a brief glimpse of an alien intelligence could be completely incomprehensible to us… we could spend a thousand years trying to decipher a single signal and get nowhere.

People get all worked up about dyson spheres and radio signals, but these are so deeply rooted in the human understanding of things in our tiny tiny slice of the universe.

Also even if we got lucky and found AM signal of some alien speech. Would we have any idea how to translate that? My understanding is that we already have human text which we cannot translate. And that has some ties to existing concepts we know of. With truly alien speech we would have zero context or share concepts.

But we could apply GPT-3 and send alien speech back ...

Artificial Intelligence is modeled after human intelligence. It's pretty much useless against a true alien mind, unless we imagine aliens as being human-like with a different shaped body.

The beauty of the film Arrival was showing the challenge of interacting with a truly alien language.

Artificial intelligence is modeled after abstractions on the concept of learning, not human thought. We just name things so that they'll be fun and easy to discuss, but (for example) there's no "human neuron" floating around in the matrix math that you see in some popular techniques.

Sure, but would GPT-3 be able to interpret dolphin chatter just by somehow using dolphin audio as input? I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure it won't work out of the box and we're still far away from achieving that result. And dolphins are closer to us in type of intelligence (i.e. central neuro-electric mass with peripheral connections mediated by the exact same chemicals) than any hypothetical extraterrestrial species.

Can you also apply GPT-3 to understand whales and dolphins?

The laws of physics impose contraints that will make certain traits common amongst intelligence species and advanced civilizations.

We see a variation of this in convergent evolution across distantly related species (e.g. the evolution of wings).

This is obviously not true. We can’t even define what intelligence means, leave alone somebody’s physical traits.

It's obviously true that convergent evolution, that produces similar traits across distantly related species, occurs. So your assertion makes no sense to me.

Only when it happens in a similar environment.

Flight evolves all over the planet, across diverse environments.

But in any case, there will be some commonality in environments across many planets, owing to what environments are the most probable hosts of life, and to the fact that the laws of physics are universal.

That works for flight, but not for intelligence. We can define what “flight” means, but we can’t do that for “intelligence”. Unless by “intelligent” you really mean “appears to be behaving like a human”.

Intelligence is a higher order trait so harder to describe, but it is still a discernible trait. Roughly speaking, intelligence is the ability to achieve an objective through modeling scenarios in order to determine more optimal behavior.

Intelligence across species shares common characteristics even between dolphins, apes and birds which all evolved it independently.

Except we wouldn't even notice intelligence that manifests in a way different from earthly animals, eg one that works on vastly different time scale.

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