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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > First contact: Is humanity ready?
 
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Jarmak
Jan 24, 2005

Bip Roberts posted:

Although depending on how fast they were traveling there might have been a ton of doppler shift on all our radio and they'll be surprised how low our voices are.

I feel pretty confident that aliens capable of interstellar travel have probably discovered the Doppler effect.

Mofabio posted:

I do think aliens, by virtue of their visit, would be smarter than dolphins and dogs. However, our superior intelligence has not allowed us to communicate with either species at the level of a native speaker.

Similarly, wolves are smarter than prairie dogs. Yet, as far as we can tell, both species are mutually unintelligible. Prairie dogs, which have one of the most extensive vocabularies in the animal kingdom, are totally unintelligible to more intelligent species. Are horses smarter than cows? Is the smarter of the two able to communicate with the dumber? We're much smarter than ants, and we know that they have extensive communication capabilities, but we're far from fluent in ant.

My point is, intelligence hasn't seemed to helped much in inter-species communication. And this is considering species with similar evolutionary backgrounds and communication hardware. Maybe we'll be figured out, but I think you're overestimating the comprehensibility of communication between species.

I'm not sure why you think our lack of ability to communicate with ants whose intelligence level barely qualifies as sentient is a good reflection of our ability to communicate with an advanced civilization with written language. We can't communicate with infants either.

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > First contact: Is humanity ready?