
Biologists and dolphins have created a new inter-species language - lotusleaf1987
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V1N-4YBX1K6-4&_user=10&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F2010&_rdoc=19&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_origin=browse&_zone=rslt_list_item&_srch=doc-info%28%23toc%235679%232010%23999329988%232388737%23FLA%23display%23Volume%29&_cdi=5679&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=19&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=f0a54b7589671ebfef9d62f77c659ebd&searchtype=a
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ryanjmo
For what it is worth, I feel like a huge part of having a startup is to have
some outrageous goal you want to achieve. My goal is to own a pair of dolphins
that I keep at my beach house area and ride around around the ocean in my
spare time.

I'm glad to know that I will be able to develop deep relationships with them
as planed :)

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TheSOB88
Why would you want to own another sentient being? I think they have a term for
that.

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szany
Neil deGrasse Tyson brings up a good point about ETI though:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-uZZ7RdL5E>

"When was the last time you stopped to have a conversation with a worm?"

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rewind
He's a brilliant guy, but this is a terrible example. Worms can't communicate
with us, so obviously we're not going to try to have a conversation with them.
If we found a worm-like species on another planet and their vocabulary
consisted of nothing more than a couple hundred words, I can guarantee you we
would stop and try to have a conversation with them. If a vastly superior race
came upon us and we were the first species they ever found that they could
communicate with, I'm pretty sure they'd do the same.

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bellaire
Tyson's entire point is that alien life, even life that appears to do things
we associate with intelligence and language, may be so different from us that
we are fundamentally unable to communicate, just like us and worms. What if
their language is undetectable (or even absent) and their intelligence is
inscrutable? He's assuming radical differences rather than assuming any
similarity.

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szany
His point is not that we might be unable to communicate, but that we might be
so comparatively stupid that communication would be laughably pointless.

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zdean
<http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/?p=50710>

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endlessvoid94
> Humans also signal their interest in someone with eye contact and similar
> body language. Perhaps these are universal — and extraterrestrial — signs of
> good manners.

That's....nonsense.

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rickdangerous1
Yes agree. There are plenty of cultures around the world where making direct
eye contact with a 'superior', or someone older than you is disrespectful.
Indigenious people from Arnhem Land Australia will signal their intention to
speak with you by standing off to the side of your peripheral vision and then
wait for you to approach/invite approach. Any first year anthropology student
knows that human social behavior is never universal...

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Natsu
It seems like a smile is pretty close to universal, though. Maybe you can tell
me in which cultures it means something different?

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rickdangerous1
Smiling might be universal across humanity but the emotional state and intent
of the smile is not. For example, in some cultures, smiling/grinning is a
response to embarrassment. When I was travelling in China I asked a old man
for directions (in mandarin)...he was so shocked that a foreigner was speaking
with him he couldn't speak back. He grinned from ear to ear though.

Also, in primates, smiling is very closely related to baring of teeth. Smiling
= 'let's be friends'. Baring teeth = 'come any closer and I'll kill you'. I
would not like to make that kind of miscalculation when meeting an alien for
the first time....

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Natsu
> For example, in some cultures, smiling/grinning is a response to
> embarrassment.

I'd have to ask, then, where is that _not_ true? I know that happens in the
USA and a friend of mine from Japan also does that.

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fierarul
And for just $31.5 I could be reading that PDF. Flagged.

~~~
protothomas
Sadly that's the standard for academic papers. The linked page does contain
the full text of the paper however.

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fierarul
I don't see the full text, just an abstract on that page.

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protothomas
Apologies - I'm at a university, it makes the pdf free, I wasn't aware that it
would also change that page. In the interests of science -
<http://pastebin.com/8A89hGC9>

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patio11
I find it amusing to think dolphin/human is a prototype for communicating with
ET. Seems to me ant/Toyota would be more likely... and we're the ants.

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TheSOB88
Personally I think that's assuming too much. We know so little about what life
is like even _if_ sentience has evolved on other planets that pretty much
everything is pure speculation.

Also, slightly contradictarily, natural selection/evolution don't provide much
pressure for a species to change after it's gotten wildly successful. Have we
had any physiological brain changes since agriculture? Not really. And now
that medicine is becoming so effective, natural selection doesn't really work
on the fitness of people, just their ability to have more children.

So, I don't think ET will be vastly more intelligent than us without having to
resort to redesigning itself.

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chris11
Practically the existence of other extraterrestrial life forms can't really
affect humanity that much.The closest star is over 4 light years away. I doubt
communication would be very successful with a 4 year gap between any response.
Any physical travel would be incomparably slow, so I doubt any life form would
be able to intentionally visit Earth. So we are pretty much limited to
searching for life in our solar system.

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danohuiginn
I dunno. Empires have been built where it took months to communicate with the
outer edges. Until pretty recently, it might have taken years for news of a
scientific discovery to reach another country.

Instant communication is a nice luxury, but it's by no means essential.

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dkarl
Funny, I just watched an episode of the Outer Limits ("Tourist Attraction") in
which a biologist proposed communicating with a strange sea creature by
decoding its vocalizations and synthesizing messages in its language, the same
way people talked to dolphins. I didn't realize the part about dolphins was
fiction, not science, and my reaction was, "Of course! If we know what the
sounds mean, then obviously we can synthesize our own messages. Huh, if people
have been doing it since the sixties, I wonder why I've never read about
it...."

Now I'm wondering why it has taken us so long to do something that science
fiction predicted fifty years ago and which wasn't blocked by any
technological limitations.

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noibl
I suspect stigma may play a part..

[John Lilly] studied other large-brained mammals and in the late 1950s he
established a centre devoted to fostering human-dolphin communication: the
Communication Research Institute on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. In the
early 1960s, Lilly and co-workers published several papers reporting that
dolphins could mimic human speech patterns.[7][8] Subsequent investigations of
dolphin cognition have generally, however, found it difficult to replicate his
results. -- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly>

Interesting guy but with a tendency to... go off at the deep end.

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mkramlich
... and unfortunately, it once again reinvents half of Lisp's features, but
poorly

