There are really really good reasons why our status in the universe matters so much and they all have to do with what is next for us as a species.
In part this has to do with the Fermi Paradox. Are we alone because we're in a protected garden? Alone because the half-life of civilizations is very low? Alone because there is a firewall that takes out all civilizations at a particular level of development (like say climate change)? Maybe if we learn about the firewall we can do something about it? The list of answers to the Fermi Paradox is immense and many of those answers could make a concrete difference to us.
Who is to say that we can't communicate? Some theories of physics might allow for wormholes or something like that (this is not likely at all due to time travel paradoxes, but who knows).
Even just learning about another civilization and measuring the rough properties of the atmosphere of their planet could be a revolution. If we discover that the atmosphere is totally unlike what we have, that a totally new kind of life is possible, we could open up entire new fields of science.
The most obvious way to communicate is to put out basic facts about the universe, like say the energy states of your favorite atoms or something like that. What if their version of the basic facts is thousands of years ahead of ours? Physics works off of very little evidence, a small nudge toward the right answer is all that it would take to change everything.
Even if we can't communicate in a lifetime or two, maybe we can communicate over the span of 200 years. Imagine what could be learned through an exchange with a culture that has followed a totally technological and scientific arc. We could be in a local minima missing really important things about the universe.
We're in a pretty crappy place when it comes to AI. We know how to do some things, but the overall picture of figuring out what intelligence is, we're in the dark about that. We don't even know how to ask the right questions. Access to a totally different intelligence would change that completely.
I could go on from fields like linguistics, to psychology, everything that communicating with an alien species touches upon would be revolutionized. Imagine how chemistry would change if we knew for sure that ammonia-based life was possible? We would invest massive sums and figure it all out, and all it would take is a bit of knowledge about the gross statistics of their atmosphere.
Most of that can be said about whales, but we still don’t see many whales-motivated scientific research being carried out even if there’s a possibility we could communicate. Who’s to say aliens would be any different?
I'm not sure what to say to this.
Whales are obviously not intelligent in the way humans are? They have no technology, no language, and don't engage in any scientific inquiries. So.. no. None of this can be said about whales.
Whales have at least a rudimentary form of language. There is evidence for syntactic structure, even if the information density is an order of magnitude (or more) less dense than human speech.
Whales also teach each other new hunting techniques and have other complicated social behaviors.
Without a better understanding of whale language and cognition, I don't think you can safely say they don't engage in a form of scientific inquiry.
Right, so they are intelligent in a different way, which I would argue is going to be no different with the aliens we discover. Their language will be intractable. As for scientific inquiries, that’s kind of unknowable and dubious considering that whales can get quite inventive with their hunting techniques, involving experimentation and cunning in a way that’s pretty similar to the scientific method of inquiry with hypothesis testing. Technology, I will grant that’s an exception.
Whale share a significant part of their developmental history, genetics and brain chemistry with us humans. They don't really qualify as alien in any of the interesting ways that were mentioned.
They’re biologically related to us, and yet we still can’t communicate with them. That should show how motivated or able we are to figure out language with other species.
It’s not basic imitation if they can communicate using the language of another species [1] nor is it that big of a stretch when they have larger brains than us.
I don't think you can generalize the level of motivation. If we had aliens to communicate with, there would be much higher levels of effort deployed than we have put into whale communications.
However, it might give us a clue about how hard cross species translation can be.
In part this has to do with the Fermi Paradox. Are we alone because we're in a protected garden? Alone because the half-life of civilizations is very low? Alone because there is a firewall that takes out all civilizations at a particular level of development (like say climate change)? Maybe if we learn about the firewall we can do something about it? The list of answers to the Fermi Paradox is immense and many of those answers could make a concrete difference to us.
Who is to say that we can't communicate? Some theories of physics might allow for wormholes or something like that (this is not likely at all due to time travel paradoxes, but who knows).
Even just learning about another civilization and measuring the rough properties of the atmosphere of their planet could be a revolution. If we discover that the atmosphere is totally unlike what we have, that a totally new kind of life is possible, we could open up entire new fields of science.
The most obvious way to communicate is to put out basic facts about the universe, like say the energy states of your favorite atoms or something like that. What if their version of the basic facts is thousands of years ahead of ours? Physics works off of very little evidence, a small nudge toward the right answer is all that it would take to change everything.
Even if we can't communicate in a lifetime or two, maybe we can communicate over the span of 200 years. Imagine what could be learned through an exchange with a culture that has followed a totally technological and scientific arc. We could be in a local minima missing really important things about the universe.
We're in a pretty crappy place when it comes to AI. We know how to do some things, but the overall picture of figuring out what intelligence is, we're in the dark about that. We don't even know how to ask the right questions. Access to a totally different intelligence would change that completely.
I could go on from fields like linguistics, to psychology, everything that communicating with an alien species touches upon would be revolutionized. Imagine how chemistry would change if we knew for sure that ammonia-based life was possible? We would invest massive sums and figure it all out, and all it would take is a bit of knowledge about the gross statistics of their atmosphere.
And we're just scratching the surface.