Let’s picture that we literally took 10 000 top human engineers and scientists, with all our human knowledge, into dolphin bodies, on another planet with no human artefacts.
That’s a bad start. The issue is not whether intelligent dolphins will be able to replicate human civilization, the issue is whether they might be able to develop their own—one which will look very different from human and which, I suspect, would be largely beyond our imagination at the moment.
The point of the example is to provoke a concrete discussion. Appeals to unimaginable are not very useful. The underwater environment doesn’t seem as conductive to technological visible-from-a-distance civilization, in any case. Dramatically different civilizations may not go into space, and if we are discussing civilizations whose apparent absence in the sky is suspicious, those recreate a huge chunk of our own civilization.
edit: let’s put it this way. The only data point we got on things such as civilization not becoming stagnant, or civilization becoming visible, is our own. The further we go from there the less reason we have to expect those to occur.
Generalizing from the sample of one is where you get the idea that we’ll see them from. edit: let’s just agree that the assumption that aliens would be visible has uncertainties, that are much larger for some really really alien unimaginable aliens.
That’s a bad start. The issue is not whether intelligent dolphins will be able to replicate human civilization, the issue is whether they might be able to develop their own—one which will look very different from human and which, I suspect, would be largely beyond our imagination at the moment.
The point of the example is to provoke a concrete discussion. Appeals to unimaginable are not very useful. The underwater environment doesn’t seem as conductive to technological visible-from-a-distance civilization, in any case. Dramatically different civilizations may not go into space, and if we are discussing civilizations whose apparent absence in the sky is suspicious, those recreate a huge chunk of our own civilization.
edit: let’s put it this way. The only data point we got on things such as civilization not becoming stagnant, or civilization becoming visible, is our own. The further we go from there the less reason we have to expect those to occur.
I see absolutely no reason for that to be so. Generalizing from the sample of one is foolhardy.
Generalizing from the sample of one is where you get the idea that we’ll see them from. edit: let’s just agree that the assumption that aliens would be visible has uncertainties, that are much larger for some really really alien unimaginable aliens.