September 4, 2011

From dolphins to aliens

They won't look like this.
The other day I posted about similarities between human and dolphin speech. It was in reference to an article at physorg called Dolphins, Aliens and the Search for Intelligent life. Ah, you didn't know about that last bit, did you? I figured I'd save it for another post -- this one.

In the article, Laurance Doyle, a scientist at the SETI Institute in California, speaks about what the language of aliens who are more intelligent than us might be like:
To explain, Doyle highlights the example of Koko, a captive gorilla that has learned sign language and can understand concepts like “tomorrow” or “yesterday”. But combine time tenses, and Koko doesn’t understand.
 “If you say to her, ‘by this time tomorrow I’ll have finished eating’, Koko doesn’t understand the two time jumps, that at some point in the future there will be a point in the past,” says Doyle. “Now imagine an alien comes with more complex abilities. They may say, ‘I will have to be have been there’. Now there’s nothing wrong with that per se, but humans can’t handle three time jumps or more. An alien could just think in a more complex way.” So instead of double entendres, they might have triple or quadruple entendres.
Isn't that cool? I'm 100% sure there are aliens out there who are vastly more intelligent than we are. It makes perfect sense given the size of the universe and life's propensity for existing in any possible niche. In fact, it's insane to think there aren't aliens who are more intelligent than us. Dog, I'd like to meet them (even if they think I'm a fly). Go read the entire article. It's major fun.

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