Inferiority? None of that, Martin, we think of different frequencies. My personal opinion of the German people has always been better than that commonly accepted in the Western world. His best virtue is that he always seeks excellence: if he is ordered to make tanks, he manufactures the best in the world, if he is ordered to be a fascist, he surpasses Mussolini, if he is ordered to be a communist, he surpasses the Russians, if he is ordered to be democratic, he gives lessons to the peoples of the south. An obedient, disciplined and respectful people with their leaders.
A democracy designed by Kissinger must be kind to everyone.
Octopuses are the most 'alien' intelligences on earth, and yet people have formed close bonds with them.
Scott's country has twice crossed the Atlantic to prevent Europeans from annihilating each other by fighting for stupid monarchical borders. For seventy years the US army has prevented Russian tanks from reaching Gibraltar and imposed rationing of all goods. American influence gave us food, freedom, and a new way of looking at the future. Instead of showing appreciation, European intellectuals responded with the slogan "American go home" in a hundred thousand demonstrations and millions of graffiti. The European Union is just a movie set. I wonder what will happen to the arrogant politicians in Brussels when the Americans leave... Remember what happened to the British Isles when the last Legion withdrew?
Relevance to this thread? Is it about bananas?
Octopuses are the most 'alien' intelligences on earth, and yet people have formed close bonds with them.
People often describe octopuses as aliens and point out that there are strange convergences. Conventional wisdom holds that to be intelligent, natural selection favours species that are K-strategists, as opposed to r-strategists. Ks typically live long, have complex social structures, produce few offspring which mature slowly but have high survival rates due to high parental investment in their care. Generally they are highly intelligent and have 'culture.' Humans, other primates, and cetaceans are exemplars of this type. Rs are the opposite - they are asocial, and they produce many offspring for which there is no parental care and which have low survival rates. K-strategists are more adaptable due to the time spent learning while r-strategists recover quickly from catastrophes.
r/K selection theory - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Octopuses and cuttlefish however break this rule (we don't know enough about squids). They're very smart despite being asocial, short-lived (which is really tragic), and having no care of juveniles (parents die before their eggs even hatch).
Despite all of that, there are plenty of reports by people who have interacted with octopuses.
My Octopus Teacher - Wikipedia
The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness : Montgomery, Sy: Amazon.com.au: Books
The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness : Montgomery, Sy: Amazon.com.au: Bookswww.amazon.com.au
Other Minds by Godfrey-Smith, Peter
Other Minds [Godfrey-Smith, Peter] on Amazon.com.au. *FREE* shipping on eligible orders. Other Mindswww.amazon.com.au
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABCg2oLB5wo
( I really feel sorry for octopuses and wish some mad scientist would endow them with long lifespans.)
(There are parrots and crows to consider but they are also R-strategists and I bring up octopuses because they diverged from our lineage so long ago, long before backbones evolved.)
So then, the point is that apparently some intersections are possible, despite what I have written above. However, we should be careful of anthropomorphisation. Maybe we can find some commonality with weird intelligences, but just how much? Flannery O'Connor, paraphrasing Teilhard de Chardin, wrote that 'everything that rises must converge':
Everything That Rises Must Converge - Wikipedia
Does higher intelligence, despite its different origins, converge on some common form? Is that wishful thinking? Even if that is so, it looks like being something that's beyond our current intellectual horizon.
Not really. They just don't need to live long. Each mother produces hundreds or even thousands of eggs. All she has to do is ensure that they remain viable until they hatch. Out of that number, enough survive to ensure the perpetuation of the species. My wish that they would live long or your suggestion that stress is a factor are both anthropomorphisation. Apparent 'senescence' is consistent in its manifestation in octopus mothers as they tend their eggs - they devote themselves entirely to the one role of keeping water flowing over their eggs to the exclusion of all other tasks, physically and cognitively. This consistency indicates that it is purposeful, even programmed behaviour, and it is advantageous to their offspring. They all behave the same way, they all act to protect and sustain their eggs before dying. Their exotic neurology when in their prime is another issue.
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-scientists-clues-aging-squishy-sea.html
Any FTL technology will be too advanced for us to copy it, and even understand it. Maybe ET could help us with other lower-level technologies to produce clean energy and improve our medicines, but the most valuable thing it could give us are its star maps. We could give him a picture of Einstein in return to test his sense of humor.
Perhaps it was not a good idea to give up the protection of the conical shell to gain maneuverability, now they spend most of their lives hidden in rocky crevices, old cans or discarded glass jars.Not really. They just don't need to live long. Each mother produces hundreds or even thousands of eggs. All she has to do is ensure that they remain viable until they hatch. Out of that number, enough survive to ensure the perpetuation of the species. My wish that they would live long or your suggestion that stress is a factor are both anthropomorphisation. Apparent 'senescence' is consistent in its manifestation in octopus mothers as they tend their eggs - they devote themselves entirely to the one role of keeping water flowing over their eggs to the exclusion of all other tasks, physically and cognitively. This consistency indicates that it is purposeful, even programmed behaviour, and it is advantageous to their offspring. They all behave the same way, they all act to protect and sustain their eggs before dying. Their exotic neurology when in their prime is another issue.
The best explanation so far for the high intelligence of octopuses is that they have to be smart precisely because they are solitary orphans. With no parent to teach them, they have to be able to learn about their environment and devise adaptive behaviours on their own quickly.
As an aside, there have been discoveries of these supposedly asocial creatures living in communities. A species known as the 'gloomy octopus' have been observed living for generations in close proximity. The question is whether this will be advantageous for the propagation of the species in the long run. Let's see what happens in a few million years...
Octopolis and Octlantis - Wikipedia
Where did I miss that? I said it was a good system for a large country like the US, not a good one for a small country like Belgium. Must I go through every country on Earth to appease the bigots?
Perhaps the cockpit of an octopus spaceship requires the use of six sticks (two for the yaw, two for the pitch and two for the roll) and two throttles (one for accelerating and one for braking), a technology unattainable for humans with only two arms, perhaps a pair of monkeys could try it by coordinating their efforts.
Every year, when summer begins, they come to walk with their UFOs over our cities, then descend to scare several old women in the kitchen of their houses, abduct a few guys, return them and leave, it is the tradition.Why aliens must spend resources for contact us @milions light years from us ?
Any system of government can run on money, but not forever. Economists have a joke about it, legend has it that when she was a child, Frau Merkel found the treasure of the Nibelungs and that there is a vault in Switzerland that is responsible for maintaining the credibility of European socialism in the twenty-first century.
Europeans cannot agree who pays for the coffee and cake for their meetings let alone anything else. How on earth (Puny, I know) they managed to get the US to pay for OUR defence for decades post WW2 while proclaiming themselves to be proud nationals I will never get.
Even worse, there is nothing we can vote to make changes at the top: they choose from among themselves.
A society with FTL technology and force fields can be several million years of technological life and have motivations, beliefs and needs completely different from ours, depending on the environment in which they have evolved and the dangers of annihilation they will have suffered during their long existence. They can have enormous size and a speed of thought a thousand times slower or faster than ours, they can have very different senses and need interfaces to understand our senses, our system of measurements and our laws. They can be colonies of small, highly radioactive gestalt organisms that communicate telepathically... or a predatory race that has obtained technology from older ones and is using it like those African warlords who use mines and helicopters to slaughter elephants for ivory. The universe is full of known dangers and hopefully the ones we don't know about are even worse.
I take it then that in his 39 year fascist dictatorial run, due to lack of patriotic vigor, Franco was never able to make Spanish trains run on time, no?
He didn't even try, he knew that we don't respect our leaders, that's why he lasted 39 years.
I honestly don't think he cared one bit whether people respected him, as long as they didn't dare to try to get rid of his dictatorship...
If it bothered him, because he was short and jokes were made, but he had to endure it, considering what had happened to the other dictators.
Here there are many intelligent people and it is fun to exchange information, unfortunately sometimes the conversation turns to politics and close the thread.
OK
ET does not pick up the SETI phone. I believe that the first ET contact will be involuntary when we are able to detect their communication systems and listen to their conversations (aha I caught you), I would bet my entire Playboy collection of the sixties that they use FTL technology.
Even that is wide ranging in potential lessons. Belgians in the Congo? Bad for the Congolese. Americans & Brits & whatnot show up in Tokyo bay? Welll... it was bad for the existing order, but over all *fantastic* for the Japanese. They hauled themselves out of the mire of feudalistic society and technology into an advanced 20th century *power.* They ended up getting their asses handed to them not because of evil colonial powers, but because they got too ambitious.
Frogs do not think long term. Humans can and do, sometimes engaging in engineering projects that are acknowledged will take far longer than their lives. And that's just baseline humans. Humans who can be frozen solid for millenia, humans who can upload into digital storage for later download into new bio or cyber bodies, humans genetically modified to last for millenia... these folk might take "long term planning" to unprecedented levels.
