this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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Okay, but picture a fox approaching a henhouse and hearing the word "danger. Large threat." In no uncertain terms in language he fully comprehends. He doesn't need to alert the dog to know a member of his kin that he cannot see knows something he doesn't.
Imagine a line of buoys broadcasting and listening for migratory whale calls to properly time gaps in shipping lanes, able to say "loud scary thing soon" and warn pods.
Teaching dolphins to assist with garbage cleanup for food in special collection docks using words like "give junk for food."
We've learned to communicate with a select few animals already. Dogs, for instance, have millenia of experience learning our body language and vice versa, and we still hold dominion over them while elevating them in our ranking of sentience over, say, insects. If any other being can form the same level of two-way communication, we should treat them with more respect.
Lastly, imagine if extraterrestrials used your line of reasoning. We would be very fortunate indeed if our difference in mental capacity and communication skills were that between a human and a whale or a gorilla.
I love the way you think.
As a sci-fi fan, I think there's an infinite number of great things that could come from it. I mentioned Uplift War, which has humans taking responsibility for raising primates up to be a space faring race and dolphins flying spaceships in water filled suits. The dog race from Fire Upon the Deep learned to communicate, develop Medieval tech, and pass on generational knowledge. Snow Crash has the cybernetic guard dogs. So many cool possibilities exist.
But I don't know if our race is ready to deal with another intelligent species able to communicate with us as equals or near equals. If we learn the true feelings of one animal, and they tell us all animals have thoughts and emotions like we do, can we eat any animal after that? And after we develop animal communication, if we learn plants are sentient as well? Again, in Fire Upon the Deep, there was a plant race that existed on a time scale we couldn't grasp because their lives were so much longer than humans. If we learn eating animals or plants now is about the same as eating your neighbors, what do we do?
We have people now that will abuse animals. Not everyone of all races values all animals the same. Much of my animal research involves owls, but they're a bad omen in some parts of the world so people kill them. Some countries really seem to not value dogs. There's Japan with their whaling. Do these become new international disputes? Do we help or take in animal refugees?
Who gets to make the determinations about animal "personhood" to determine the new animal rights or how we interact with them. Do we end up with animal embassies? Can an animal press charges against someone abusing them? Can a mouse sue a cat for eating her husband?
As for if aliens would treat us badly or even have no regard for us whatsoever as if we were ants is one hypothesis for the Fermi Paradox. Life could be hiding from a galactic murderer or most have already been wiped out by them. And again, look at our history of what we've done to other groups of humans we've come across. We've had millenia to do almost whatever to all life on this planet, and not everyone would go along with a change this massive.
I just look at all going on around the world and it seems we haven't even learned to deal with our own species properly. I just don't think we'd be able to handle another just yet.
Pretty much any aspect of our daily lives or our spirituality would be affected if we had an intellectual peer. It's fun to think about as a series of hypotheticals, but if it were real, I don't know how we'd feel about ourselves. I don't think a lot of species would necessarily be thrilled with us. I wouldn't want to have to be the first person to speak to a bison on the Great Plains for instance and try to explain why humans did what they did to them.
I see where you're coming from. On a social scale it'll be more disruptive than the coming of Jesus or the Buddha. Yet ignorance has rarely yielded better results with time. If animal life is more intelligent than we let on, than not studying it is like not turning around to see the house fire because we're looking at the pretty lights dancing on the grass.
Again, I have to go back to alien life. One of two things will happen. They will see us as animals with an above average level of communication: a parrot, and not deserving of the title sentience. Or, they will see how we treat life that does meet their definition of sentience, and we eat other beings that do, too. Or, the secret third thing where we're ranked the same as the bacteria of our world.
We are in the position of those aliens making a decision about potentially sentient life. Now that we have a whiff of the embers, we should look at the fire to know how badly we've been burning it.
I do hope we would do positive things should we gain the ability to talk with animals. I've watched a bit about Koko and the other gorillas that learned sign language and it's very amazing stuff. It seems to get treated as a novelty though.
I don't know if we can really even assume what another race would do with us. If they're millennia ahead of us, they could probably trick us like when somebody pretends to toss something to a dog. We could luck out and be overall more advanced than them ala The Road Not Taken.
It's easy to see most any animal as an individual if you spend any time with them, yet we still spend most of our coexistence with them treating them as NPCs. I don't know what it would take to win us over as a whole, and I guess that thought just makes me a bit sad.