Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2020 October 26

= October 26 =

Communicating with ants
It has been said that communication between us and a super-advanced alien civilisation would be nigh-impossible due to the intelligence gap: we would be like ants to them, and we can't communicate with ants, can we?

While the analogy holds true in the sense that you or I as individuals can't communicate with ants, it doesn't seem particularly hard for us as a civilisation to use our tech to cook up copies of ant pheromones to communicate with them: ''there's food this way! get out of here, it's dangerous! protect the queen!''. Sure, we wouldn't be able to teach them how to build a Concorde, but we would be able to communicate in most, if not all, areas that are relevant to ants, right?

So I guess my question is: 1) is it technically possible to replicate and use ant pheromones to communicate with them; and 2) if so, does the analogy with human-alien communication hold water? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.48.118.6 (talk) 09:55, 26 October 2020 (UTC)


 * It is reportedly possible to use synthetic trail pheromones to disrupt the foraging of the Argentine ant. I am not inclined to consider this a form of communication. Some people believe the gods are trying to tell us something by sending earthquakes and pestilence; one would think they could have found a more effective medium by now. --Lambiam 13:52, 26 October 2020 (UTC)


 * It depends on your concept of "communication". It is possible to instruct ants to do something using chemical cues.  As an example, as a kid I learned about their chemical trails and was able to make ants go around in a circle indefinitely (cf. ant mill).  However, if communication implies a back-and-forth exchange of information, one can't really communicate with ants.  Ants exhibit some degree of intelligence as a colony, but not as individuals (cf. hive mind).  Is it theoretically possible to communicate with an ant colony?  An interesting question addressed in D. R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach (recommended reading).


 * The human-alien communication analogy is a bit of hyperbole. An exchange of information is possible if the two parties are able to establish a common form of language, whether directly or through technological means. --2606:A000:1126:28D:B5DD:5357:E670:E544 (talk) 19:12, 26 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Communication should be possible up to the level at which the less intelligent/sophisticated being is able to communicate i.e. the reason humans cannot communicate much with ants is at least in part because ants can't communicate much between themselves. Sure, they can lay trails that show others where food might be, and I'm guessing they must have means to alert each other when their colony is under attack etc., but they can't discuss philosophy or theology or other abstract concepts, nor can they explain their life histories or precisely articulate feelings etc. So my guess is that a super-intelligent alien being would be able to communicate with humans at a similar level to the way that humans communicate between themselves, but the way the alien beings communicated between themselves would presumably be beyond our comprehension. PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 19:42, 26 October 2020 (UTC)
 * An impediment to communication with a highly intelligent alien entity could be a lack of common ground in notions that are grounded to us in interoception and emotional states, and communicable to our conspecifics by virtue of recognizing the same in others, using a (hard-wired) theory of mind. Examples could be such notions as beauty and fairness. --Lambiam 23:21, 26 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Excerpt from communication with an alien entity:
 * — ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.
 * — Why? That is not fair!
 * — REASON IS WE ARE TAKE YOUR BASE. NOW BELONG TO US.
 * — But they are ours, I mean, they are belong to us.
 * — YOU ARE MISTAKE. THEY WAS BELONG TO YOU. NOW BELONG TO US.
 * — Can't we just all be friends?
 * — ALL YOUR FRIEND ARE BELONG TO US.
 * --Lambiam 10:07, 27 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Communication with no a prioris is a potentially delicate thing to define - see Chinese room. 2A01:E34:EF5E:4640:80C7:2FB8:BDEA:96DD (talk) 15:29, 27 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Lots of ways have been used to quantify interstellar civilizations which may be enlightening on this discussion. Consider, for example, the Kardashev scale, which attempts to define a civilization based on its energy usage.  Any alien civilization which cracked the hard physics problem of interstellar travel would need to be at least Kardashev Level 2.  Humans are currently Kardashev Level 0.  That gap in energy usage is unfathomably large, and to presume that interstellar aliens would be "like us but just a little smarter" is simply not accurate.  That even ignores all of the issues such as timescales of communication and whatnot.  We're used to a human-sized world with human-sized time-scales and human-paced communication.  It's not hard to imagine an alien species which lives either much slower or much faster than we do.  How do we communicate with a species which is much more intelligent than us, but which communicates at a speed orders of magnitude slower than us?  What if the wow signal was a single bit sent our way from an alien race which was sending such bits once every thousand years?  We couldn't even get a word-length piece of information from them on evolutionary timescales.  -- Jayron 32 17:52, 27 October 2020 (UTC)
 * The (hard) SF novel Dragon's Egg is about intelligent creatures establishing successful communication with comparatively slow-witted humans, who live a million times slower. --Lambiam 09:38, 29 October 2020 (UTC)
 * We can communicate with bees, using a robot to mimic their waggle dance and thus direct them where to forage for food (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.07126). Jmchutchinson (talk) 06:15, 1 November 2020 (UTC)