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You miss my point. An advanced civilization might be unable to communicate with us for exactly that reason---we are not intelligent enough. You can speak to a fruit fly all day in English, Greek and Latin, and it will still have no idea that you are more intelligent.
If a civilization communicates purely by mental telepathy, how in hell would a human being be aware of that if the part of the brain necessary to do so is absent? Bees can see ultaviolet and migratory birds can sense geomagnetic fields and oysters know what day it is, but they can't communicate any of that to our limited brain.
Communication always depends on some kind of hardware (even if it's just eardrums), and there isn't even recognition of the medium without the necessary hardware.
I caught your point, and you totally missed mine. My point is that your point that the hardware missing is wrong.
How does one create radio waves? Hardware (even assuming that the creatures would communicate naturally using radio waves, we could pick it up on our receivers). How does one emit light? Either naturally or through hardware (those fish at the darkest depths of the sea are cool, the ones with the lights). Even if they could not communicate through sound, they would have the hardware necessary to communicate through some other means. So, your point that the "hardware is missing" is moot.
Now in terms of intelligence, you also missed my point. My point is that any civilization advanced beyond the stone age would have discovered simple math. Stuff like 1+1 = 2, in whatever base arithmetic they use. Even binary we could understand ... logic, stuff like AND gates and OR gates. Since we are advanced enough to understand simple stuff like this, and because they would undoubtedly would too, we could quickly develop a means of understanding each other through math.
It may be difficult, but it could be understood. Your points are, at best, highly improbable. I won't argue impossible, but highly improbable.
Anyway, this sidebar is interesting but besides the point. I am simply curious IF we could communicate in some ways after establishing linguistic understanding, through some technological or natural means, what would you ask?
What do you value? How do you pass down knowledge? Do you have myths? Do you have comedy? What is humorous to you? Do you have rituals? Do you have musical instruments? Do you have literature? Can I read it? Followed by, do you have to use the restroom? How do you have sex? Do you have something similar to families? You have seen my planet, can I see yours? What are your norms?
The interesting phenomenon of cattle mutilations has led me to a certain conjecture, as to the 'Why' of this question.
We need to consider the possibility that they have somehow exhausted their natural supply of some nutrient, that can be extracted from terrestrial sources. Cattle mutilations invariably involve the removal of organs that are rich in hormonal content. Cows are big and docile animals that can serve as a rich and easily extracted source of such organic material, with limited moral compunctions.
A have some experience with cattle mutilations, having accompanied a sheriff's deputy and a veterinarian to the site of one. No cattle mutilation has ever been solved, however it is customary for authorities to attribute them to cult activity, in order to avoid uncomfortable follow-up questions from the citizenry. The deputy I accompanied has investigated a dozen or so cattle mutilation, and told me it is definitely not cult-related, and that if he did say what he thought, he would lose credibility as a law officer.
I have always found UFO sightings, crop circles, and cattle mutilations funny. Making logical conclusions considering our nearest solar systems, aliens would have had to travel some 80 light years to get to our little blue spot.
Traveling eighty light years in a manner conducive to realistic time constraints, some mastery of time and space would also be necessary (transgenerational ships are not realistic as far more time would have passed on the originating species planet for knowledge to prove useful). Considering these conclusions (space and time mastery, and the refutation of that pesky light speed barrier) do any of you realistically believe that they would be viewable to us? Masking one’s self should prove far simpler.
Additionally even if they were to reveal themselves to us would we have the ability to comprehend what we were viewing? In my opinion our attempted comprehension of a species with these capabilities would be more akin to an ant looking through the opposite side of a magnifying glass. Additionally if a species with the ability to reach us did in fact want to perform studies on species endemic to our planet, why would they leave clue’s? Dead cow’s, crop circles and the such seem a bit ridiculous. Referring again to their tremendous scientific capabilities cloaked research would be far easier and realistic.
Finally if they did in fact want to impart a message wouldn’t a direct manner prove more affective? Now don’t get me wrong. I believe that there are intelligent species out there and they may even be here currently, however much of the evidence out there of their existence currently is pretty hokey to me. Going back to the OP’s initial question of what I would ask them if I had the opportunity (assuming that they knew) the true meaning and nature of the universe.
I would ask them how they feel about losing their ship in Roswell and how they feel about us stealing all that technology to create cell phones, dvd players, cd's, and gps systems.
Everyone here needs to break out of the narrow view that life is only possible where carbon and oxygen are stable. C and O are not essentials to life, they are only essential to all the life forms that we know about.
Here you start us on a rather thought provoking thread and raise the level of discourse with the above and just as I was about to rep you for your insight you speak of cattle mutilations as credible evidence of advanced extraterrestrial activity... talk about a rollercoaster ride.
Here you start us on a rather thought provoking thread and raise the level of discourse with the above and just as I was about to rep you for your insight you speak of cattle mutilations as credible evidence of advanced extraterrestrial activity... talk about a rollercoaster ride.
I did say that whoever is responsible has so far escaped detection or credible explanation, which leaves open the possibility that extraterresrians (if there are any) could be manifesting themselves in this way. And I offered, as was originally requested in the OP, a plausible example of what reason aliens might have visiting this planet. I merely offered cattle mutilations as credible evidence that unexplained events are occurring, with motives unclear to earthlings, adding the aside that the characteristics could be within the realm of hypothetical alien visitation. Never did I say that the phenomena constitute credible evidence of advanced extraterrestrial activity.
...a plausible example of what reason aliens might have visiting this planet.
It could certainly be the case that an advanced civilization was conducting explorations, and happened upon a planet supporting life that they hadn't previously known about.
New Yorker magazine has a cartoon this week, of thousands of aliens pouring out of a space ship, and one of them tells the earthling "This isn't an invasion---it's a cruise".
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