David Berreby spoke with Denise Herzing, a dolphin researcher who recently wrote a paper explaining the need for “a non-human biased definition and measure of intelligence.” How this will help as we explore the universe:
“I was thinking in terms of, Well, why do we want to know this, anyway?” Herzing told me. We might find a splendidly complex creature out there that has no interest in being sociable with its would-be friends from Earth. Grasping this could help us avoid unpleasant misunderstandings—like that moment at the end of Stanislaw Lem’s novel “Fiasco” where an astronaut, having hacked away at some unsightly mounds on the ground, comes to realize that the mounds are the intelligent aliens he was looking for.
Of course, it’s kind of discouraging to think the human race could spend so much hope and effort on the search for life only to find roving wave-lattices and other beings that won’t, or can’t, talk with us. But you can also see the expansion of our quest for intelligence as exhilarating. It raises the possibility that life out there will be interestingly, perhaps shockingly, different. The alternative possibility is that the problems of life and intelligence are the same everywhere, which means that evolution will keep converging on the same answer on Earth and on any other planet—and what could be less encouraging of space travel than the thought that the journey’s end would reveal more of the same? Better to wrestle at the edges of comprehension than to expect, as Wallace Stevens once wrote of Heaven, “that they should wear our colors there, and pluck the strings of our insipid lutes.”
The Dish 