I've always thought ideas like these to be cool exercises, but ultimately so naive.
It seems there are so many underlying assumptions on what intelligence looks like for this to make any sense. E.g. why do we assume another intelligent being would necessarily follow a linear, sequential conversation? or that the conversation would happen in the same time-scale we are used to as humans? or that an extraterrestrial being would care about conversation at all, instead of exchanging information via other means, like direct chemical reactions, genetics, or apparent random noise, and expecting us to pick all the implicit signals?
I bet we wouldn't be able to recognise certain life forms if they literally appeared before us, because we have such strong biases of what "life" looks like - we can't even reach consensus over viruses being life forms, despite being gene-based, following natural selection, etc. Let alone "intelligent life forms" or anything else that a virtually infinite universe could throw at us.
PS: Maybe my notion of "extraterrestrial" has been deeply influenced by H. P. Lovecraft. :D
It seems there are so many underlying assumptions on what intelligence looks like for this to make any sense. E.g. why do we assume another intelligent being would necessarily follow a linear, sequential conversation? or that the conversation would happen in the same time-scale we are used to as humans? or that an extraterrestrial being would care about conversation at all, instead of exchanging information via other means, like direct chemical reactions, genetics, or apparent random noise, and expecting us to pick all the implicit signals?
I bet we wouldn't be able to recognise certain life forms if they literally appeared before us, because we have such strong biases of what "life" looks like - we can't even reach consensus over viruses being life forms, despite being gene-based, following natural selection, etc. Let alone "intelligent life forms" or anything else that a virtually infinite universe could throw at us.
PS: Maybe my notion of "extraterrestrial" has been deeply influenced by H. P. Lovecraft. :D