I don't have much time to write this but one of the finest memories I will have of NN12 is a heated two-track debate while sitting in the Cuban Revolution restaurant in Providence.
The first debate was largely between Muskegon Critic and his watch, namely: "Should I cancel my fish sandwich order? Because it's taking forever!"
We'll save that outcome for the diary punchline.
The other debate had Muskegon Critic on one side holding serve against both aaraujo and myself on the important topic of first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Specifically: Could we even talk to them, or recognize what they had to say as talk? And vice-versa?
More on that below.
Well, I like to think I have a handle on the whole future history thing...what's likely and when and roughly how it will come about.
So here we are discussing science fiction (see: HP Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, etc.) and somehow the topic of first contact comes up.
Feeling a few beers and all sure I got it all figured out, I blurt out I think we'll detect some obvious sign of sentience within our lifetimes.
Muskegon Critic promptly disagrees, stating in as many words that we've largely talked ourselves into believing we can talk to our pets and that they "get" what we are saying. That we can read their signals and interpret them properly - and these are creatures we've been breeding for cohabitation with human beings for centuries, thousands of years and some for tens of thousands of years. But that, Muskegon Critic said, was NOT communication.
Aaraujo and I looked at each other and protested. Well, we might not understand it but we can see that cetaceans communicate. And herd and pack animals in the world.
Yes, Muskegon said - we've assigned that this is "language". And nothing he had studied in the field of linguistics suggested we had one clue of translating that to assess its level of content, nor its content save by direct observation of behavioral changes. In other words, we had empirically derived that Noise A (bloop) prompted Activity B (dash away at top speed) concurrently with the arrival of a shark ergo that meant Noise A was either a warning of danger or shark. When it might have meant "Screw Anchovies; Fred just found a school of Tuna at north by northwest four kilometers away. Let's party!"
OK, he did not actually say all that but I'm translating a verbal conversation on the fly into writing and I want to show I actually was listening to his points even as I was flabbergasted that anyone could possibly find my thoughts disagreeable.
It gets better. I raised the topic of a truly alien intelligence on our own planet that has some serious street cred in the popular science articles of late: octopi.
Muskegon waved that off. It's all hardwiring, accumulated programming over many millions of years of evolution. There's no way it's intelligence on account octopi only live a year, maybe a few years tops, They might have cleverness but they do not communicate nor do they have a body of knowledge to share with eight-leggedkind.
Which was the whole point of the discussion, that to detect an alien intelligence we have to posit that there is out there
1. A species that formulates ideas and communicates them in a conceptual medium between minds that observe, abstract data, have some means of transmitting this information to others of the same species (young, peers, etc)
2. And can latter develop a technological civilization that involves electromagnetic broadcasting
3. of sufficient strength to punch through numerous blocking and scattering phenomena that are closing the detection range available for us to "see" signs of sentient life
4. that said species is in that range
Muskegon's primary argument was that gettng to step #1 is practically "game over" for this type of discussion and the rest of the short list above is peanuts.
And that was his solution to the Fermi Paradox: That, based on the hundreds of millions of species that have lived and died on earth, the combination of (a) having something to say (b) a means of abstraction to accumulate a body of knowledge seprarate from genetic hardcoding and (c) to keep it going via communication among the species was so hard to practically moot the rise of any communicative sentient civilization never mind a technological radio and TV broadcasting one.
I'm actually about a magnitude off of Muskegon's view - I think t just makes sentience really rare but not absolutely so. Yet his stronger stand - that it's not just rare but hopelessly so to find intelligence other than our own ... unless we make it, I suppose.
So no one is going to pop in, or wave, and the dolphins will not pop up into space and say so long and thanks for the fish, per the Muskegon Solution to the Fermi Paradox.
And maybe that's a good thing, as it will force us to clean our own stables if no UFO allegory to angels doesn't swoop in to the rescue of either us or the critters we are killing en masse.
Oops. Almost forgot. Muskegon got his sandwich. He let me taste a bit of it. It was damn well worth the wait. So he won twice. :)