Okay, it’s a mask, but as far as I can ascertain, this happened. One imagines the CIA is happy to leak disguise technology from 30 years ago. Who knows what they have today. Of course, donning a mask does not infuse a person with language skills or cultural empathy. For that, you just need to hand a suitcase of cash to a person who grew up in another language and culture. The only thing that might have changed about that technology is the suitcase.
Octopi are super smart and super weird. Maybe they are as smart as us. If they evolved superior intelligence, would we even notice? Maybe they don’t care about inventing things like agriculture, the steam engine, and the radio. Maybe they are just happy doing what they’re doing. They have plenty of real estate to work with, after all.
No, dolphins are not communicating with extraterrestrials that we know of. This Aeon article is pretty interesting stuff though about how the study of dolphin intelligence and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have been intertwined over time though. The consensus these days seems to be that dolphins are as about as smart as a human toddler, which is pretty smart if you think about it, but not smart enough to build a technological civilization. This article contains some musings about whether technological civilizations are the inevitable end state of the evolution of intelligent life, whether another one would arise on Earth if ours disappeared for some reason (but life itself did not), whether there are likely to be others out there, whether they are likely to have come and gone, and if so why.
Later, at the first Soviet-American conference on communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) in 1971, it was suggested by some attendees that we don’t see evidence of supercivilisations across the galaxy because the only ones that persist are the ones that give up the risky path of technology and instead pursue immersion in nature. Ageing civilisations either self-destruct or shift focus to something like Zen Buddhism, it was conjectured: pursuing spiritual and qualitative self-perfection at the cost of all interest in external reality or ‘“quantitative” expansion’. The Russian astrophysicist Vladimir M Lipunov speculated that, across the Universe, the scientific mindset recurrently evolves, discovers all there is to know and, having exhausted its compelling curiosity, proceeds to wither away. By 1978, the philosophers Arkadiy Ursul and Yuri Shkolenko wrote of such conjectures – concerning the ‘possible rejection in the future of the “technological way” of development’ – and reflected that this would be tantamount to humanity’s ‘transformation into something like dolphins’.
Aeon
It’s a bit of a puzzle why we haven’t discovered any signals out there despite looking for around half a century. I recently listed to this Science Vs. podcast where someone likened our search so far to dipping a cup in the ocean and not coming up with any fish. You wouldn’t conclude from that that fish do not exist, just that they do not exist where you dipped the cup. The expert interviewed went on to say that technology is improving and those cups are now turning into buckets.
When IQ tests are taken by each generation, they are always normalized so that the average is a score of 100. However, when people are asked to take tests from older generations, they tend to do better than the older generations did. This is the Flynn effect. It was very consistent throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, but a number of studies in Scandinavia indicate that it may have reversed more recently. Immigration is one controversial explanation that has been suggested, whether due to genetic or cultural reasons. But the study I link to here tested the effect within families against the effect across unrelated people, and found that it is just as strong within families. This suggests environmental factors such as education and nutrition as the culprits, although the article does still put “migration” in this category. I suppose if you had a society with a high quality of nutrition and education, and you then have an influx of new people with more bad habits (let’s say, a high rate of smoking), that could have an effect.
Wikileaks has released a set of documents about NSA activities, which is covered by the Intercept. Here’s one tidbit:
The NSA, it turns out, likes to stay on top of the latest scientific developments. Writing at the end of 2004, an NSA cryptanalyst described her experience working as an intern, and using her cryptography skills, on looking for information about genetic sequencing in the signals intelligence collected by the NSA. “The ultimate goals of this project are to gain general knowledge about genetic engineering research activity by foreign entities,” she wrote, “and to identify laboratories and/or individuals who may be involved in nefarious use of genetic research.”