Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[10ebbor10]

Or the megastructures. Ie mean, the ants make bridges to grab leaves, pull them together and them pin them together using the heads of other ants. I mean, that's taking one for the team.

[Loud Whispers]

Or the megastructures. Ie mean, the ants make bridges to grab leaves, pull them together and them pin them together using the heads of other ants. I mean, that's taking one for the team.

Life comes cheap when you're a drone

But what if two opposing alien swarms meet? The human hive mind vs the alien hive mind?

[10ebbor10]

Or the megastructures. Ie mean, the ants make bridges to grab leaves, pull them together and them pin them together using the heads of other ants. I mean, that's taking one for the team.

Life comes cheap when you're a drone

But what if two opposing alien swarms meet? The human hive mind vs the alien hive mind?

Well, as long as we can do succesfull diplomacy with them, everything is fine.  If they learn that crush/kill/destroy is the easiest way to handle it, we might have to vaporize quite a lot of them to get it out of their system.

Also, about the head things. They are also used as a replacement for wire in some hospitals. The heads are less painfull, hold better and don't cause scars.

[lemon10]

Ants don't actually have a hivemind. It can appear that they have one, and they work amazingly together, but they can't pool their intellect, their behavior is genetically based, and they lack other things that a true hivemind would have.

Ants do have a hivemind. They only don't have the sci fi intrepretation of a hivemind. The difference between those is that the ant one is possible from a scientific perspective, while the second one is heavily dependent on the abilitiy to psychically connect.

Besides, who said ants can't pool intellect. The definition of a hivemind is that they are individually dumb, but smart in numbers. Ants can solve a maze quite quickly, by each taking a different route and covering it with a chemical. The shortest route will be covered the most, so all ants start following it.

Hive mind may refer to:
- Collective consciousness (Ie, not your intrepretation)
- The apparent consciousness of colonies of social insects such as ants, bees and termites (Ants)
- Swarm intelligence, the collective behaviour of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial (My intrepretation)

Ants don't actually have a hivemind. It can appear that they have one, and they work amazingly together, but they can't pool their intellect, their behavior is genetically based, and they lack other things that a true hivemind would have.

Not a sci-fi hivemind, no.
But they along with bees function as a super organism. Where they actually do pool their intellect together. Groups of specialists working in concerto can achieve what individuals cannot, and our own swarms give us a good idea of that.
If a scout finds food, it leaves chemical trails so that workers can find them. If the colony needs to fragment, the females may no long be chemically suppressed and become queens.
Then you've got the downright awesome examples of the supply lines soldier ants make, or the ant boats

Ninja'd.

They don't pool their intellect together though, that's the key thing.
A thousand ants in a group are exactly as smart as a thousand ants each on their own.
They will act differently due to being in a different size of group, and can do things that individual ants can't, but viewing them as a single mind is incorrect, they do often times operate as if they WERE in a hive mind, but they aren't.

Spoiler: Large quote (or small article) from a website that shows what I mean (click to show/hide)

"Hive mind" is basically a science-fiction concept that extrapolates from a reality that's a lot less flashy. It's not that the concept is a bad one, but the connotations are a bit much. If you go poking around in the literature on artificial intelligence, you can find some of this stuff. It's also in the biology literature, under the concept of "emergent properties" and "self-organizing systems."

What it boils down to is this.  Most animals seem to have a set of rules they follow under certain circumstances, sort of a hard-wired stimulus/response system. For some animals, like humans, this set of hard-wired behaviors is very small, and generally plays little role in day-to-day existence. For others, the hard-wired stuff constitutes almost their entire behavioral repertoire. Ants are in the latter group. The "rules" that govern an ant's actions don't change when it's in a group--the ants do not individually become any "smarter"--but these rules themselves tell the ants to do certain things differently based on stimuli they get only when they're in a group. As a result of interactions between group members, then, the group as a whole will exhibit patterns of activity that isolated individuals normally don't: an "emergent property."

Some folks have worked up computer simulations to study what sorts of rules are needed to bring about patterns that match, for example, what we see ants doing in the real world. One fellow, Nigel Franks, has done some amazing simulations that replicate the seemingly complex behaviors of army ants using incredibly simple computer programs. The bottom line is that ants in a raiding column or honeybees building a comb don't have to know what they're doing or what the overall pattern is that they're contributing to--since natural selection appears to act upon the properties of the group as a whole, the group is the level at which the complex behaviors are expressed. To put it another way, the group "knows" something that the individual members don't. Calling this a "hive mind" is reading way too much into it, but also an oversimplification of how the phenomenon comes about.

[10ebbor10]

Sadly, your website is wrong. Hive mind doesn't mean that. That's what fiction made of it, and suprise, it's wrong. For the actual definition of hivemind, use wikipedia, or a dictionary/ encyclopedia.

Also, a thousand ants in a group are way smarter than a thousand ants on their own. For example, put one ant and food in a maze. Or put a thousand ants and food in a maze.  The single ant will find the food, and start moving it back. The thousand ants will find the food, estabilish the optimal route, and therefore bring it back much faster.

The fact that they don't link there minds like multicore processors doesn't mean that they ain't a hivemind. You're going No true scotsman here, Ie by changing the definition to meet your requirements, doesn't mean that reality will fit to that.

Ants are a hivemind, the things that are called hiveminds in television, are not, Not always anyway. It's just that Hollywood once again misused a term, and therefore crippled it's meaning.

[Loud Whispers]

Ants are in the latter group. The "rules" that govern an ant's actions don't change when it's in a group

..


Complimentary video

[darkrider2]

Ants are in the latter group. The "rules" that govern an ant's actions don't change when it's in a group

...

I remember reading an article on herd intelligence or something of similar name. Talked about how when in the presence of large groups the mind automatically interprets actions by other members of the group and derives information from them. Like finding a terminal at an airport you might look for a group of other people heading in a common direction.

They performed an experiment where 100 people walked in a large circle donut indefinitely, and then a few of them would be told to try to get the rest of the group to follow them outside the circle. At about 5% of the total group you could get the whole herd to follow them.

yay sociology.

[Cthulhu]

The odds of aliens being anywhere near us technologically are basically zero.  The Earth has been here for 4.5 billion years and we've had guys in space for what, 60 years?  If advancement continues to be exponential, and we assume aliens will be similar, they're going to be so primitive they may as well be lower animals, or they're going to be so advanced we can't relate to them on any meaningful level.  Maybe they aren't even living things by our paradigms.

What worries me is that planet-killing weapons are a necessary corollary of interstellar travel.  If they can send a ship here in a reasonable amount of time, they can do the same thing with an unmanned ship or a big slug.  A couple tons of metal at relativistic velocity would blow off the Earth's atmosphere, and would be basically impossible to stop no matter how advanced you are.  When the stakes are that high, is it reasonable to not exterminate potential spacefaring civilizations?  If they do it first, your entire race is gone.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

When the stakes are that high, is it reasonable to not exterminate potential spacefaring civilizations?  If they do it first, your entire race is gone.

Would any civilization that would so callously resort to existential genocide make it to being a spacefairing civilization at all? It would seem to me that they would wipe themselves out long before that, since we know from our own experience that planet-killing weaponry will likely come centuries before mass space travel.

Furthermore, we cannot definitively say that there is no way to defend against relativistic weaponry. We have not reached that level of technological development. An advanced computer system also employing relativistic weapons could be used to counter such an attack.

[darkrider2]

I love how half the posts in this thread are tantamount to "gods ways are so above us we couldn't possibly understand" except instead of god its aliens.

[Loud Whispers]

I love how half the posts in this thread are tantamount to "gods ways are so above us we couldn't possibly understand" except instead of god its aliens.

Only half is a good place to start

[Hanslanda]

As for the 'Aliens could wipe us out! We should wipe them out just in case!" I shall save my berating for after this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_dilemma

[kaijyuu]

When dealing with the unknown, humans like to make up wacky shit.


There are a lot of educated guesses we could make, but I can confidently say "not like Star Trek." A grasping appendage or two is almost certain for any tool using species, but bipedal, with hands, and hell maybe even bilateral symmetry isn't a given.

[Cthulhu]

When the stakes are that high, is it reasonable to not exterminate potential spacefaring civilizations?  If they do it first, your entire race is gone.

Would any civilization that would so callously resort to existential genocide make it to being a spacefairing civilization at all? It would seem to me that they would wipe themselves out long before that, since we know from our own experience that planet-killing weaponry will likely come centuries before mass space travel.

Furthermore, we cannot definitively say that there is no way to defend against relativistic weaponry. We have not reached that level of technological development. An advanced computer system also employing relativistic weapons could be used to counter such an attack.

1.  Who says?  Humans are, for the most part, loath to hurt each other, but have no qualms about killing members of other species, even highly intelligent ones (Dolphins would be a good example).  Harmony within a civilization doesn't necessarily translate to friendliness toward other species, especially when they're an existential threat

2.  Main problem is it's impossible to track.  If you see it ten light years away at .9c it's actually one light year away, and by the time you've figured out where it should be it's somewhere else.  Could a computer do the right math to catch it?

I don't really see any reason that an advanced race must be friendly toward other races.  Even if they are, the big thing:  If you're wrong, you're extinct.  Knowing what you know about humans, would you bet the survival of your entire species on a mysterious alien race being friendly?

[Hanslanda]

When the stakes are that high, is it reasonable to not exterminate potential spacefaring civilizations?  If they do it first, your entire race is gone.

Would any civilization that would so callously resort to existential genocide make it to being a spacefairing civilization at all? It would seem to me that they would wipe themselves out long before that, since we know from our own experience that planet-killing weaponry will likely come centuries before mass space travel.

Furthermore, we cannot definitively say that there is no way to defend against relativistic weaponry. We have not reached that level of technological development. An advanced computer system also employing relativistic weapons could be used to counter such an attack.

1.  Who says?  Humans are, for the most part, loath to hurt each other, but have no qualms about killing members of other species, even highly intelligent ones (Dolphins would be a good example).  Harmony within a civilization doesn't necessarily translate to friendliness toward other species, especially when they're an existential threat

2.  Main problem is it's impossible to track.  If you see it ten light years away at .9c it's actually one light year away, and by the time you've figured out where it should be it's somewhere else.  Could a computer do the right math to catch it?

I don't really see any reason that an advanced race must be friendly toward other races.  Even if they are, the big thing:  If you're wrong, you're extinct.  Knowing what you know about humans, would you bet the survival of your entire species on a mysterious alien race being friendly?

Yes. It's the only way to win the Dilemma. Check my previous post. I'd rather face annihilation and risk winning cooperation, then go for assured destruction on one side or the other.