Timeline for How can I make humans NOT WANT to investigate how a supernatural ability works in an intelligent, non-human creature?
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:52 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| May 27, 2015 at 21:53 | comment | added | user | @Byte56 Good point, and that's part of the point to asking this question in the first place. If you feel the answer is "that's simply not realistic, period" then I encourage you to post that as an answer, elaborating on it. Your comments on this answer would seem to be a good starting point. Do keep what I laid out in the question in mind when writing that answer, though. | |
| May 27, 2015 at 21:52 | comment | added | House | No offense taken. I'm just saying that you should consider more than just their shape shifting ability as something humans would want to investigate further. Intelligence, as far as we know, is rare in the universe and certainly worthy of investigation. Even in a universe where only two species have it, it's rare and worth further study. | |
| May 27, 2015 at 21:50 | comment | added | user | @Byte56 I didn't mean to dispute your point; apologies if my comment came across that way. I simply meant that in order to do these negotiations, they wouldn't necessarily need to show off their ability (if they have it) to actually speak in a human language. They would be showing off their intelligence, but notice that I wrote in the question that humans already recognize several relevant abilities in these creatures including the ability to communicate with humans, so that wouldn't come as any major surprise to the humans involved. | |
| May 27, 2015 at 21:48 | comment | added | House | @MichaelKjörling Same deal. While he did speak, Alex showed slightly more intelligence in the way of communication than other parrots like him. This made him considerably more interesting and worth additional study. Same situation with other animals people have taught some form of communication to (mostly sign language with primates). Any other species that's able to communicate with humans, in whatever form, above a certain level of intelligence, would draw the same interest from humans. | |
| May 27, 2015 at 21:44 | comment | added | user | @Byte56 Note that the negotiations would not necessarily need to be done in spoken form. For example, you could have a sufficiently intelligent animal use a stick to type at a computer keyboard to type out messages. That would also not require showing off the shapeshifting capability. | |
| May 27, 2015 at 21:42 | comment | added | House | The shapeshifting alone could maybe be kept mysterious, but their ability to speak and negotiate with humans? People would flip if we found an animal that wanted to negotiate with us, even if it didn't have shapeshifting abilities, we'd want to study it. | |
| May 27, 2015 at 21:30 | history | answered | Samuel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |