Intelligent aliens communicating by scent

[Vertigo]

Wasn't too sure where to put this but I thought here would be appropriate.

Intelligent aliens (usually insectile) communicating by scent is a pet hate of mind that I seem to have come across rather a lot recently; China Mieville, Tanya Huff, John Scalzi are a few of the recent authors I have come across presenting this idea (though to be fair Scalzi's was in a spoof book).

Now I know insects do indeed communicate in this way but in the process of evolving intelligence a better form of communication would seem to be a pre-requisite to me. Now I am sure complex scents are capable of conveying lots of useful information but just take a look at the limitations.

Speed of transmission - if someone calls to you across a room it's going to take several minutes for you to "hear".
Lots of people talking at once, in a social gathering for instance - will become a serious mess of smells, though to be fair I guess the same could be said of sound waves.
Range - you are really going to have to be fairly close to stand any chance of "hearing".
Environmental problems - step outside on a windy day and you are going to be totally stuffed - the talker and listener would have to keep swapping places so the listener is downwind.
Sequence of elements (I'm sure there's a "proper" word for that) in the "language" -unless you are seriously close the natural movements of air (or whatever medium) are going to jumble your words up something terrible.

I just can't see communicating by scent scaling up to work with intelligent species requiring complex information exchange. I would love to have someone more knowledgeable show me I'm wrong about this as I then won't get so frustrated and annoyed by it.

 

[Nik]

Perhaps they'll click their atrophied wing-cases as punctuation ?

Pheromones may be a blunt instrument like a bee queen's hive control or army ants' trail-laying, or delicate like that infamous moth that can detect the merest handful of molecules from a mile downwind...

Provided that the forum is adequately ventilated, communication could continue...

Not having enough ventilation might be a social faux-pas to rival dousing with cheap perfume, burning a dozen, mismatched mood candles or serving durian fruit indoors...

But, I'd still go for a multi-layered approach: clicks for stand-off distance, wafted Pheromones for mood, exchanging minute quantities of multiple chemicals by touch with their antennae etc for precision-- Think pictographs like Japanese & Chinese, or even Ancient Egyptian heiroglyphs...

 

[Vertigo]

I'd certainly go along with something like that Nik, I think a combination approach would work fine. But the ones I'm complaining about just use scent and that simply doesn't make sense for me (no pun intended! well maybe not)

 

[Pyan]

I think you're judging the concept from the point of view of a human with a human sense of smell. We can stand in the middle of a crowded, noisy room and talk to someone else with little difficulty because we filter out most of the noise, and tend to look at the face of the person we're talking to, because we communicate with sound and sight. A species that communicates mainly by smell would surely have evolved the same screening and concentration abilities, only for scent instead.

 

[Vertigo]

Yes I can accept that Pyan, for the "everyone talking at once" scenario and probably shouldn't have brought that one up. And I can also accept that scents can be detected at quite remarkable distances by some species. However it still doesn't deal with the speed of "transmission"; for reasonable speed you would have to be very close to each other. Also I can't see a practical solution to communicating outdoors with any kind of wind or any air movement for that matter. Sound waves are affected by wind but not very significantly unless it is a real gale. However scent is much more affected by air movement as demonstrated by skilled hunters approaching their prey from downwind.

 

[Nik]

I suppose some of their scents would evolve to degrade very rapidly, so 'fresh' can be distinguished from 'stale', a bit like we can distinguish echoes in a hall...

 

[Luc Valentine]

I think it's the insect thing that bothers me. Now an advanced race of dogs, on the other hand...

 

[Vertigo]

Yes that's actually a very good point; let's face it insects are already so successful that I'm not sure evolution would "bother" with intelligence for them!

Now dogs on the other hand... though maybe there's the problem - hands. It would take an awful lot of evolutionary "work" to give dogs "hands" that could manipulate tools. And I know that theoretically you could have intelligence without tools, but I'm not sure that there would be any great evolutionary advantage to that, in which case it simply wouldn't happen.

Shame really

 

[skeptical]

Vertigo

I agree with you. While there is nothing to prevent an intelligent species evolving that communicated by smell, the limitations of that method would appear to prevent them developing a technological civilisation. The range thing you mentioned would be a killer.

And to develop the equivalent of a telephone - the mind boggles....

My own favourite is light. We have cuttlefish here on Earth that communicate with each other by rippling patterns of different colours over their skin. A method like that would not have the range limitation - assuming good distance vision. A simple TV camera would give great long distance communication by wire, optical cable, or radio wave.

One of my own pet hates is all those scifi shows that have robots talking to each other with moving mouthparts. How ludicrous! If a robot used sound at all - perhaps to talk to us backward organics - it would use a simple electrical speaker. Much more likely, though, is that the robots would communicate with each other by radio.

 

[Vertigo]

Must admit I hadn't thought of the problem of telephone or radio communication Skeptical! The mind really does boggle!

Light is a good one and I have no problem with that; in fact if you can control those colours fast enough it would probably be far more efficient than sound. I also have a little pet idea, that I keep meaning to post and get comments on, for telepathy - all our brains generate electrical signals so, what if evolution up'ed the power a little and developed an organ that could detect/receive those signals? It would probably be very short range and be supplemented by another form of communication such as sound but I don't see it as any more impossible than birds that can detect the Earth's magnetic field.

Re the robots I also agree 100%. If we made the robots look similar/identical to ourselves then they may communicate with us by moving their mouths but the actual sound would almost certainly come from a speaker. They would only do the mouth moving to make us feel more comfortable. Certainly between themselves they would use radio unless, again, it is important for us to be able to listen into their conversation (a bit like putting a telephone on speaker).

 

[skeptical]

Re telepathy

There is no method known, even in theory, for that to work. Detecting electrical fields could only operate at extremely close range. This is what is known as putting your heads together.

However, there are researchers today working on brain implants of various kinds. What about an electronic brain implant that is simply a two way radio?

 

[Dave]

If you have a wireless router in your head you could converse with anyone and anything.
Interface by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George - FictionDB

 

[Heck Tate]

This reminds me of the Buggers from Ender's game who had evolved a "hive mind" that allowed them to communicate instantly no matter the distance. This seems like the ultimate evolution of communication excepting that it didn't allow for ingenuity among the individual members as each was more like an extension of the queen's mind.

 

[Vertigo]

Re telepathy

There is no method known, even in theory, for that to work. Detecting electrical fields could only operate at extremely close range. This is what is known as putting your heads together.

However, there are researchers today working on brain implants of various kinds. What about an electronic brain implant that is simply a two way radio?

Ah shoot - that's blown my idea away! How close a range are we talking about? Would jostling around shoulder to shoulder be enough or are we talking millimeters?

 

[skeptical]

Vertigo

Since it cannot be done right now, it is hard to answer a question based on the concept of : "What if it could be done?"

My guess would be millimetres, since the human electric field is so weak. Now if you were an electric eel, it might be different!

 

[Vertigo]

Ah well that's not so bad as I was thinking very much in term of possible aliens rather than humans, so maybe it's not a totally impossible idea!

 

[skeptical]

Vertigo

There are living organisms on Earth that are capable of sensing the electric fields around other living organisms. This is sometimes used by fish living in extremely murky water as a means of detecting prey. As far as I know, such abilities are still quite short range. Up to a metre of two. Still very useful, but it would appear that using this for communication would also be very short range.

Hammerhead sharks are known to hunt squid at night using this electric sense. Since the squid lack the sense, and cannot see well in that total darkness, this gives predators a big advantage. They use "ampullae of Lorenzini" as their electric sense. But it is worth noting that electrically conductive seawater permit the sense to have a longer range ( a few metres). On land, the range is much more limited.

 

[Vertigo]

That is interesting Skeptical I hadn't envisioned it as being a long range communication but rather very short range and very personal. Normal communication would be by sound.