It will be both awesome and depressing as fuck if it turns out they are capable of complex high order thinking and meta cognition. If we open a line of communication and then have to explain ourselves… I don’t envy the person who has to explain our failures.
I’ve started considering myself as member of a still young and rather foolish species and I think that is a much better approach than the old ‘god put humans here to rule the earth’ - I mean look where that got us.
Here is the original paper.
Wait, so they ‘practice’ talking to non-humans on earth so they can later talk to aliens? Talking to the non-humans who share this planet with us is way more important than getting prepared for some alien encounter.
It’s beautiful thought that we are finally trying to communicate, at least.