Aliens have Landed

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The Aliens Have Landed

Imagine for a moment that intelligent aliens from another world have landed on our planet.

They can see that we are primitive, and have to make a decision whether we should be categorised as
1/. intelligent beings
or
2/. Just regular animals.

If 1/. They will share their knowledge, if 2/. We go to the Zoo & our possible use as Food is explored

Key signs of an intelligent being, are its ability:

To learn new things rapidly
To quickly integrate new experiences into their existing internal ideas.

The aliens have managed to establish slow crude communication with humans using the BabelChips¹ translator, and have been assured by all who they have met, that we humans have a remarkable and quick photographic memory. They have even been told that every tiny detail of life's experience is stored away in each human's brain somewhere.
To the Aliens who know of such things, this seems pure fantasy, indeed many humans admit that retrieving such information is often almost impossible.

The Aliens have heard this story on many occasions before, especially when primitive creatures are seeking an upgrade. They have also found that the simplest of intellects often have the greatest delusions about their own powers. Humans apparently believe that they are handicapped if they are able to receive no more than a Megabit per second of information via their networks, yet they have yet to present actual evidence that they are capable of learning at more than a few tens of bits per second.

The future status of mankind now rests on their ability to come up with some experimental evidence that much greater rates are possible.

So Fellow Humans: Where is the Evidence?

Note 1: The BabelChips translator superseded the much much earlier BabelFish translator (as recorded in the annals of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams). It was considered by the aliens to be obsolete, but was rediscovered on the alientics rogueshow, and resurrected to deal with primitive intelligent species.

(There is a serious point to this though. I believe that the maximum sustained information rate from reality to our consciousness is no more than a few tens of bits per second. It seems ridiculously low, so If you are aware of any quantitative experimental evidence to the contrary, I would be very interested).

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