I heard about this because someone I know personally on here says she’s helping to work on this (which by the way sounds like it would perfectly fit the format/structure of the fediverse) and I felt too fascinated to not ask. What are some scenarios that comes to mind when you think of this being a thing?
I see where you’re coming from. On a social scale it’ll be more disruptive than the coming of Jesus or the Buddha. Yet ignorance has rarely yielded better results with time. If animal life is more intelligent than we let on, than not studying it is like not turning around to see the house fire because we’re looking at the pretty lights dancing on the grass.
Again, I have to go back to alien life. One of two things will happen. They will see us as animals with an above average level of communication: a parrot, and not deserving of the title sentience. Or, they will see how we treat life that does meet their definition of sentience, and we eat other beings that do, too. Or, the secret third thing where we’re ranked the same as the bacteria of our world.
We are in the position of those aliens making a decision about potentially sentient life. Now that we have a whiff of the embers, we should look at the fire to know how badly we’ve been burning it.
I do hope we would do positive things should we gain the ability to talk with animals. I’ve watched a bit about Koko and the other gorillas that learned sign language and it’s very amazing stuff. It seems to get treated as a novelty though.
I don’t know if we can really even assume what another race would do with us. If they’re millennia ahead of us, they could probably trick us like when somebody pretends to toss something to a dog. We could luck out and be overall more advanced than them ala The Road Not Taken.
It’s easy to see most any animal as an individual if you spend any time with them, yet we still spend most of our coexistence with them treating them as NPCs. I don’t know what it would take to win us over as a whole, and I guess that thought just makes me a bit sad.