Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

How can I communicate with a collective consciousness?

+0
−0

A world, I am building, had been flooded, causing a species of fire ant that makes ant rafts to evolve a collective behavior, ditching anthills and becoming an ant-hill (I'm not sorry). Over thousands of years, the flood waters receded and the clustering behavior of these ant-hills remained, creating a powerful, natural, biological army.

Over many millions of years and some complicated evolutionary history, I don't have room to explain, these ant-hills evolved into a collective consciousness that have shown the true limits of swarm intelligence. While each ant is just an ant, together as a whole, the collective is sapient.

As they do not breed and lack 'organs', so to speak, their species (Diluviumformica sapiens) consists of many smaller specimens, all working as a whole, communicating to each other using touch and pheromones, the larger whole communicates with each other through much more powerful pheromones.

They are virtually immortal and have met with humanity. To avoid war, humanity is attempting to communicate with these aliens, but we are failing. Humans communicate via sound and the ant-hills communicate via smell, it is proving difficult.

How can an audio based communicator like a human communicate with a pheromone based communicator like the ant-hill?

History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/66381. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

0 comment threads

0 answers

Sign up to answer this question »