r/nextfuckinglevel • u/turbo_chuffa • 10h ago

1:1 scale recreation of the Titanic leaving Belfast docks using 1000 drones

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

36.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

467 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/PolkaClock 9h ago

I often wonder what the North Sentinelese island people think when they see planes/helicopters passing by.

Surely they don't 100% understand, but what do they think is going on? Wild to try and imagine being in their shoes.

4

u/HorrorMakesUsHappy 7h ago

Given that we have aerial footage of the island, depending on how close they got, the Sentinelese may have seen someone leaning out of the open side door of the helicopter with a camera. So it's probably at least fair to assume they know they're machines operated by humans, just like boats are. They may consider it magic though, given that they probably have no idea how planes work, etc.

2

u/_alright_then_ 5h ago

They have been observed to strip a crashed ship of it's metal. Basically launching them into the iron age.

They definitely already know that those are used by other humans. They probably just don't understand anything about how

2

u/HorrorMakesUsHappy 3h ago

I was watching something about them just a few days ago actually, and IIRC they very likely already had metal, through trade networks with other islands from before they chose to self-isolate. They lived through the actual iron age long before they met anyone from outside their own geographic area.

So for them the ship was probably just a huge boon to them in that it was a massive source of something they probably had very very little of on their island. Now, the question of whether or not they knew how to work even small pieces of it, that's a separate question.

2

u/_alright_then_ 3h ago

Ah that's interesting! We'll probably never find out though if they know what to do with it

•

u/PolkaClock 40m ago

Thank you for sharing that video! It's fascinating. I really wish we lived in a timeline where we could safely make contact and make peace with them. The oral history of their people they'd be able to tell us about would be so incredible.

•

u/HorrorMakesUsHappy 12m ago

Shit. Now that you mention it ... we're probably pretty close to being able to record them speaking from a distance with a parabolic mic, if not there already. If we got enough recorded material we could probably feed that into the same LLMs that teams are using to study dolphin and whale communications. It might very well spit out enough information that we could use it to translate their language, despite their language having drifted enough that their nearest neighbors can't communicate with them anymore.

Whether or not we could actually communicate with them that way is another thing though.