Judging from the movies, aliens are a real pain in the butt.
If they aren’t busy destroying our planet they are annoyingly mysterious,
designing puzzles for us to ponder, and scaring us half to death in the
process. The latest rendition is courtesy of the TV show “Nightflyers.” An
extraterrestrial spaceship is found in deep space and it doesn’t respond to any
messages. Humans send a spaceship to meet the ship, in hopes that the aliens or
artificial intelligence running the ship will provide us the technology to help
Earth cope with widespread illness and other issues caused by over-population
and climate change. Throughout the first episodes, the aliens remain an enigma.
They sometimes present challenges, such as sending back a probe the Earthlings
have sent to them, and combining it with biological material, but with no word
of explanation. Such a plot makes perfect sense for television. It builds
suspense and gives the characters some challenges to overcome. In reality, those type of actions would be a waste
of time and energy.
It seems hard to believe that aliens would arrive in our
solar system or make contact without a specific reason for doing so. Now,
perhaps the aliens would want to be left alone. If they didn’t have the
technology to stay unobserved, one would figure they could at least simply push
us away or blow up our spacecraft? It seems like a lot of work to torture humans
with riddles.
The movie “Arrival” had much the same premise- mysterious
aliens and challenges for humans to understand. However, that film explained it
quite neatly. The aliens presented the challenges to bring humans together and to
help us understand their language, which also taught us a whole different way
of understanding the universe. I can accept that aliens might have a different
way of reaching out to us than we might expect, but deliberately trying to confuse
us seems like a lot of work. Why couldn’t the aliens in “Arrival” have simply
told us they had a message for the whole world, and then explained their way of
language and thinking? I can’t imagine we wouldn’t listen to such an
explanation.
If aliens have developed the technology to come to our solar
system or contact us in some other manner, they would be good problem solvers.
You don’t conquer interstellar travel by being obtuse. The idea of an elegant
solution, the simplest and most direct way to solve a problem, seems likely to
be a universal goal. Thus one would imagine that if aliens set out to greet
humans someday they would do so in the most effective way possible. They would
find the most elegant solution. They would have a reason for wanting to make
contact. They would do the planning needed to meet their goals as efficiently
as possible. It would be easy to research human beings. A probe in Earth orbit
could link to our Internet by tapping into a satellite. The human web would provide
all the information necessary to learn our language, understand our society,
and investigate human psychology. Now there could be some culture gaps along
the way, but a basic understanding of humans would seem to be a pre-requisite
for saying hello, if aliens are the ones who reach out. If we reach out first,
via a long distance communication, then it could be a very complex and involved
process of learning languages and establishing even basic understanding.
Weird aliens are great for drama, but not for getting things
done. I would imagine that if we do make alien First Contact someday, the aliens
will be very, very different from us. However, if they have the technology to
travel to our solar system, it would seem likely they would have the smarts to
do research and acquire an understanding of humans before saying hello. Let’s
hope so. I hate riddles.
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