Extraterrestrial Contact: Bad Humans

What would extraterrestrials think of us? It’s a question that commonly finds answers along two poles: they would love us or hate us. Of course, being the intelligent creatures that we are, we realize that it would likely be much more complicated. However, those two poles are where our hopes and fears lie and with any discussion of extraterrestrial intelligence, hope and fear play big roles. Interestingly, they both make the same assumption: humans are bad.

We fight with each other. We kill. We subjugate the weak. We take advantage of each other. We build nuclear weapons and threaten to blow each other up. We treat our planet and fellow creatures like crap.

We build civilizations. We celebrate complex art and culture. We develop science to help us unlock the secrets of the universe. We spend time, effort and money on medicine and do everything we can to save human life.

The love side of things assumes that aliens will want to help us. They will see the good side of our nature and help us to overcome our conflicted ways and develop new technology to ease our environmental burdens.

The hate side says that aliens would want to control us or get rid of human civilization altogether. They will see the bad side of our nature and decide that they don’t want to deal with us if we manage to develop interstellar travel.

It’s a question of perception. That’s one thing that’s tough to speculate about. Alien perception would be a product of what they are as beings, what they believe and how they have developed as a species. They could be a warring, nasty bunch and consider us to be cream puffs. They could be peaceful and thoughtful and think of us as brutes.

Does it really matter? Of course it does- we want to have a positive relationship with any extraterrestrial civilization that we meet. But are we going to fix our human weaknesses overnight to get ourselves ready for extraterrestrials that may or may not meet us some day? Clearly not. We will be here, warts and all, ready for inspection if an extraterrestrial civilization takes interest. We can’t change who we are in the short term. There are many positive signs that if we don’t blow ourselves up or destroy the environment, we may actually have a peaceful and prosperous future.

The point is that we can’t change where we have come from. We can only work to make the present and the future better for humanity. We need to stop worrying about whether they will love us or hate us. If aliens choose to make contact with us, in whatever form, it will be their agenda and that agenda will be based on their needs, not ours.

However, there is a bigger lesson in this discussion. In the same way we may hope that they don’t judge us on our weakness, we need to be prepared to find many things about their culture and civilization that we dislike. It’s that way in any new relationship with a foreign being. If you list the things you like and dislike about some other nationality, if you know that culture well, it’s bound to be a long list. There will be things about extraterrestrials that we will like and things we won’t like. These likes and dislikes could be dramatic at first, until we truly understand where they have come from and what they want for their civilization. We need to accept their weaknesses, acknowledge their strengths and find a place for mutual understanding.

We are a weird bunch, the human race. But you know what? I bet the aliens are just as weird.

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Extraterrestrial Contact: We’re Just Not That Important

Harlow Shapley did the scientific work necessary to show that humans are not at the center of everything and then he took the argument to the next level, showing how such discoveries are changing the human perspective. Perhaps most importantly, he provided a road map for where we might go in the future with our self-perception and our place in the universe. All of that concocted in 1918 and expounded on throughout the early days of space exploration. Astronomers know Shapley (1885-1972) for his observations at the Mount Wilson Observatory, which eventually lead him to conclude that Earth is actually at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. Why was this a big deal, aside from the scientific accomplishment? It was a further blow to the idea that humans are at the center of everything. It’s the progression of scientific thought from the Earth and the solar system at the center of the universe, to a wider understanding of reality. Shapley called the change in human perspective, fueled by the scientific discoveries, the fourth adjustment.

JoAnne Palmeri explores these ideas in a chapter about Shapley in the book “Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context” published by NASA. Shapley viewed anthropocentrism as a serious barrier to our development and clearly we humans still have a long way to go. We spend time speculating about meeting intelligent creatures from other planets, and yet we treat intelligent creatures from our own planet like, well, animals. Dolphins deserve much more respect than we give them. Some people have even called for dolphins to have recognized “personhood”. I enjoyed this article by Kay Holt calling for more science fiction folks to explore dolphin rights. I do remember a great science fiction story in which the aliens arrive on Earth specifically to communicate with dolphins; they’re just not that interested in us.

I only bring this up to show that anthropocentrism drives much of how we perceive the universe. This was Shapley’s main point. Such thinking builds a barrier to us better understanding the cosmos. His phrase “star-stuff” was designed to open our perspective to a wider view. He simply pointed out that the Earth and its subsequent inhabitants were formed from elements cooked-up in stars and thus humans are made of “star-stuff”. It’s a common idea now, but a bit out-there in the 1920s and 1930s. Shapley provided fuel for generations of scientists and science fiction writers alike, including Carl Sagan who used the “star-stuff” phrase frequently. Like Sagan, Shapley was an active public speaker and considered his advocacy role to be as important as his role as a scientist.

Shapley had his fair share of problems. Famously, he disputed Edwin Hubble’s assertion that there are other galaxies in the universe, at times calling Hubble’s theories junk science. We know how that turned out.

What can Shapley provide for us today? He made a powerful argument for the coordination of science, philosophy and religion. Certainly not in a sense that science should be a religion or religion should drive science. However, he did speak to a widening of the religious perspective to see the human place in the vast universe. The problem from a religious context seems to be anthropocentric. For some folks, religion teaches that humans are the center of the universe and God’s primary concern. For others, religion shows the vastness of the universe and humans are just part of the grand fabric. It’s a significant difference. Can people pray to God if they don’t have a direct pipeline to the heavens? Can God worry about humans and space aliens equally? Is Jesus the savior for humans and space aliens? How about Muhammad?

The Palmeri article does an excellent job of examining the path that Shapley took in religion. The understanding of science, and especially astronomy, lead him to religious considerations. Shapley gave lectures with topics such as “Stars and Spiritual Things and “The Religious Implications of Astronomy”. However, Shapley was also known for criticism of contemporary religious institutions. Shapley disliked the “superstitious” side of religion and the anthropocentric and rigid nature of religious institutions.

So, why worry about Shapley now? He’s an important voice in the conversation and one which may need to be recalled if we face the challenge of First Contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Such an occurrence would cause all sorts of seismic events in the religious communities on Earth. While some may call Shapley’s views humanist, given his anti-anthropocentric inclinations that would not be correct. His views were truly Universalist. It’s perhaps that context that we will need if we enter a new era for humanity After First Contact. 

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Extraterrestrial Contact: Fighting and Fornication

If extraterrestrials watch HBO they may notice a common theme in the original series: fighting and fornication. No matter what the backdrop or who the characters, the plot lines return frequently to those two actions. Of course, it’s not just HBO. Fighting and fornication have been a fixture in human storytelling for hundreds of years. Fighting and fornication are the two elemental parts of biological existence and they have a common denominator: survival. We are still fighting and fornicating, in many different ways, each and every day on planet Earth. We may try to clean things up in modern society, but it always gets back to those elemental themes. I really like football. Every now and then, though, I take a few steps back in my mind to view what’s actually occurring on the field. You got it: fighting and fornication. Well, not the act of fornication itself. It’s more the prelude, as women jump around in skimpy clothes cheering while the guys clobber each other.

Survival is the essential part of biology that binds us together with all animals, plants and microbes. It makes sense that extraterrestrials would have their own survival themes in their society. Who knows, perhaps it even comes back to fighting and fornication? That was certainly the Star Trek theme. Klingons and Romulans had visceral tribal customs involving the aforementioned activities. The Vulcans tried to rise above such activities and yet they too had a history of fighting and, of course, fornication.

The biological imperative of fighting could be changing. For millennia, fighting meant survival, which was fine when fighting meant clubbing one person over the head to protect your family. Technology flips that equation. These days, if someone feels they have to protect their country, they can fire a nuclear missile and kill millions of people. Perhaps not fighting is the new biological imperative?

Why do we care about such things? Our ability to relate to extraterrestrials will be greatly enhanced by commonalities. The things we have in common with extraterrestrials will provide a meeting point for initial understanding. If we have common societal themes, it will be easier to build understanding between humans and extraterrestrials. The more differences we have, the harder that process.

Extraterrestrials would not even have to participate in a current culture of Earth-style fighting and Earth-style fornication to share commonalities. Perhaps extraterrestrials we meet some day have a rich history of fighting and fornication, and yet have moved beyond such things? They would be wise to share that history with us early in the relationship, so that we might better connect.

Humans are likely to have an interest in fighting and fornication for quite some time. And this is one human who is okay with that. However, we are changing and we are evolving. Survival themes may become less important to us as our technology progresses. Biological imperatives may weaken. The evolutionary road that we are on could be similar to the road extraterrestrials have traveled. If so, we’ll want to share the stories of our voyage. And most likely those stories will include…well, you know.

Extraterrestrial Contact: The Ultimate Alien

The term alien has many meanings, one of which is the primary use when describing extraterrestrial beings: belonging to another and very different place. That certainly makes sense. But there’s also the use of the word alien to describe something as strange. That usage could have a big impact on how we might relate to a member of an extraterrestrial civilization. Strange in our popular media has tended to be portrayed as serpent or insect-like creatures. It’s perhaps easiest for us to imagine extraterrestrials as having characteristics of fauna here on Earth. What might be harder to wrap our heads around would be machine intelligence.

Astrophysicists and science fiction writers have suggested that space-faring aliens might be machine intelligence for several reasons. Machine intelligence would be tougher, could survive for a longer period of time, and require far less support than biological creatures. Machine intelligence could be intelligent probes created by biological creatures to explore the universe. I think we could probably understand the concept of intelligent computers. But what if the machine intelligence is the evolved form of biological creatures? We wouldn’t be dealing with a sentient computer, but rather a whole new form of life.

Why would this be tough for us? Much of what we consider as human comes from our bodies: senses, emotions and reproduction. The very state of being alive as a human requires that the human body be working. Without the body we are dead. If even the most outlandish looking alien had a living body we would have more in common with that being than machine intelligence. We could ask about their senses and biological functions. The answers to those questions could help us better understand how those biological aliens perceive the universe and thus we could find commonalities. Those commonalities would be incredibly important. No matter how open minded humans would like to be, there would be a bias against creatures incredibly different from us. The first things we would likely search for would be similarities. That’s fine for biological creatures, but how about machine intelligence? Could we find commonalities with machine based beings?

This is no small question. The entire relationship with any extraterrestrials we may meet in the future will be determined by these questions. In the popular media it seems we fear the machine intelligence creations (think Terminator) at least as much as the weird looking serpent aliens. In some ways we may fear them more, because machine intelligence represents something threatening in a very basic way: it calls into question our biology and thus our humanity.

In the end, it may depend on the aliens themselves. If they are advanced enough in technology to have evolved into machine intelligence one would hope they would be able to find ways to communicate with us that would make us feel comfortable. A machine based being speaking colloquial English with a Midwest accent would be much more comfortable to us Americans. If the aliens did their homework they would study human relations carefully and make some public relations decisions. Scientists often put off such considerations as being too anthropocentric. But if you’re the visiting alien don’t you want to make the best impression possible? Why wouldn’t you study the beings you are about to approach and determine a form of introduction and communication that would make those beings the most comfortable?

While such work in human relations would be important for an extraterrestrial relationship with humans it would not be the most important factor. The big question would be the reason for the aliens saying hello in the first place. They wouldn’t go to the trouble of saying hello without a motivation for doing such. What they expect from the new relationship will be the primary consideration for humans if First Contact with an extraterrestrial civilization ever does occur.

Extraterrestrial Contact: The Checklist

The popular media, and in many respects the popular imagination, likes to portray aliens as either positive or negative. The beneficent extraterrestrials want to save us and the malevolent ones want to hurt us. Needless to say, the negative portrayals are much more frequent. Angry aliens can blow stuff up and Hollywood loves to blow stuff up.

There is another possibility in extraterrestrial First Contact: aliens that don’t act like humans. I know this is a shocking suggestion, but it seems likely any aliens we meet won’t behave like humans at all. They will behave like aliens. That’s not as much fun for us to portray because that type of speculation can get really complicated. For the most part the complicated considerations are left to the science fiction writers, science fiction fans and SETI scientists.

If an extraterrestrial civilization has the ability to travel the stars it seems likely they will have some sort of science, a framework for how they build knowledge. That logical approach (their logic, not ours) could lead to another motivation for aliens to say hello to humans: benchmarks. Let’s say that an alien civilization has been studying us for some time (and I’m not saying this is the case, it’s a scenario folks). They watch our development and wait until we meet certain criteria. Call it a checklist, if you will. I call them benchmarks because they could be a set of technological or sociological measures. Why would they care about our society and technology? It could be the point when they regularly decide that contact should be made with an up and coming civilization. It could be a point where our society is ready to handle the challenges of First Contact. It might be a situation where they decide we are on the brink of discovering the truth of extraterrestrial intelligence ourselves, through astronomy and other sciences. It could be something we have never even considered, something important to them and obscure to us.

So, they run down the checklist and we reach the benchmarks and they decide to say hello. What does that say about them? The answer could in many respects be more unnerving than the good or bad aliens. How about the dispassionate, logical aliens? Think of Spock in Star Trek but ramped up several levels. Perhaps they are actually machine intelligence and over the course of evolution they have lost the emotions that we might recognize. That truth would be troubling to us because we would have a hard time feeling connected to such beings. Whether you love them or hate them the good and bad aliens are forms that we can understand. There are plenty of good humans and far too many bad humans. And, of course, the essence of humanity means that every one of us has plenty of good and evil wrapped up inside. Purely logical aliens would be hard to warm up to, one way or another. And if they’re machine based there will be plenty of suspicion based on that characteristic. We have decades of popular fiction dedicated to the notion of our machines taking over the Earth. Would we be able to conceive of machine intelligence as having “being”? I suppose that might depend on how they communicate with us. If they have studied us well, they would want to do their best to communicate in a way that we would understand and also in a way that we would be comfortable. It could be as simple as adopting our colloquial language style and paying attention to sociology. If the aliens are bright enough to travel the stars it seems likely they could come up with a solid public relations campaign.

I think the dispassionate aliens are the most likely scenario if they do travel the stars. Human emotions can be debilitating for both individuals and society as a whole. Emotions may drive us in the survival stage of existence, but with the advent of technology emotions can prove dangerous, not just on a local level, but on a global level. Humans 200 years ago could get mad and perhaps kill 100,000 in a horrible, long-lasting war. Today war can end human civilization and destroy the planet in a matter of hours.

Have we reached the benchmarks and are there aliens out there ready to say hello? Who knows? They could just as easily be too busy with their own matters to even care.

Extraterrestrial Contact: Localism, Individualism and a Global Society

Extraterrestrial First Contact would most certainly change our human perspective. It would take our thinking to a universal level. It may also hasten the formation of a true global society for humans: one people, on one planet, in a galactic sea of life. This will worry many. They will fear the global society becoming Big Brother as imagined by George Orwell: a crushing bureaucracy of intrusive government. It’s a reasonable concern. Does the rise of a global society mean massive world government? Even more so, does it signal the decline of the local community and the shrinking importance of culture? It does not seem as if we are headed in that direction, perhaps in part due to the power of Orwell’s words and the voices of so many pro-individual thinkers. Orwell didn’t live long enough to see our technology grow. Humans have entered a golden age of sorts when it comes to the individual connection to technology. The power of a Smartphone connected to the Internet is a remarkable thing. The power of a Smartphone connected to Twitter can be a revolutionary thing. It provides each user with the ability to reach the world. It’s no small matter. That ability was previously controlled by giant media interests and the government. One human can now place an idea in the virtual world and inspire an entire nation to action.

Localism is on the rise. We have reached the point in many nations where people are pushing back against the growth of mass market food, drink and culture. We are demanding choice, quality and even more importantly, local individualism. We want things made by neighbors, not people 3000 miles away. We enjoy supporting craft and we are willing to pay more for it. Sure, it’s a small, elite movement right now. Only those of us with the time and money to spend can truly reap the benefits of localism. That’s changing. There are those with a great vision who are trying to bring localism to everyone, no matter their income or social standing. It doesn’t mean a rejection of the global society, just the support and nurturing of localism in conjunction with a global society.

I think in the wake of First Contact that such nurturing of the human culture will be extremely important. Our neighbors, our community groups, our local businesses and our churches will be needed and valued more than ever. They will be the touchstones that help us reconnect to humanity, when the universe seems to be growing beyond our comprehension.

We cannot fear the global society. It will be critical for humans to come together to face the universe as one race and speak with one voice. That doesn’t mean we’ll need one massive institution. A number of closely connected institutions could be quite effective. New technology is forcing institutions to be open and honest in a way not previously seen. Either institutions will respond to those individual needs or they will be toppled. We may be entering a new era in human development, with or without First Contact. The power of the individual grows daily. We will decide how we organize our lives and how we choose to collaborate. Technology may be pulling us together, making geographical distance less of a factor in our day to day lives. However, technology also gives us the power to share the richness of culture and celebrate the things we hold dear as individuals. We can be one and we can be many. We can be a woven rug of many distinctive strands, beautiful in our difference and strong in our connection. That may sound like new age-speak now, but if high-information First Contact ever does occur, keeping that woven rug healthy and vital will become a serious challenge.

Extraterrestrial Contact: Finding Out About Us

If an extraterrestrial civilization discovered intelligent life on planet Earth and wanted to know more about our society, they would have an easy method of tapping into our collective knowledge, assuming they had the ability to put a probe into Earth orbit. The Internet provides a wealth of information and certainly in a form far more conducive to research than the electromagnetic signals that we have been sending into space for many years. Radio and television may provide a glimpse of our civilization, but it is a fleeting glimpse at best and probably a confusing one at that, given the nature of television and radio. The Internet provides all sorts of research possibilities.

So, if members of an extraterrestrial civilization were to plug-in to the Internet, what would they find from that research? Certainly, most modern topics are discussed in great detail on the Internet. The items lacking would be those documents out of print or forgotten in time. However, even Vatican library documents are now available online. The amount of original source material is increasing by the minute. If extraterrestrial researchers could bypass security codes, they could search all sorts of databases to find both original source material and follow-up works examining those materials in a new light. If they had the ability to import huge amounts of information (from our perspective) they might be able to map the human condition to such an extent that they could begin to understand our civilization in a complexity that even we might have trouble fully understanding.

I know… there’s plenty of speculation there. But go with me on this thought. If extraterrestrials did have access to most of our databases, giving them a link to published works, websites and social media, there would be two major issues. The first would be context. It’s one thing to take in vast amounts of information, it’s quite another to place it into context. One would assume that such enterprising aliens would have a clear objective for plugging-in to the Internet. They would be conducting the research to accomplish something, even if it was simply the quest for information about another civilization. To actually take action, to say hello or do something to engage humans, they would clearly need a reason to do so. That reason would likely shape the nature of their search and provide a context for their research. However, they would be missing the human context, that being the thousands and thousands of years of history and development that brought us to this point in human society. Sure, they could find plenty of articles and books about our development, but would that really provide the context of what it is to be human?

They may not even care. But if they hope to influence us somehow or find a good method for making contact, they would be very interested in that context. Human fiction could provide a way to develop context. Fiction is about feelings, needs and interactions expressed in a complex set of scenarios. If an alien researcher was to take the time to examine our stories that researcher would have a much better insight into what it is to be human.

Even then, there is one major part of knowledge that would be lacking: experiential knowledge. Experiential knowledge, needless to say, is gained through experience. Knowledge gathered on the Internet would be a priori knowledge. Writer Barry Lopez uses the distinction to delve into human experience in regards to the environment. Unless you experience nature you cannot truly understand ecosystems. Dr. Thomasina Borkman of George Mason University defines experiential knowledge as “truth based on personal experience with a phenomenon.” Aliens would certainly have their own experiential knowledge. But they would not have experiential knowledge of life on Earth, unless they had lived it.

Reading all the non-fiction and fiction available on the Internet would not teach you what a human feels when they experience everyday life. It would not provide insight into how humans might react under a particular set of circumstances. In fact, if the aliens did peruse human works of fiction in an attempt to tap-in to experiential knowledge, that writing could be quite confusing. An alien researcher would have to sort out how humans really act, versus how our fiction likes to describe us acting. Without context, how would you understand those fine shadings in fiction? Just look at horror novels. There are no vampires to be found here on Earth. However, after just a few minutes spent perusing popular fiction, you would think Earth is overrun with overwrought (and often shirtless) vampires.

In the end, alien researchers might turn to the sources known for carefully stating objective, process, results and conclusions: the scientific research paper. By sticking to peer reviewed research journals aliens could find a discernable logic in communication and most importantly a common, established form of communication. Research papers follow the same general format and provide a common context for understanding. Once you know the format of a scientific paper, you can start to categorize the information you receive, and compile it in a way that might help direct extraterrestrial contact choices.

There’s plenty that alien researchers could accomplish without experiential knowledge, but they would need to be careful about moving forward with decisions based on a priori knowledge. The human world is complex enough for us humans. One would imagine that for an extraterrestrial civilization the complications of human society could take a long time to decipher.