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Alien invasion!

When people, even scientifically educated people, think of extraterrestrial life, humans serve as their base line for intergalactic normalcy. It’s difficult not to think of other forms of life in terms of, “How do they differ from us?” “Are they more intelligent than us?” “Are their governments totalitarian or liberal?” But a better question would be to ask, “Are they really comparable to us at all?” The products of evolution on Earth have differential gaps so wide that human intelligence does not so much make humans superior to lower-animals so much as it renders comparisons between humans and distant relatives increasingly difficult or impossible. Although when talking about extraterrestrial life of merit, we rally to intelligent cryptospecies, even an alien race that hypothetically could match our qualifications for “intelligent” would still be substantially more dissimilar from humans than the typical ET archetypes thought of in pop culture and even in professional circles.

The traditional Grey represents the archetypical alien with its bulging eyes, lack of sexual features, large head, and a generally eerily aura. Still all the most importantly human elements are shared with these mythical animals. They are bipedal and have hands and fingers, already an evolutionarily rare occurrence if Earth is a representative sample; they have small mouths and two eyes and at times verbal communication that place them in position of seeming familiar yet still strange. In the circus sideshow that is the alien sub-culture, there are quite a few alien races that make their rounds mutilating cows and probing men, reptilians and little green men among others, all sharing disconcerting similarities with humans and other earth beings.

Now in robotics, the term Uncanny Valley describes when a robot is so familiar in appearance to a human that it evokes an uncomfortability among humans. Greys do that same thing; they remind us of our ideas of what is anthropic, but they still defy them and make us feel uncomfortable about what it is to be human. It's the sheer horror in film in television garnered when the members of an queer alien species surround our human protagonist, slowly approaching him as he tries to verbally reason with them, realizing that human speech and values are meaningless to these so humanesque of creatures.

Luckily, in all likelihood, we won’t have to deal with this angst away from fiction. It may be common in speculative literature for aliens to wield heads and members like we do but it’s just as likely that aliens have members incomparable to legs, arms, and wings, or perhaps no members at all. On worlds where the evolutionary incentives of gravity, air pressure, and chemical compositions differ from ours, there may be no advantage for cephalization; we may see advanced creatures with brain-equivalents dispersed about their body, or aural and visual receptors in different locations, or of course, not at all.

The Rarity of Humans

One can earn a great deal of cred in the chic and misanthropic department by disparagingly commenting on how unremarkable humans are in the grand scheme of things. Indeed they are, and the evolutionary difference between us and apes, or any other animal is smaller than one would think. Still the fact of the matter is that humans, although they are nothing novel on an evolutionary scale, have a few relatively unremarkable abilities that together combine to create civilizations that record their history and moralize on their position in the world. Not only this, but the small genetic difference between men and chimps accounts for significant and rare changes that in probability would be exponentially more uncommon on the galactic field. Now in order for an extraterrestrial life-form to match our definition of “intelligent,” will probably have to meet several standards. Keep in mind that not all of the following are capabilities of intelligence, but capabilities to express or utilize intelligence.

Spacial intelligence is the base requirement. They must at least have evolved to be able to mentally explore the world and recognize the sky and space. This may seem trivial, but any number of creatures may grow up in two-dimensional worlds with only the evolved mental capacity to reasonably consider their flat playing-field.

The species must also be dexterous. Dolphins are another good example of a violation of this; they may be quite intelligent, but without anything but their noses to move about potential tools and explore the world, their intelligence is limited to social and inter-mental thoughts and cannot spill much over into a practical world. It's a reasonable hypothesis to think conversely, that the having body members like free arms as have humans is a potent evolutionary enabler to allow a species to toy around with the world, but more prominently make evolutionary benefits of advances in intelligence more pronounced due to their wider range of physical agency.

The intelligent species nearly certainly must be social. I would garner it an impossibility that a sole organism of any imaginable type be able to construct a device for interstellar travel. At that, extraterrestrial "lone wolves" would be likely too fixated on living without a Leviathan so to speak, and the concerns of an individual would probably not reach to the stars in the first place.

With the above in mind, as well there must be a powerful method of precise communication to make good use of social intelligence. Humans obviously use spoken language, but an equivalent of writing is nigh required as well; that is, a way of communicating without direct communication, embedding information in a neutral medium to store for others. Without this, accumulated knowledge rests on individuals and dies with them or is limited by an equivalent of oral tradition. Written word allows the snowballing of knowledge through generations and is humankind's single most valuable cultural artifact.

Only when we imagine a species with all of these qualifications, if not more can we start to imagine interstellar travelers. In a sense, these species would all have to have more humanesque qualities than even our closest primate relatives.

Invasion

There are few media featuring extraterrestrial intelligence that do not include the theme of planetary invasion. Wars between the worlds serve as a common impetus for interest in the contemplation of alien life and an endless source of worry. But when we think a bit further on this these worries might be found to be less compelling that one might think. Still, Stephen Hawking for a his Discovery Channel documentary Stephen Hawking’s Universe came out as saying, “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” The difference however between humans and a hypothetical alien race is far more imposing than that between Amerindians and Europeans. We must first think of under what circumstances an alien species might want to conquer or subdue Earth.

The Aliens featured in the 1996 film Independence Day encapsulate the most plausible of resource grabbing-invaders. The alien race was nomadic, hunting from planet to planet eliminating life and apparently sucking enough resources to survive until the destruction of the next world. These are a bit of a more plausible invading force than a species stationary on a foreign planet; if the species were living entirely in a distant star system, it would take an infeasible amount of time and energy to transport Earth’s resources to another distant world; instead the aliens simply travel around and invade as they go. Hawking invokes this type of alien lifestyle in the previously mentioned documentary saying, “I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

But for a species to actually invade Earth for the reason of acquiring resources or space, we have to take into mind several things:

All of the fears of alien invasion rest on the assumption that aliens are fundamentally identical to us. Yet a full-out invasion would be so impractical for an intelligent species that it makes us wonder why exactly a species may want to come in contact with us in the first place. Of course the previously noted reasons for the natural impracticality of invasion have left out social or scientific reasons for contact.

The Exchange

Humans developing a will to contact aliens for their own edification may be mirrored by some kind of alien species across the galaxy. Of course noting how different we may be will reduce the kind of knowledge which would be useful to exchange; social history, psychology, art, and nigh near every field apart from physical sciences would be worthless for exchange apart from intellectual fancy. We could also learn an inconceivable amount about the tendencies of evolution, biology, and extraterrestrial chemistry but most of the non-science material taught in our schooling would be incompatible, perhaps inconceivable to an alien race, as would doubtlessly many aspects of their cultures.

That in inevitably would not stop humans that don't understand this from trying to superimpose their cultures on an alien culture. We may as well see Christian missionaries fruitlessly trying to have alien communities 'born again,' or perhaps Marxist intellectuals encouraging them to throw off the bourgeoisie's oppressive shackles, all of this to a bewildered an irrelevant audience. I think this mistake in seeing what is universal versus what is human is well-foreshadowed in humans' desires to impose their own wishes and sentiments on other species on earth; the proponents of animal liberation, and human rights expansion may not be able to see the differences between social obligation and allowance for a human and an prescribed innate universal.

Now changing pace a bit, I think that it would be quite difficult to speak about inter-mundial communication without talking about how it would take place. Although I established communication as a precursor for the label "intelligent," there is no reason to think that alien methods of inter-individual communication would mimic our own. Humans obviously speak as their primary communicative measure, but there is little reason to assume this is so among the consensus of other-worlders and, even if they do speak, it may be unlikely that they do in a range audible to humans. As with our sight, we hear only a small portion of waves. Even if humans and extraterrestrials could hear one another it is nigh impossible that they have similar sounds in language; it would be hard to produce the bilabial nasal sound /m/ without lips or a nose, or vocal chords for that matter.

All of these hurdles can be overcome mechanically, but more importantly lies the question, "what if alien language is in a sense incompatible with the human brain?" It may seem a strange question to most, but studying human language acquisition, it has been found how genetically specific language is; humans with autism or with a mutated FOXP2 gene may not even develop a full understanding of language on earth. Grammar of communication may be irreparably different allowing two cross-spacial species to study each other's language only by observation and association, not comprehension.

It seems evident that, having noted all of this, any kind of communication between humans and extraterrestrials would prove difficult than imaginable. Of course meaningful contact in the first place, aside from being apparently rare would only be fleeting and terse as both mechanisms and reasons for communication would be minimal. It may be that the idle exploration of space will only be successful in locating life after centuries of travails, but its dubious that either humans or other species will ever go out seeking to exploit inhabited planets as the benefits of doing so in the given conditions seem scarce.