Thinking like ETs…
As more and more planets are discovered, some in their star’s E-zone (Earth-like conditions stretched a little, but always with liquid water), it becomes almost a certainty that life exists “out there.” Earth isn’t the center of the Universe, it might not be all that special, and human beings better start giving any gods they’ve created a little more credit, or create new ones with a more universal outlook. That said, what about intelligent life?
Fermi’s paradox, summarized succinctly by “Where are they?”, isn’t really a paradox. If you assume the ETs are subject to our same physical laws—in other words, they’re limited by the speed of light and the immense distance even to nearby stars—they can’t visit us anymore than we can visit them. Many ET civilizations might have come and gone. Their people might have wondered if there’s someone “out there,” or they didn’t give an ET rat’s ass—maybe they were so xenophobic they didn’t want to meet anyone else, or their planet was shrouded by thick fog and they didn’t even know anything outside the atmosphere existed. Intelligent life just might not be that intelligent.
Or, it might be a lot more intelligent and technically more advanced than we are, pushing beyond the limitations of physical laws as we currently understand them. In my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” (CCT), I postulate some colonization in near Earth-space via trips lasting hundreds of years, followed by an ET-Human collaboration that figures out to hop around the multiverses, a type of faster-than-light travel that doesn’t make old Einstein turn over in his grave.
Now I’m getting into the realm of sci-fi. Some natural questions arise for the sci-fi reader and writer: if ETs exist, how do they think? Can an ET be a main character? Can we get beyond those 1950 sci-fi ET B-movie villains and have a “realistic” ET villain? Given all the above, the answer to the last two questions must be a resounding “Yes!”, so the first question must be answered. (I stated these questions in a discussion thread on Goodreads, but I thought others might like to consider them—but there’s some self-promo here I usually avoid on GR.)
The more alien the alien, the less we can really understand how they think. In Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card creates a civilization of wasp-like creatures that don’t understand Humans either, so they generally just overrun Human colonies without giving it much thought. The Tali in CCT #2, Sing a Samba Galactica, have a similar problem, even though they are bipeds—they even put what they call some feral Humans in a zoo! On the other hand, the Rangers, more bug-like and strange to Humans, hit it off with Humans early on, once high tech allows the two groups to communicate.
In CCT #2, I wanted to underline that communication problem. For ET-Human communication, it’s a lot more than simply finding a Rosetta stone. The problem is solved in CCT #2 by using a powerful AI as a translator—Humans can’t understand the Rangers spread-spectrum language (they actually have two, the simpler for use on land, the more complicated one for use underwater), but the AI can learn it. The wasp-like aliens and Humans in Ender’s Game never reached that point, although Ender manages to communicate with the Queen in later books.
But even Ender’s wasps or CCT’s Rangers think more like Humans than some intelligences we can imagine. CCT #2 and #3 postulates an entire Galactic star cluster where minds are linked via the Nexus, a maze of pathways that cuts through the multiverses. This collective intelligence is beyond Human comprehension, but Swarm can communicate with Humans by using avatars that use only a miniscule part of its massive intelligence.
That wasn’t entirely original. Hoyle’s Black Cloud was also beyond Human comprehension for the same reason. A different twist on this idea is to create a collective intelligence among Humans themselves using an alien virus that comes from ETs, as in More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. Until we meet up with some real ETs, though, the sky’s the limit, and sci-fi writers can use their limitless imaginations to examine how ETs might think in multiple ways.
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The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. This novel, which is a bridge between the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” and the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy,” considers the following question: how will the U.S. government in the future handle all those old people with classified secrets in their head? This is just a Smashwords sale. The book will be priced at $0.99 until June 1, reduced from $2.99. The coupon code is MP45S (type that in when you order—be sure and specify the format you want). Pass the word to your relatives and friends.
In libris libertas…
