Along the way, the science fiction stories I'd been writing since I was 13 began to grow more believable. With my BS in biology and a fascination with genetics, I started to use more science in my fiction.
After reading hard SF for the past 50 years, and writing hard SF successfully for the past 20, I've started to dig deeper into what it takes to create realistic alien life forms. In the following series, I'll be sharing some of what I've learned. I've had some of those stories published, some not...I teach a class to GT young people every summer called ALIEN WORLDS. I've learned a lot preparing for that class for the past 25 years...so...I have the opportunity to share with you what I've learned thus far. Take what you can use, leave the rest. Let me know what YOU'VE learned. Without further ado...
I’m going to START with a quote from the END of article cited below, Alien Mindscapes—A Perspective on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence:
“Ultimately, SETI's (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) vision should no longer be constrained by whether ET has technology, resembles us, or thinks like us. The approach presented here will make these attributes less relevant, which will vastly expand the potential sampling pool and search methods, ultimately increasing the odds of detection. Advanced, intelligent life beyond Earth is most likely plentiful, but we have not yet opened ourselves to the full potential of its diversity.”
So…let’s unpack this one sentence at a time FROM MY POINT OF VIEW AND IN MY OPINION…
“SETI’s vision should no longer be constrained by whether ET has technology…”
I’d like to start by defining exactly what a mindscape is. A mindscape is “all the things that a person, or a particular type of person or group of people, thinks about and believes” (Yourdictionary); “A mental landscape; the world of the mind” (Wiktionary); “The landscape of thoughts, a reification [definition (Merriam-Webster): “to consider or represent something abstract as a material or concrete thing; to give definite content and form to a concept or idea of imaginary entities, memories, feelings, ideas, fears or any other object in the mind, seen together as making up metaphoric features: forests, jungles, deserts, rivers, valleys, cloudy mountains, etc.]
So, in the alien mindscape we “should” be looking for, the aliens we’re seeking may or may NOT have technology. We shouldn’t be concerned whether they have it or not.
How about we define “technology” then? (For a lengthy definition of the word, follow this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology) For the purpose of my discussion, I’m going to define it a bit more broadly that I’d normally use it: “…a systematic treatment’, craft, art, study, knowledge’, ‘knowledge of how to make things’, ‘a way of doing – including dancing, navigation, or printing, whether or not they required tools or instruments; the academic discipline studying the methods of arts and crafts, or to the political discipline’ ‘intended to legislate on the functions of the arts and crafts,’ as a result of scientific progress and the Second Industrial Revolution, technology stopped being considered a distinct academic discipline and became ‘the systemic use of knowledge to practical ends.’”
I think these authors – and most of the rest of us – have started using “technology” in an extremely narrow way. Especially in that by SETI no longer concerning itself with “whether ET has technology”, you’ve excluded us looking for ANYONE “like us”.
But if we use the broader definition that, as it comes from the PAST, it includes a far more inclusive range of what we can look for AND INTERPRET as a “technological civilization”.
An example from past science fiction (which I read starting from when I was 13), included a story by Spider and Jeanne Robinson, is the novel STARDANCE (I encountered it first as a series of stories in the issue of ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact ). This synopsis from GOODREADS reads as follows: “Shara Drummond was a gifted dancer and a brilliant choreographer, but could not pursue her dream of dancing on the Earth, so she went to space, creating a new art form in three dimensions. Then the aliens arrived, and there was only one way to prove that the human race deserved not just to survive, but to reach the stars. The only hope was Shara, with her stardance.”
By the narrow definition of technology, the aliens in STARDANCE would be excluded. But if we step back to an OLDER definition of technology, we get “a way of doing – including dancing, navigation…”
The question I would ask the authors here is HOW can we search the cosmos – or even the stars within twenty light years? That 20-light-year bubble of stars contains 83 star systems holding 109 stars; and around those stars, we would find at least 18 planets. Those are the ones we HAVE DETECTED.
If we can’t look for technology as we narrowly defined it above, how can we EVER tell if there are other civilizations out there? If the stardancing aliens of the Robinson’s stories are included in the larger definition of sapient aliens who communicate via DANCE, how can we FIND them (in the novel, of course, THEY found US).
I profoundly hope that the sentence “we have not yet opened ourselves to the full potential of its diversity” is NOT hinting at some sort of psychic or telepathic contact with aliens – or that it is not supposing that the (more than a few) ufologists who claim, like Spike from the movie “Notting Hill” to “be in contact with some quite important vibrations”…
I have no tolerance at all for woo-woo – how can two aliens communicate telepathically with each other (sorry, Vulcans) instantaneously? Language itself is hard – interpreting the mindscape of a being who perhaps processes the world around themselves in a way that is not even remotely similar to how a Human would process it strains the edges of CREDULITY!!!
So, let’s assume that the authors of the paper meant something else – possibly more metaphorically speaking that we have to sort of “open our hearts and minds” to include more that just Humanoid-like intelligence. Yet…how helpful is that injunction?
Given interstellar distances (and my resistance to telepathic woo-woo) how COULD we communicate with aliens at a long distance without some sort of two-way-compatible technology of SOME SORT?
Food for thought as I begin heading in new directions using the paper as a jumping off point!
Sources: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5111820/ ; https://astronomical.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_nearest_terrestrial_extrasolar_planets
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