Five decades ago, I started my college career with the intent of becoming a marine biologist. I found out I had to get a BS in biology before I could even begin work on MARINE biology; especially because there WEREN'T any marine biology programs in Minnesota.
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 was thinking about angels, demons, monsters, and (currently) reading GODRIC, a novel about a man the book is named after, and his journey from being a cutthroat, thief, extortioner, and really, the worst of the kind of Humans we’ve all experienced.
The book, by Frederick Buechner was one of three nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1981 and along with SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell the two lost out to John Kennedy Toole’s A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. Toole took his own life in 1969 after five years of rejections. His mother found it, sent it out seven more times until it was finally published in 1980 – seventeen years after Toole had finished writing it.
All of this is to ponder how Humans, Earthly animals and ultimately, aliens might experience emotions.
“‘In the last decade or two, people have gotten bolder and more creative in terms of asking what animals’ emotional states are,’ explains Georgia Mason, a behavioral biologist and animal welfare scientist at the University of Guelph in Canada. They’re finding thought-provoking answers amid a wide array of animals.
“For instance, recent studies hint that picking up a mouse by its tail casts a pall on the animal’s day, and that an unexpected sugar treat may improve a bee’s mood. Crayfish might experience anxiety; ferrets can get bored; and octopuses, and perhaps fish, can experience pain.
“Such findings could drive changes in how we treat the animals in our care….certain invertebrates such as crabs, lobsters and octopuses should be considered sentient — that is, capable of subjective experiences such as pain and suffering.”
“Her team created a simplified, portable EEG device…measures a horse’s brain waves. Horses that were able to graze freely with a herd had more slow theta waves than horses that spent more time restrained alone in a stall. In humans, such waves reflect calmness…horses that roamed with their herd outdoors, grazing at will, had more brain waves called theta waves, which have high amplitude and move slowly. In humans, theta waves are thought to reflect calm and well-being. By contrast, the animals that lived in solo stalls with little contact with other horses had more gamma brain waves, the fastest of all brain waves. In people, gamma waves are associated with anxiety and stress.”
Of course, the problem here is that the assumption is that two brains evolved along almost entirely different lines are being compared as if they were the same…and also, of course, certain scientists cry foul and: “investigat(e) animals’ feelings through the lens of human psychology. Looking for parallels in how humans and other animals process experiences makes sense because our brains and behaviors reflect a shared evolutionary history.”
Of course the problem here is that the “shared evolutionary history” is something most people wouldn’t bother to check. The fact is that Humans and Horses evolved from WIDELY divergent lines. To impose sameness on two fundamentally dissimilar brains (if you still want to do studies of the emotions of brains similar to our own, you might look to rabbits, lemurs, and rats.) is...not very sensible.
And now, finally, my point: most of the science fiction stories and novels I read; most of animal husbandry I see (I live in a FARM state, people here have suburban farms in their back yards. EX: teacher I worked with has some 40 quail, 16 chickens, two honeybee hives, two grape arbors (one wine, one table), plum trees, pumpkins, squash, and other plants I can’t recall).) assumes that animals feel exactly as we do.
How many friends do you have who feed their dog from the family table – on Human food? You could more logically assume bats, rhino, reindeer, and pangolins would have the same feelings as your dog and cat – but your DOG feeling about you the way YOU feel about them? The distance on the evolutionary tree is too far to easily bridge: your dog does NOT love you the way you love them.
We cannot assume that aliens will act like us. Sarek and Amanda (Spock’s “parents”) or Fred Kwan and Laliari would NOT be likely to feel the same about each other (or even in the way they feel emotions) that GALAXY QUEST implies.
She’s descended from aquatic crustaceans and he come from savannah-dwelling primates. Though, to give props to GALAXY QUEST, there’s a scene where Captain Taggart tells the Thermians to “look around and try and find…” something – they look UP. While it seems like a behavior your average adolescent would do when you ask them to look for something they’ve lost; with the Thermians, it’s a NATURAL reaction. They are evolved from creatures who not only lived on a single level of a three-dimensional world like WE do; their ancestors live under water – and would have had to be cognizant of dangers from ALL AROUND THEM.
I don't think so... How do they “feel”? We CAN'T POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND!
“ARRIVAL”, the movie starring Jeremy Renner, Amy Adams, and others, posits aliens who rather resemble five-legged octopuses – or the “heptapods” comes a bit closer to how alien aliens might “feel” than pretty much any other alien movie I’ve ever seen.
BESIDES that fact that they experience time differently that we do and have five legs and appear to swim like squid, our IMMEDIATE assumption is that not only CAN we communicate with them, is that Abbot and Costello are “friends”. Let’s just start with the simplest question: do Earthly squid have friends?
We’ve got no idea because the very idea of squid having FEELINGS is repulsive to Humans. We’re A-OK with horses and dogs and cats loving us exactly as we love them; but *EEEEEWWWWWW* when we suggest that you love your pet octopus as you love your dear, baby, cutie-kins-puppy-wuppy-momma’s-little-baby-furball; most of us would run to throw up in the nearest toilet.
What gives us the idea that we can like alien aliens? Shoot Dr. Louise Banks Agent Halpern of the CIA can’t even stand to be in the same ROOM together, let alone communicate effectively with each other – and they’re genetically related FAR MORE than Abbot and Costello are related to Dr. Banks…
We aren’t going to be able to bandy humorous colloquialisms between a Human primates and an androgynous, humanoid Octopodiform like Asta Twelvetrees and Max Hawthorne with Harry Vanderspiegel in the TV show “Resident Alien”. I’ll grant the script-writers occasionally try to grapple with Harry’s alienness; but usually briefly, and typically humorously. He “miraculously” decides to like Humanity because he’s been in our form for longer and longer times and attempts to thwart a pre-Human-historic methodology of dealing with other alien species.
Of course, this makes the assumption that “to know us is to love us”, which is, as usual, Human-o-centric thinking.
I’m stopping for now, but I’m going to come back to this some more!
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces; https://www.writingroutines.com/renowned-writers-on-overcoming-rejection/, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/animal-emotion-behavior-welfare-feelings;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:An_evolutionary_tree_of_mammals.svg; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Alien_(TV_series) Image: https://image.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/alien-human-600w-136457129.jpg
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