They might think very differently from us… but with a sample size of sophonts of 1, it’s very difficult to say. And it’s even more difficult to write a compelling story about aliens who are psychologically completely different from us, and when you try, you usually end up with a Planet of Hats. Much better, to my tastes, to just go ahead and make them people, with the same range of personalities as humans, and only those differences as are based on their different physiology (for instance, if their reproduction works very differently than ours, then they’ll probably differ from us in their notion of gender roles).
I like ones where the difference in thinking is pretty subtle, but matters to the plot. I recall a story involving humans interacting with a “herd species” alien society. Think Cows in Space.
One human figures he can just bully the central alien character into doing what the human wants. In the end, though, the alien comprehensively runs circles around the human. The tag line?
“He thought I’d be a pushover because we live in herds. But he forgot, every herd needs a leader.”
I listened to Neil Degrasse Tyson give a couple example of aliens and why we should be afraid of them. The first is an advance being, much more advanced than humans. They have destroyed their home planet and possibly others. They come upon earth and find it can support life as they know it. They find us humans to be a very early version of life from their home planet. They also find us as food. They take over earth and in 30 to 40 of their life generations, they leave to find another planet to live on. Earth is no longer capable of sustaining life as we know it. If we human have settled the moon and/or Mars, they do the same to those.
The second is life from a planet where plant type life has become the top form of life. They come to earth and find it will support them. They are also horrified to find the humans and other animals eat plant life as food. They learn they can survive on earth without any kind of animal life, earth returns to it’s early stage of planetary life from 50 to 100 million years ago. A few types of animal life survives and the life cycle starts over. Our sun is also on it’s downward spiral of life. It is expanding as it looks for the fuel it needs to sustain itself. In 50 million years, earth resembles it’s previous self.
It seems to be a lot of work to imagine a truly alien species (e.g. to whom we are “ugly bags of mostly water”) that we would be able to, or need to, interact with on a regular basis. The few aliens on Star Trek, for example, who weren’t just humans with slightly different anatomies and exterior configurations, were potentially interesting, but they didn’t hang around long on the shows for us to find out. It was just a sequence of crisis caused by misunderstanding, humans change their interaction enough to placate aliens, never hear from or about aliens again. After all, if we can’t have sex with them, what good are they really?
I’d like to think I would be interested in reading about human interactions over a long term with a truly alien species (physically, psychologically and socially very different). I doubt it would sell well, though.
This is sort of a variant of my thoughts about the topic. One way I like to think about it is to randomly pick any species on Earth and imagine it evolving into the top-of-the-food-chain, space-faring civilization on its planet.
Do this with bees or ants and you would presumably end up with something viscerally horrible to humans as well as something with which we could not communicate or negotiate.
IMHO it’s that aliens like that are a lot more difficultly to imagine and write interesting stories about. The one that immediately comes to mind is the crystalline entity. How would writers even begin to write multi episode plot lines for something like that, as opposed to Romulans and Klingons, or even Q or Changelings, which are still essentially people despite differences in levels of power and their physical form?
ETA: Regarding AI, the interesting AI characters were also interesting because of their (sometimes literally debatable) personhood. IMHO that’s why Data, Vic Fontaine, and The Doctor were such interesting characters, but the Enterprise computer wasn’t.
In other words, I myself can’t imagine what a non-person intelligence would be like.
How about Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx commonwealth?
It’s a nice optimistic view of the universe that we might be able to co-operate and even have synergistic advantages by working with other intelligences.
As far as them eating us or whatever… that doesn’t really seem very likely.
Probably biologically incompatible, and anyway if they have technology that allows interstellar travel, they are probably in a post-scarcity economy. All the elements of the periodic table are almost certain to be available in any solar system, so the old SF trope of them coming to mine Earth for things they have ‘exhausted’ is silly.
Nah, aliens to whom we’re “ugly bags of mostly water” are easy. That’s just physiology, and to science fiction writers, coming up with aliens with different physiology is child’s play. For instance, in a book I read relatively recently, the alien character is made mostly out of stone, is shaped like a cross between a starfish and a spider, “sees” entirely through echolocation, has a body temperature that would seriously burn a human, and has “muscles” that work by steam expansion.
But it (the human character says “he”, but we don’t know enough about the alien’s reproduction to say if they even have two sexes) still thinks mostly like a human. The differences between the alien’s thought processes and the human’s are mostly due to the fact that the alien happens to be an engineer while the human happens to be a scientist. Oh, and the alien is a lot better at mental math than the human is, too, but that’s made mostly irrelevant by the fact that the human has access to computers.
Keeping to ST the current Strange New Worlds version of the Gorn seems to be wrestling with the idea of truly alien but interesting.
Outside of that Scavenger’s Reign does. Chiang’s Story of Your Life (made into the movie Arrival).
My interest though is when there is discordance?
The humans mistakenly project human types of thought onto a very other other because of superficial commonality, or fail too because appearance deceives.
The latter done as alien is more often a stand in for human cultural, ethnic, or racial differences, and finding common ground in how we are all actually the same is the common trope, or they each stand for exaggerated aspects of human characteristics (more aggressive, more logical, more greedy, whatever).
Yes, good old ‘Rocky’, in Andy Weir’s "Project Hail Mary ". We can work with him (where ‘he’ embraces any necessary pronoun) since we share math and the periodic table, so have a compatible scientific model.
If you want a REALLY alien intelligence, read “The Black Cloud” by Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle.
A cosmic entity which is much larger-scale than any planetary creature.
Since Fred was a working scientist, the physics is pretty much correct, though the technology is rather outdated now.
I remember being very impressed with the alienness of the Amnion in Donaldson’s Gap series. I don’t know if I can recommend the books casually, though, because they are so unrelentingly grisly, cynical, and bleak. Nevertheless the Amnion are fairly compelling as a species that thinks and acts in unusual ways.
I also like the species diversity in Chambers’s Wayfarers books. She’s an intensely empathetic writer with all her characters so the nonhumans do tend to the “alien body, human spirit” end of the scale, but she finds some pretty interesting ways to emphasize different aspects of the species’ psychology due to their biologies.
I was always intrigued by R2D2 because he was clearly intelligent, and not just that but highly emotive, despite being nothing like a “person.” I’ve wondered about this before - was there any prior precedent in film or television of a robotic character who communicated solely in bleeps and bloops and other audible but non-verbal noises? Sometime during the end of the first Star Wars, when Luke is preparing to fly his X-Wing in the climactic battle, a mechanic says to him, “your R2 unit is pretty beat-up, you want a new one?” and Luke answers “not on your life!” Clearly in-universe the R2 units, and perhaps all droids, are thought of as disposable components, but Luke’s loyalty to R2 is kind of touching.
I always wondered if the droids in Star Wars had transferrable consciousness, i.e. if their “brain” could be transferred to a different droid with a different physical form. Would the “brain” of an R2 unit ONLY work in an R2 unit or could it be installed into a humanoid droid like a C3PO? Would it then be able to speak in a language a human could understand, and move its limbs the way a human does? Or are all of its “movement” impulses constrained to the mechanical components of an R2 unit, and its “language” constrained to whatever components are responsible for generating the bleeps and bloops that we hear it using?
Well, a lot of the things with droids in the SW universe is that they’re mostly treated like slaves. Yes, they are intelligent and self-aware, but most organic beings treat them as disposable workers or cannon fodder. Sometimes one will stand out from the crowd, and become a favorite of some few organics, but will still be treated like chattel by the rest of society (see the cantina scene, “Your droids have to stay outside, we don’t want them here.”) R2 is pretty much the poster child for this. As you say, most other astromech droids are just there, and do their jobs unnoticed and unremarked (until they fail, of course, like the Red unit that blows its top when Uncle Owen and Luke were buying droid from the Jawas). But R2 stands out from the crowd.
Beyond that, the technology behind the droids isn’t explained very much, if at all.
It is even worse than that; a extraterrestrial society capable of transiting interstellar space would be so far advanced they may well not even consider humanity to be really sapient, and would not accord us ethical standing any more than we would consider the ‘rights’ of insects before destroying an ant colony or a hornet nest. Nor would they likely be interested in communicating with us even if it were possible for a meaningful exchange of concepts and ideals, which is questionable at best given a completely different evolutionary basis and (presumably) neural systems for modeling the world and structuring language. Aliens may use very different senses and spectrums for perception, may operate on a very different timescale, and may not even share basic concepts such as counting numbers, independent consciouses, or what we consider basic logical principles and mathematical axioms. At best, any communication is likely utilitarian, effectively telling us to stay out of the way while they extract resources or do whatever it is they are intent on accomplishing, and any challenge would be met with the cosmic equivalent of bug spray.
Most portrayals of aliens in fiction are consciously or otherwise efforts to create an allegorical reflection of some philosophy aspect of humanity that the author wants to explore, i.e. aggression, factionalism, curiosity, bigotry, et cetera, and aren’t any kind of sincere effort to conceive of a truly alien consciousness, and those that are legitimately alien are widely criticized as impenetrable and ‘boring’, i.e. the monolith-builders in 2001: A Space Odyssey, even when their basic motivations are evident.
There is so much about Star Wars that is unconsciously but deeply fascist and nihilist in a “rational egoism” manner, which is unsurprising because one of George Lucas’ main influences were the propaganda films of Nazi filmmaker and documentarian Leni Riefenstahl. That droids are treated as disposable laborers despite their obvious sapience is but one aspect of the authoritarian mythology of Star Wars.
There was also a sequence in one of the prequels where C-3PO’s head gets swapped with that of a soldier droid, though the results of that seemed to have been designed for maximum slapstick comic relief, rather than being based on any sort of consistent model of droid brain and motor function.
