Not clear what is the proposal, but shanghaiing people is not cool. Portman’s actions on Sentinel Island helped cement the legendary hospitality for which the tribe is known for today (or, to put it another way, they learned all about aspects of the British Empire, in case they were starting to develop some doubts).
The Ursula Le Guin story sounds more like tourism, which seems cool, although you had better take into account that the locals will let you know whether or not this is welcome, as a few people find out in parts of the Amazon to this day.
It isn’t tourism, as she presents it: (very vague spoilers follow):
the character is more like an ambassador – the title I believe is “envoy”. The envoy’s supposed to try to convince the people on the planet to allow further contact and to join the Ekumen, but that agreement isn’t taken for granted. And the envoy is accepting significant risk, up to and including risking his life.
I think that ‘envoys’ might be the best way to contact alien civilisations, even ones which are completely non-human (by the time we are able to travel to a life-bearing extra-solar planet I would expect that humans should be able to create an ‘envoy’ that resembles the local species closely).
Some years ago I wrote this page, giving a range of options for First Contact (note that I don’t necessarily think that all, or any, of these strategies could be workable, but I was attempting to be exhaustive).
Note also that this page is written from the point of view of an advanced human civilisation in the future that has already tried most of these strategies, with varying degrees of success.
This current thread may inspire me to add a few more options, so thanks in advance.
Not sure I like the sound of the space blackface idea, but one fairly standard science-fictional idea is that in order to survive space travel (hard radiation, micro gravity, etc) humans will need to biologically engineer themselves to adapt to that environment, so who knows what the explorers might look like? In any case not like the local population if the latter are ‘completely non-human’. In that situation your initial delegation would probably include a lot of linguists, xenoanthropologists and other experts as much as career diplomats.
Blackface is a problem because of a specific historical context.
But we’d need to bear in mind that the specific historical contexts of the alien culture might produce equivalent metaphorical landmines that we’d have trouble anticipating.
– huh. Now I’ve got a germ of a story in my head, in which our attempt to avoid that problem in itself causes us to commit such a misstep –
We know TO SERVE MAN was a cookbook. But I recall a pulp SF story of artistic aliens, whose artistry was to dissect races they met and arrange the organic bits in aesthetically pleasing ways. How to counter that? Send in shiploads of human homicidal maniacs. NAZIS VS NAZCA SAUCERS could even happen in Peru; probably with cocaine involved.
The ‘blackface’ analogy is interesting, but you don’t need to go quite that far. If you are trying to make contact with a humanoid species, you just need to make an ‘envoy’ that is roughly humanoid - not too close or you’ll fall into the ‘uncanny valley’, not too far or you’ll look monstrous. But if the species you are trying to make contact with is a centaur, then a roughly centaurian envoy could help to break the ice.
You don’t really want to try contacting humanoid aliens if you look like a shoggoth, or vice versa.
