Well, yes, and that’s what makes sci-fi fun to read/watch. But in the discussion above, everyone was complaining about this, and demanding some truly non-human thinking, and my point is, that’s fundamentally impossible. Even the most outrageous notions of alien thought from the weirdest sci-fi you can name will be tainted by at least a hint of “You’re still thinking like a human, monkey-boy!”
Alien that’s a herd creature? “Oh, you’re just modelling them on cows!” Alien that’s a hive mind? "Oh, that’s just “Bees in Space!” Alien that is entirely self-sufficient and sufficiently long-lived that they actually could build their own starship all by themselves to come here? “Oh, that’s just a metaphor for extreme Libertarianism!”
And while it would be presumptuous to assume that all aliens think like humans, it’s equally presumptuous to assume that none do.
Especially if you are talking about aliens who have not only mastered science and engineering well enough to be interstellar travellers, but also managed to secure the resources to make it happen.
Any aliens that come to our solar system would be by definition expansionistic, and we would just have to hope that they prefer to assimilate new cultures rather than exterminate them. In either case, humanity as we know it is over.
We live in an interesting time, in that some or many of the people living today may get to interact with highly intelligent entities which are fundamentally different to the human model. I’m talking about the sort of advanced chatbots that might be available a few decades from now. These entities will almost certainly have little internal resemblance to human minds, but I anticipate that they will appear very competent, and in many ways appear self-aware.
Perhaps these entities might give us some insight into the ways alien minds might think; or perhaps they will be too deeply immersed in human culture to truly show us their exotic nature.
I mean, they will be trained on human culture. Human culture is all they have to interact with. Even if they develop their own, at its base, it will still be derived from what we taught it.
To be fair, even if you don’t like the idea, it is a brief aside in a large book. This seems to be a thing about popular science. There are all sorts of these books mostly making valid points but occasionally saying something wrong, dubious, outdated, misinterpreted or well-outside-the-thesis-of-the-book-and-out-to-lunch (superfluous comments about diet or politics are high on this list). Mildly regrettable at most, but hardly relevant to the main point and generally easy to ignore.
Sagan was and is massively influential, his prose inspiring, the ideas he popularized interesting and sometimes compelling. No scientist is above criticism and the method requires challenge and good evidence (regardless of the superlative vocabulary used to describe evidence, good evidence is just that). But a challenge should bring a lot of verisimilitude to the debate. This is merely being fiddly about the specific word used to describe good evidence. While it is true the level of evidence needed to convince experts, change practice, rewrite textbooks or influence policy is generally high, these things are hopefully made on the basis of the evidence rather than descriptors.
Hmmm…. Is this evidence extraordinary? I concede it went to a prestigious university, was published in a good journal, did some worthwhile charity work and got high grades, but our standards at Cecil University are high and lots of evidence can make these claims…
“Master[ing] science and engineering well enough to be interstellar travellers” is only not a guarantee that an extraterrestrial intelligence will have human-like cognition, it almost certainly means that at least their understanding of physics far exceeds our own which may come from a completely different way of characterizing physical laws. One of the major assumptions that most people make is that even if the use of language is very different from a vocabulary and grammar that we would recognize (and what consists of “language” by aliens who may not use spoken or written word may require a very expansive definition), mathematics would have to be similar because math is universe. Except…it isn’t. The systems of mathematics that we use are all fundamentally built on ‘counting numbers’ and extension thereof, and a fundamentally Euclidian model of geometry. We do have abstractions that deviate away from this but they are all built upon a mental model of converting from those abstractions to those things that our brains can deal with, and human brains are evolved to interpret discrete items and linear behavior.
An alien intelligence which has a fundamentally stochastic view of all quantities will have a very different approach to their counterpart of calculus and differential equations, and make have a completely unrecognizable conception of geometry that we can’t even comprehend. Just the fact that any alien species will have evolved under a different physical environment, may use very different senses, and interpret them in unique ways virtually assures that there will be significant differences in how they perceive and interact wit the world and with themselves which may preclude any real communication beyond the most trivial exchanges. An extraterrestrial intelligence that ‘thinks’ enough like humans to the point that we could sit down and have a conversation, even though some kind of translation system, is enormously unlikely.
There is a tendency to think of the motivations of an extraterrestrial society in terms of what drives human societies, and for us the motivation for exploration in the pre-modern and early modern era has been almost completely commercial exploitation. This is the reason that Marco Polo went to Cathay (if indeed he did), that Magellan sailed (most of the way) around the world, that Columbus inadvertently found the Americas and that conquistadors and pilgrims followed, and even that pre-modern peoples swept from the Eurasian steppes through Western Europe, the ‘Sea Peoples’ across the Mediterranean, and the Paleoamerican peoples crossed the Bearing land bridge. It is why the United States bought the Louisiana Territory, Florida, and Alaska, annexed Texas, and went to war over the Mexican Cession. Even the Shackleton-Rowett expedition to Antarctica had commercial interests in possible mining and a vague hope of finding faster global trade routes.
The exploration of space and sending astronauts to the Moon may be the first major exploration effort that wasn’t driven at some level by commercial potential, and interplanetary exploration by robotic landers, while original an issue of national prestige between the United States and Soviet Union (and more recently other nations), is really the only purely scientific exploratory ventures. There are, of course, many enthusiasts looking to expand commercial ventures into space and beyond Earth orbit to “pick the riches of space” (whether any will be successful is another question) but when it comes to interstellar travel and exploration there is essentially no possibility of commercial trade or exploitation (even sending back large amounts of information will be extremely challenging) short of some fantastically cheap and fast superluminal propulsion or ‘wormhole’ travel, so what may motivate an extraterrestrial intelligence which engages in such an effort is entirely speculative, and I don’t think we can really exclude or restrict the motivations, which could vary from the sublime to radically xenophobic.
I don’t mean to focus specifically on your observations, which are well-reasoned and considered but they highlight a set of general assumptions that are made by many people that aliens would have to have recognizable thought processes and motivations in some significant way; I think this is not an assumption that can even be validated, much less used to attempt to discern or predict how an extraterrestrial society might respond to or treat us. I think the default assumption should be that aliens would have no perception, philosophy of the world, or motivation that is similar to us or that we could necessarily comprehend, and whether the are malicious or not may even be incidental to the threat they might pose in simply not recognizing us to be worth preserving or avoiding harm.
Sagan’s book was excellent and still largely holds up, but the original Cosmos mini-series was astonishing; most science ‘documentaries’ to that date were largely talking heads interspaced with stock footage or static figures; Cosmos was not only expansive but compelling. It was not the first attempt at a more interdisciplinary approach to popular science documentaries and obviously took inspiration from predecessors such as James Burke’s Connections but did so with a more philosophical and humanistic bent, with Sagan lecturing from scenic backdrops or his “Starship of the Imagination” and an evocative Vangelis accompaniment. The newer, Seth MacFarlane-produced series with Neil deGrasse Tyson (who is a protégé of Sagan) tries to capture that and are great in their own right but just doesn’t evoke the same sense of wonder and interconnectedness, which admittedly may be a personal perspective from viewing the original series from an almost entirely naive state of scientific literacy. Frankly, even with the handful of historical and technical issues, I think the original book and series hold up extremely well, and if it weren’t for the videotape-era image quality and hand-drawn animations would feel very much in place with modern sensibilities, not having any of that tacky feel of talking head doing vague scienc-y things documentaries that were a staple of previous decades.
It may even be that our ways of thinking, in the broadest intercultural sense, are the very thing that prevents us from reaching the level of interstellar travel, that there may be treasured ideas/principles that we must first shed before we can “step outside”. Who we are may be the very thing that is holding us back.
We are accustomed to speculative fiction that is literally nothing more than what we are familiar with merely pasted onto a much larger canvas. I think it is pretty safe to assume that if there were/is a galactic society, it would be absolutely nothing like anything we imagine, and the motivations of interstellar travelers would probably be, shall we say, totally alien to us.
I mean, why go to the stars in the first place? Curiosity is simply not a good enough excuse. Until we comprehend our own worthwhile motivations for undertaking such an enormous and perilous enterprise, we will never be able to understand “their” motivations for doing so.
I’m forgetting, now, the title of the Sagan biography I read. But it mentioned that his oral presentation was influenced by a physical problem that he had with swallowing. After however much time it’s been since I read it, I don’t remember if it was a congenital problem or what the syndrome’s name is.
But the universe is made of things that can be counted, and acts with Euclidian geometry. Assuming that they are using the same laws of physics, they would have the same experience with those things.
They may have a different word for one and two, but they would understand the concept of an individual object or double that number of objects. They certainly didn’t have a person named Pythagoras, but they would certainly see that if you lined up 3 objects on one side, four on the other, then it would take 5 objects to complete circuit and make a triangle.
Because that’s how the real world works. As long as they are looking at the universe and trying to model how it works, they would come up with some form of counting numbers and geometry in order to count the discrete items and track the linear behavior.
Sure, but they aren’t going to be building a steam engine, much less a rocket ship.
And I’m sure that this would describe some aliens out there. But the problem is that it isn’t describing all aliens out there, especially not ones that are capable of understanding the universe well enough to traverse it.
Which is why we’ve done so little in the last 50 years. If there were commercial potential in space, then it’d be much more developed now. My conjecture is that as soon as it there is a profitable reason to put a person into space, rather than an extreme expense, commercial exploitation will explode.
The two points here are that I don’t see how it is valid to say that no alien species would be recognizable to us, especially one that has managed to cross the void to get here.
And it’s best if they do, then we have a chance. If we go out into the universe, and we come across a planet that has recognizable intelligent life, then we have a decision to make as to how to relate to them. We may assimilate them, we may “zoo” them, we may exterminate them.
If we come across a planet that doesn’t have anything that we recognize as intelligent life, then we will simply wipe out the intelligent life that we didn’t recognize without even realizing it.
But, by definition, if they are expanding, they are expansionistic, and the only way they leave our planet alone is if they make a conscious decision to preserve us as an example of intelligent life.
Crowding.
The Earth gets crowded, so people start building settlements on asteroids. The asteroids start getting crowded, so people start looking for greener fields.
The thing that most people don’t seem to understand is that this would not be a project undertaken by the whole of humanity, or even a significant fraction of it. It will be a group of people, making up a fraction of a percent of humanity, that expand outwards.
I’m really not a fan of trying to respond to chopped up posts so I’m just going to respond to this with a couple of other notes and then let it rest, but the assumption that “the universe is made of things that can be counted,” is exactly the kind of human perception-centric viewpoint that limits consideration of how unfamiliar the cognition and conception of the world an extraterrestrial intelligence might be. Our brains are wired particularly to lump things into categories as countable objects because that is how we perceive the world, but virtually nothing in nature consists of discrete quantities of truly unique objects.
For instance, it may seem intuitive to a human that a basket of apples is a collection of essentially identical units, but at a detail level each apple has a unique profile, weight, distribution of color, et cetera, and if you were not predisposed to ignore these and just think of all vaguely round, redd-ish, sweet-tasting fruits to be the same, you would not count them as members of a group. An alien species that doesn’t collect food in such units and lives in an environment where everything is part of a continuum which is not discretely differentiated would have no evolutionary pressure to come to divide things into discrete categories.
And we also have to think past our own technological and industrial development as the only path to technology. An extraterrestrial may not build a ‘steam engine’ out of metal tubes and fasteners; it might learn to extrude its technology by controlling its equivalent of enzymes to create highly complex proteins. Or it might follow some other path of technological development that we can’t even conceive of because we don’t experience the environment they evolved in and their ways of manipulating the world. Even if they are animal-like terrestrial creatures with manipulative appendages, their approach to technology development may be something we just wouldn’t recognize as ‘technology’ without seeing the results, and at the point they have become able of crossing interstellar distances may be as unfathomable to us as an iPhone would be to a Bronze-age human; essentially magical and able to do things with no recognizable mechanisms or power sources they would be familiar with.
Oh God! Bill Bryson should not even be mentioned in a Carl Sagan thread. A Short History of Nearly Everything was so factually incorrect as to seem written by a 12 year old who had no internet access to check any facts. Like the star Betelgeuse being 10,000 light years away. And errors like that, that a 12 year old writer would have caught, are on every page. The book may be entertaining to some, but any factual research is missing.
At least Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, was honest enough as to obviously be written by someone who has never spent one night in the outdoors. That one was bad, but hey, at least you know he is just making shit up.
So far no human civilization with technology to send anything into space has no counting numbers. An interesting science fiction story would be about an alien race that knows intuitively how to send things into outer space without the use of numbers. There’s a science fiction story about an alien race that intuitively knows how to use faster-than-light travel despite having very primitive technology:
There are two counter-arguments to that. First, there has to be at least some physical commonality because aliens will almost certainly be carbon-based life forms (the only other element that can form very complex molecules is silicon, and it’s not suitable for biology for a number of good reasons). Either that or the aliens will be intelligent robots. We’re at least familiar with the rudiments of both biological and machine intelligence. Also, as already mentioned, aliens would necessarily be familiar with the universal laws of physics and with math, and would have to be tool users.
The other problem with your argument is that we can indeed experience completely non-human thinking without having to try to imagine it. We see it all the time in the behaviours of AI. For example, AIs based on the language model paradigm being much smarter than humans in many respects, yet making ridiculous mistakes that almost no human ever would. More dramatically, expert players of the game Go have said about Alphabet’s remarkable Alpha Go machine that some of its winning strategies, while indisputably successful, are not the way a human player would approach certain problems. They described Alpha Go’s strategies as “alien”.
I would also add a third, our ability to understand how non-human animals think.
Indeed, a lot of early hunting strategies relied on understanding how animals would process available information that, while might save them in their natural state, would doom them to organized human hunters. I’m thinking of running herds of animals off of cliffs, for example, and not falling them with high powered rifles.
Although there are good astrophysical and biochemistry reasons to believe that self-organizing live-like systems will be based upon CHONPS chemistry, that doesn’t translate into their neural or cognitive systems being anything like ours. It is tempting to assume that there would be some significant degree of convergence in at least basic organizing principles but with a sample set of one evolutionary chain that isn’t really guaranteed, and indeed, we can look at how very different cephalopod neurostructure is to see how even organisms which developed from the same basic pattern diverge significantly.
When talking about the “behaviors of AI”, I think it is important to grasp that nothing that is currently labeled as “AI” has anything that we would actually consider a general abstracted intelligence, and large language models (LLMs) aren’t really ‘intelligent’ at all in the sense of having any kind of world concepts; they are essentially very powerful and complex statistical pattern matching algorithms that mimic the way that people respond to prompts by synthesizing the same patterns. This is why we see them producing “hallucinations”, i.e. they produce seemingly nonsensical responses because they don’t actually have any semantic understanding of their response in the context of the real world. When we do actually produce machine cognition system that is a true AGI capable of actual abstract thought and independent conceptualization—which I think is coming but not nearly as imminent as many enthusiasts are breathlessly projecting—it will most certainly not think like us and without restraints will come to conclusions that to not conform to any ethical or moral principles or expectations of human society.
As it is, we cannot understand how ‘deep learning’ algorithms produce the results they give even though we’ve defined the underlying functional rules. Nor can we make any practical inferences about how a human (or even far less complex creatures) ‘think’ just by looking at the structure of a small group of neurons. So, it seems likely to the point of near certainty that an extraterrestrial intelligence would be virtually impenetrable to us even if it were operating at a comparable cognitive level and on the same timescale. An intelligence that is far in advance of how we think, or that operates much faster or slower would be indescribably incomprehensible, and may not even regard us as being sapient organisms.
Human thought patterns are framed within the context of a chemical stew of emotions and exigencies that we could, maybe, simulate, to some extent, in AI models – but, why? What would be the point of building artificial brains that function exactly like our biological brains? Research should be exploration, a search for alternative reasoning patterns that complement us, not mimic us. Then, when we meet the putative space aliens, we will have a broader set of tools for communicating with them.
Any that have had an industrial revolution, or even made it into the bronze age?
That could only work if there is an individual doing all the work, otherwise, they would need to find some way of communicating measurements for building and fueling rockets. Even then, they’d have to understand that one thing is bigger than another, and by how much. I spent a fair amount of time in kitchens where the standard unit of measures were “dollop, glug, and pinch”, but that’s not going to cut it when you are designing and operating rockets into space.
Not to mention things like orbital mechanics.
Examples of cultures that don’t count are of cultures that don’t need to count. A spacefaring civilization needs to count.
If we allow magic, then pretty much anything’s on the table.