What Are Alien Races?

I’ve been taking my time pondering the Selenoids, and it got me thinking more generally about Alien races. More specifically how would a human civilisation begin to research or interact with an Alien race?

I guess you’d need a crack team of people at the height of their respective fields to begin to unpack a different intelligent race right? Biologists, Psychologists, Sociologists, Historians, Theologians etc. But then that got me thinking, wouldn’t that put an oddly human spin on things?

Humans that were at the top of their respective fields would see those aliens in comparison to humanity rather than as a separate entity. In the same way that we as humans continually humanise animals. So would our view of an alien race be entirely skewed by our humanness?

Take the psychologist for example, in dialogue with an alien (assuming dialogues are possible) would the psychologist try an map the alien’s thinking with a Freudian lense, finding things that match those presuppositions and potentially ignoring vitally important aspects of an aliens psyche purely because those aspects are unimportant to humans?

It’s only recently that we are becoming more aware of how women differ from men, and not seeing things through an exclusively male lense that we’re seeing increases in diagnoses for all sorts of medical and psychological issues in women because they manifested in a different way, and that’s our own species! Imagine how long and difficult the process of understanding an alien race would be?

I wonder how much of this is true regarding Alien races in media (comment your views below). Which races are just humans with one aspect of our species skewed – more warlike, more logical, more noble, more religiously fanatical? Or which races are just things we as humans are familiar with but blown up i.e. big bugs – your Starship Trooper Arachnids, your Xenomorphs. I suppose a lot depends on the creators/ writers/ authors reasons for the race, they may well be trying to show us something about ourselves in and through that alien race, and in that sense they will be something human but skewed.

As humans, would we even be likely to make peace with something so foreign? Would we have the time, as resources dwindled and populations grew? Is it possible to present a truly Alien race in any form of media without it being at war with humanity for reasons neither side truly understand? My favourite sci-fi horror film is John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’, and I’ve had what some might call a controversial reading of that film. I read the entire thing as a misunderstanding. Let’s face facts for a moment. If the alien’s goal was to take over the base and then the world, would any of the humans be aware anything had happened at all? Drop a hair in someone’s soup, leave a few skin cells on a door handle, ‘accidentally’ cut yourself and bleed all over the room if you have to. The point is that the moment MacReady shoots Clark (the dog handler), and Clark was revealed to be a human, was all the evidence you’d need that the alien had no interest in assimilating every human. Clark spent a lot of time with the alien when it was still the dog, Clark was the only person that was nice to them, and so he didn’t get killed by the alien or assimilated. The alien only attacked when provoked, and even then didn’t attack in the way you’d expect, it deployed more scare tactics, more intimidation, more of a ‘leave me alone’ kind of attitude. The whole thing plays out like one big misunderstanding, because the humans saw the alien as inherently evil, rather than capable of very human thinking.

So where does that leave us? I’m not sure. But by way of a beginning, I’m thinking that a very simple way humans would categorise Aliens is by their technological capabilities. How difficult would the tech war be to win against an alien race, including whatever natural advances that race may have. Also I’m thinking that humans would draw up some kind of cooperation index. Initially if an alien race did have technology that would be useful to humans, how compatible would it be with our own? If an alien race were found to be living roughly in the Stone Age how useful would it be for us to make contact with them at all? From there you’d maybe look at how compatible our cultures were, how do we view things such basic concepts as ‘good’ and ‘evil’, justice, autonomy etc. What resources do we both want, and what resources might we trade off symbiotically? I suppose in all of that there’s a sweet spot, too alien and it would be too difficult to work with them, too similar and were likely to end up fighting with them in the same way that we fight with other human civilisations. Thoughts?