So with all the interesting political news going round I have decided tonight to talk about aleins, mainly because its much more interesting than going over the many reasons why I dislike George Bush, and who I think did a good job trashing him. I think in many ways we are facinated with aliens today because they have become the replacement for the litany of fantastic characters that people generally don't believe in anymore (i.e. elves, faeries, Grendel). Also they are just simply very mysterious characters that we can do anything with. They can give us hope for an easy solution to all of our problems from a technically and morally superior species (see Vulcans). They can also inhabit our nightmares with terrifying visions of a Hitler-like species bent on our extermination (see those things from Signs).
My perception of what aliens would be like lies in neither the area of savior nor exterminator. I rather think that any alien species will be so beyond us that it will be impossible to comprehend them at first. Think of how difficult it is for a human to understand and predict the actions of a chimp. Some peoplke have dedicated their entire lives to understanding the creatures, and yet we still have a very limited perception of how those creatures decide what actions to take, what their societies are like, and what exactly it is like to be a chimp. With such difficulties understanding a chimp I cannot imagine what we would have to go through to understand life from the perspective of something 10x more foreign and more complex than a chimp. I expect the real benefit of contact with aliens would not be the magical solutions they could offer us, but the process of discovering what life looks like from the perspective of something so radically different from ourselves. Think of the amazing insight into ourselves that we could garner from such a different perspective. I guess the closest thing I can give as an example is the experience the main character has with the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. That is too complex to explain in a blog entry, so read the book and find out. Also, try to imagine what's out there for yourself, and perhaps you might even be inclined to put in a comment about thoughts.
