Extraterrestrial Intelligence(s) – how diverse is E.T.?
Today’s topic is an article by John W. Traphagan entitled “Culture and Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence” in: Vakoch, Douglas A., Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication, NASA History Series NASA SP-2013-4413, pp. 79-94. (Download the book here: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/Archaeology_Anthropology_and_Interstellar_Communication_TAGGED.pdf).
Traphagan describes the ways in which efforts have been made to develop interstellar messages: with the help of mathematics, whose rules are considered universal, and with the help of music. But also over the areas “aesthetics” as well as “spirituality,” the attempt was already undertaken to develop a concept with whose assistance one could say “hello” to potential E.T. contacts.
In whatever way we would communicate with an intelligent species outside of the earth, all scientific efforts always lead to finding a “universal language”, which could be perceived as a message and understood, i.e., translated.
In this context, Traphagan discusses the definitions of “intelligence.” He refers to Marvin Minsky (LINK), who connects intelligence with:
Self-awareness, problem-solving capacity, analytical skills, the ability to describe the world, explain phenomena, accumulate and exchange information, allocate scarce resources, and plan ahead.
Well, that’s quite a few prerequisites to meet beings that should have at least the same IQ as us, isn’t it? Traphagan goes one step further and summarizes: In order to make all this possible at all, a culture is needed. Traphagan goes one step further and summarizes: In order to make all this possible at all, a culture is needed. And this culture is not universal but variable.
This is followed by an exciting discussion of the term “culture”. According to James L. Watson, the term “culture” is something that unites a group of people through common beliefs, values, and behavior. Correctly, Traphagan doubts this because culture as such can also divide, namely when people have agreed on a certain behavior for reasons of opportunity or other reasons, but the individual would not do such a thing of his own accord.
Moreover, membership in culture also says nothing about what subjective experiences and memories the single individual associates with it. A good example is the collective affection of many Americans for baseball. While a wife might associate this sport with her husband always sitting on the couch in front of the TV, unmarried women are unlikely to have this experience.
A very important insight emerges from this:
A person’s self-perception as part of a culture would always be closely linked to what they consider important and what they focus on. Beliefs would be constantly challenged and developed. Thus, we could not speak of “the one culture”, as there would be no such thing. Culture would therefore be a constantly changing process in a fixed framework.
I would not see this quite so radically. In Egyptology, we always speak of the “Ancient Egyptian culture”. Correctly, we have moved away from the term “high culture” since this carries the risk of describing one culture as superior to another. But no one would doubt that the Ancient Egyptians were a unique group of people, possessing an iconography and mythology characteristic for them, which made them clearly distinguishable from, for example, the Assyrian culture. In a footnote (fn. 14, p. 167), Traphagan again clarifies that it is important not to refer to a culture as “them out there” in order to cement differences in terms of race and ethnicity.
That is absolutely true. But categorization into “cultures” should be similar to scientific categorizations and classifications. They are tools that allow us to perceive differences in the first place. They are used to describe, compare, and make differences visible. They should always be done with the goal of self-reflection, never used to justify racial ideologies or other unethical measures. Only under this premise is scientific discourse possible at all.
This principle can be compared to a child’s look in the mirror. A baby, which still fully identifies with its mother, at first does not perceive its counterpart in the mirror at all. Later, it sees a stranger and may or may not respond kindly to its reflection in the mirror depending on its own mood. Only as a growing child, who gradually experiences itself as an individual separate from its mother, does it recognize itself in the mirror.
Another intriguing point Traphagan raises is the interdependence of culture and biological preconditions. In other words, the question of how the world is perceived also depends on the senses with which this perception takes place. In this context, he points to an interesting comparison: while we humans perceive the distance to fixed objects and their boundaries visually with the help of our eyes, bats do this with the help of echolocation. This means they emit acoustic signals, perceive their reflections, and “translate” them into the information that there is a rock wall there and a tree here. This, according to Traphagan, is not possible for us because we do not have such a perceptual apparatus.
In this context, it should be pointed out that in extreme situations, the human species is quite capable of shaping its own perceptual apparatus in such a way that, for example, despite a visual impairment, the person concerned can still cope well with everyday life. In special exceptional cases, which have not yet been fully researched, blind people even develop abilities similar to bats’ echolocation, see the Ben Underwood Miracle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnH7AIwhpik.
A major conclusion of Traphagan’s is one that I personally share: we will probably not be dealing with a completely homogeneous group of beings in an extraterrestrial civilization either.
But maybe we should get away from the rigid term “culture” and call the phenomenon, on the contrary, “cultural expressions”, which represent our multifaceted, diverse species.
However, here we come back to the point I made above about categorizing groups of people: We speak of ourselves as “humans.” Human-like beings would then perhaps be the “humanoids” or the “Martians,” or whatever you might call the alien species. But categorizations remain, whether you zoom in or out. These are meant to help us perceive the differences, to see the contrast so that we can determine that there is something else out there besides us. They should not create separation or aggression against the unknown and certainly should not prevent us from reaching out to E.T. in a friendly way.
