Otherness
April 11th, 2008Alien… Weird… Foreign… Alterity… Strange… Xeno… Other.
Scientists and philosophers have had a field day with the issues raised by communicating with aliens. Consider the Problems of Interplanetary and Interstellar Trade. When we finally do meet the aliens, at least we can rest assured that they’ll speak geek.
Nothing compares to the otherness found in science fiction. Even when artists take existing structures found on Earth, and simply add another layer of complexity to them, the result is remarkable, as we can see in these two videos by 1stAveMachine, where insects and jungle plants are made alien by simply adding additional organs to them:
And another:
Wayne Barlowe creates some of the most alien creatures of all, and makes them all the more real with hard SF details. There is some concept art that was used in making the CGI speculative documentary Alien Planet, about robot probes visiting a distant planet called Darwin IV, where life is detected in the future. Barlowe also has several great books collecting aliens from SF literature, which could make for interesting coffee-table books.
I tend to think that ETs, if they exist, would not speak math in the way that we speak math. I also believe that our first meeting would be pure chance (from our perspective) and not a “phone call” based on a common language.
Math is nothing more than a well thought-out (by our standards) description of our environment. For another civilization to come to the same conclusions would require them to go through the same things we did.
Add the fact (pun intended) that they may not even need math. I have a sneaking suspicion that the first tools on earth, such as a club or stick, didn’t require calculus for its use. ET may not need it to move amongst the stars…
-BMF
Where do you find these videos?
I get most of them from my RSS feeds. What I’ve done is create a queue of videos so I can post one a day. That way I can keep from overloading people with streaming content, and space them out so I don’t run dry. I do the same thing with my twitter quotes.