I can’t recall if I read The Colonel. It’s not in my Kindle library. But for ,99? Why not?
The idea of “alien” meaning “incomprehensible” seems odd to me. Why should extraterrestrials be incomprehensible? I mean, there’s no telling what some alien species will be like, and whatever they are might not use sound to communicate, might not see visible light, and so on. But just for them to thrive in the physical world there must be some points of reference. Like tropisms and aversions so on which will determine the crude shape of their mentality and also allow for crude initial forms of communication that can be gradually refined over time.
Not to me. Alien means alien. It may even mean completely different. So different that we can not even begin to communicate. And there is always the possibility that they can’t or won’t try to communicate.
Assuming anything about a truly alien race is a stupid thing. Not an insult to you, Miramon. Just my take.
And as far as math? Sure, we can send them various stuff. If they even have a system of symbols that will work. What if they use scent? Or movement? Or thought that we can’t receive?
Of course the philosophical principle of privacy prevents us from ever truly knowing what anyone else is thinking, much less any animal. And the human tendency to associate superficial behaviors with recognizable cognition and emotion is a potential problem. But I still think it’s possible to say we can communicate on some level with every even faintly conscious thing in our world.
Now sure, there may be arguably sentient beings in the universe it’s difficult to communicate with. Perhaps stars are all sentient. We probably can’t create a phenomenon they could notice much less come up with a communication modality. But within the realm of reasonably sized physical beings that survive in the world by recognizing commonplace objects and forces, avoiding destructive phenomena and seeking resources for nutrition, growth, or pleasure or whatever, I think there will always be some kind of point of contact.
I get your point. And I would hope it is true.
But I have some doubts.
How would a large cockroach/squid alien affect the people that had to communicate with us? If we were just disgusted by it? Would we find people who could deal with it? And if we did, what if it took too much time? What if they decided that we were ignoring communication on purpose?
There would be millions of people eager to have sex with them, if there was any possible way to accomplish it… Seriously, let an alien present the slightest bit of sympathetic behavior, and I’m sure their mere appearance wouldn’t matter. Look at how easy it is to sympathize with a real-world intelligent octopus who sneaks out of his tank at night and sneaks back in while the keepers aren’t looking. So I don’t think squickiness will be a problem.
Beings that are intelligent but don’t share our senses and have unfamiliar modes of thought, beings with brains made of different kinds of things, beings that don’t comprehend individuality because they’re hive-minds or whatever… those may be more of a problem. But even then it shouldn’t be too hard unless they simply don’t want to communicate. Implacable hostility is certainly possible, and could well be insuperable. It just doesn’t seem that likely offhand.
I see you’re familiar with Andromeda post-Sorbo take-over.
I don’t think Sorbo qualifies as either a star or sentient.
Agreed!
However I was thinking of the “Avatars of the Suns” silliness that eventually happened after Sorbo forced out the original series developer/producer.
Sorry to derail this thread further but this cracked me up from his Amazon page
This is def. on my to-read list!
I say we turn the earth over to our new octopus overlords.
The forum?
I remember those guys; they had a whole thread about how Qt3 were all assholes and liberals, and someone linked to it here, and then they saw that thread and started talking about it, and we talked about them talking about it. Plus they were all gay.