It’s astonishing how much we seem to know about aliens.
They build technology-driven civilisations and pilot spaceships across the galaxy.
They beam interstellar greetings to us.
They create energy-harvesting structures around their stars.
How do we know all this?
Because it’s what we would do.
Which is to say: when we start speculating about what advanced extraterrestrials are like,
we’re really just talking about ourselves.
The impulse to cast alien life in our own image goes back to the proto-science fiction of the 17th century.
The French novelist Cyrano de Bergerac pictured a lunar landscape inhabited by gigantic man-animals
who somehow managed to create a very European courtly society, where they debated Aristotle
and Christian theology.
We’ve anthropomorphized aliens ever since.
Science’s search for extraterrestrial life arguably began with a 1959 paper by the physicists
Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison.
They suggested that aliens might attempt to communicate with us using shortwave radio waves,
which are ubiquitous through the Universe.
Nothing in this suggestion was unreasonable, but it’s self-evidently the result of two
smart scientists asking: ‘What would we do?’
Their proposal to look for familiar types of signals, coming from familiar types of technology,
has heavily conditioned the ongoing scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
It’s extraordinary how closely these parallels are drawn.
For example, the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb thinks it might be good to look for signs
of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmospheres of alien planets, apparently in the conviction
that aliens have fridges like ours.
To the question ‘Why haven’t we found evidence of aliens?’ the SETI Institute,
which searches for extraterrestrial life,
offers the answer that maybe ‘the Galaxy is urbanised [but] we’re in a dullsville suburb.'
It all sounds dreadfully… human.
Speculating about extraterrestrial civilizations is a fine and worthy sport,
and you’ve obviously got to start somewhere.
But such failures of imagination can become a straitjacket for our thinking.
How can we move beyond solipsism and Hollywood tropes?
For starters, we probably shouldn’t be too distracted by science fiction.
Some of it is fabulously inventive, but let’s not forget that it’s storytelling,
which means that even the classics have overlords and dictators, heroes and heroines
spaceship fleets and empires.
But dig a little, and it’s possible to find more creative ideas about how intelligent aliens
might exist yet not be detectable to us.
Maybe super-advanced beings relinquish the physical world,
dwelling in the nooks and crannies of extra dimensions.
Maybe they disintegrate into a disembodied swarm intelligence, as in astronomer
Fred Hoyle’s 1957 sci-fi novel "The Black Cloud" – a rare example of a scientist being truly inventive in fiction.
Maybe the lives of hyper-intelligent aliens will look to us incomprehensibly complicated or boring.
The physicist Enrico Fermi famously dismissed the idea of intelligent alien life by pointing
out that none had ever dropped by.
If they really exist, he said, then “Where is everybody?”
But the moment we start to imagine their motives, technologies and physical makeup as projections
of our own, we need to remind ourselves that we’re merely looking for our reflection in a distorted mirror.
The range of possibilities for alien life is extraordinary,
so why not allow ourselves to be daring?"