The aliens in our minds...

Yesterday I came across this article about Stephen Hawkings warning us against aliens. They may have been around for a very long time, and may not recognise us as being especially gifted in the thinking department.  Intelligence is not a constant, and even Stephen Hawkings himself may be concidered to be nothing more than a clever tadpole by them.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved. The numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational.

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

Human perception of aliens has always been based on what we already know about deep space, celestial dwellers - namely ourselves.
From Star Trek to Star Wars, from Enemy Mine to Forbidden Planet, from Journey to the moon to Avatar - it's all about humans and being human. We simply can't grasp the idea, of what kind of alien we just might encounter somewhere in the future, but it won't look human. So forget the ripled foreheads - chances are they don't even have foreheads! Everything we are, is a product of the planet earth itself. If Earth was a bit bigger or smaller, our frame would probably be different, if the plantlife had never evolved, the planet would probably be without oxygen, and our respiration would have to be Anaerobic. Not to mention the distance to the star, how many moons, the amount of water, which atmosphere and so on.

Even if an exo-planet would be the same size, having plants, having mammals, the chance of a monkey to turn up would be very slim, and even if so - would it sprout a brain? And if it did - just remember that for about 70.000 years ago a bottleneck of the human population occurred, reducing human population to about c.15,000 individuals! It's a miracle that even we are on this planet.
Some of my favorite aliens are the bugs in Starship Trooper (for their "alieness") and the inhabitants of Alien Planet (designs by Wayne Barlowe are inspiring and alien. He did alien design for Avatar as well, but I won't comment on those here).

Having said this - it's a genuine problem to describe aliens in fiction. Since most readers will be human, how can they relate to an alien being as strange as it possibly will be? Aliens may communicate with fumes, chemistry, light, signs, whatever is handy on they homeplanet. They may react emotionally on totally different signs as we do. They won't have any recognisable body language or expressions for us to go by. They probably won't have genders like we do, so forget the Orion slave girls... And I haven't even taken cultures into the equation yet.

So when producing fiction, you have to walk a fine line, when it comes to describing what cannot be fully understood. And that's possibly why the good Professor Hawking has been ridiculed for stating that we should avoid aliens. Because he believes, that they are out there, and they are not your average Vulcan - they are Something Else. And the lot that ridicules him seems to lack imagination.

I'd love to see aliens more alien in future fiction and real aliens to turn out more friendly and forthcoming than we've ever been...