Dirk Schulze-Makuch - Psychology Of Alien Contact - Could Humanity Handle The “Otherness” Of Extraterrestrials?

Key Takeaways

• Humans do not respond well to "otherness." We are frightened and divide ourselves into "us" versus "them."
• We need to overcome this tendency if we are to have a successful encounter with alien beings.
• One possible solution, should we make contact with an intelligent alien species, would be to use "neutral" robots to facilitate interaction.

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Psychology of alien contact. Could weeven handle it? Big think? Searching
for extraterrestrial life is an important goalnot only for NASA, but for many
of us in the scientific community,to address the ancient question of whether we
are alone in the universe? Butwhat if we actually discover alien life?

(00:26):
We can just as easily imagine afriendly encounter a tea the day the Earth
stood still as a fight to thedeath war of the world's Independence day.
Either way, we expect the extraterrestrialsto be very different from us. It
is implicit in the word we useto describe them aliens. Examining these conflicting

(00:48):
views is one of the goals ofa new initiative called Exploring Otherness on Earth
and Beyond, funded by the EinsteinFoundation in Germany, which held its first
workshop earlier this month at the GermanAerospace Center in Berlin. By including perspectives
from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, the initiative hopes to
build on ideas discussed during a symposiumon Astrobiology and Society held in twenty fifteen

(01:12):
at the Library of Congress in Washington, d C. The fact that this
can even be a topic of seriousdiscussion suggests that contact with extraterrestrials is no
longer considered an unlikely pipe dream.While most scientists would welcome the discovery of
alien life and the chance to learnmore about it, such a discovery is

(01:33):
often perceived as strange or frightening bythe public at large. Some would welcome
aliens with open arms and expect themto solve our problems, from climate change
to cancer. Some might even treatthem as gods. Others would be afraid
the aliens would take over Earth andhave us at their mercy. Which attitude

(01:53):
prevails likely will depend on what typeof behavior we recognize in the extraterrestrials as
being like our own otherness. Historians, philosophers, and social scientists have long
grappled with the idea of otherness.Human history is a long parade of cultures
colonizing and subjugating each other, andracial and tribal politics are still very much

(02:16):
with us today. Although many inour society are becoming more tolerant of otherness
in areas like sexuality and neurodiversity,the separation of us and them is alive
and well, and that's just amonghumans. If we consider our fellow creatures
on Earth, otherness is even moreof a problem. Why do some animals

(02:38):
repel us while others we want tocuddle. A bear is far more dangerous
to humans than a tarantula. Achild's teddy bear conveniently leaves out the teeth
and claws, yet we feel moreat ease around our fellow mammal. Since
bears are more closely related to humansthan tarantulas, it is easier for us
to read a bear's emotions, andmost of us are creeped out by a

(03:00):
tarantula's other worldly appearance and behavior,the multiple eyes and the scuttling movements.
In fact, spiders in general tendto rank highly among the most feared slash
disgusting animals, with bunnies residing atthe other end of the scale. This
may explain the preponderance of movie aliensthat resemble arthropods. The movie District nine,

(03:22):
a powerful indictment of societal otherness comesto mind. Science is only beginning
to understand the staggering variety of alienbehaviors on our own planet, from sea
turtles that sense magnetic fields to plantsthat communicate with each other via airborne chemicals.
If we venture into an inhabited universe, we are likely to run into

(03:43):
beings that evolved under entirely different physicalcircumstances. Will we meet them as curious,
friendly fellow explorers, predators, andprey? Will we be delighted or
disgusted by their strangeness? This dynamicmade depend on whether they are more technologically
advanced than us. If they are, they are likely to call the shots,

(04:06):
not us. But let's assume fora moment that we are the more
advanced species. Would we afford moreprotection to an extraterrestrial microbe than to our
own microbes, which we kill bythe billions in our lab experiments without giving
it a second thought? What ifthe alien is a more complex life form,
say, similar to one of ourfellow terrestrial animals, shouldn't we treat

(04:30):
it ethically? What would that evenmean to a society like our own that
still eats fellow animals, even thosewe are closely related to the psychology of
alien contact, how we deal withalien life, if it should ever come
to that will be one of themajor challenges for humanity. We certainly want

(04:50):
to avoid miscommunications and misunderstandings that couldhave dire and possibly fatal consequences, and
we need to consider the possi abilityof encountering intelligent life forms that we simply
cannot understand, as in the StanislavFlem novel Solaris. We might be so
confused by their otherness that we don'teven recognize them as living beings. There

(05:14):
might be a way around this dilemma. Artificial robots may be more successful emissaries
between interplanetary civilizations since they could takeon a more neutral form. Another solution
would be mimicry. Many science fictionaliens, from the Man who Fell to
Earth to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, take human form when they come visiting.

(05:36):
Religious questions also come into play whendiscussing the otherness of aliens. How
would the major religions on our planetdeal with the discovery of intelligent aliens.
At the two fifteen Library of Congressmeeting, Brother Guy Consul Magno from the
Vatican Observatory said he was once askedwhether he would baptize an alien. I

(05:58):
thought his answer was very smart.He said yes, but only if the
alien wants to. Of course,some Eastern traditions like Buddhism would do away
with notions of self and other altogether. Perhaps that is the key insight that
will allow us and perhaps other civilizationshoping to travel among the stars to meet
each other with open arms rather thanwith weapons drawn, even if some of

(06:23):
us or them might still have adeep nagging feeling inside of being repelled by
alien otherness.