Will it be normal?

[Doc. Josh]

I have had this thought for a long time and figured i would share it with the sf community. Now this is a big WHAT if but what if someday we make alien contact. Rather it be in person or a sort of communication, Would it be readily acceptable in modern society? Will the world accept what has happend and adapt? In 50-100-250 yrs will it be normal to have (alien) friends on face book and the world goverment have (alien) politicians. This seems far fetched i agree but so did some other ideas that were (((impossible))) until now there are jumbo jets in the sky and helicopters. Just wondering if the day would come were sitting on our back porch and...o look at that john... bill its just a space craft nothing major. this is supossed to be simply (hypathetical) of course. unless.........

[CaptainPanic]

Kinda depends how the aliens present themselves, doesn't it?

 

If they present themselves in a tiny village, in the middle of the night, then acceptance might be difficult.

If they land on Times Square in broad daylight, then it might be a little faster.

 

Regarding Facebook and alien friends... let's first find out if they also developed language, shall we?

[imatfaal]

As we have no benchmark to compare with this is speculation, but I consider Humanity as a race as very adaptable. Every day at work I do things without thinking that when my father was my age he would would have been considered extraordinary, my grandfather would have considered amazing and previous generations would see as pure magic. What requires a huge paradigm shift for the individual is merely a tiny increment for the population en mass. And it isn't just technological progress - again anecdotally, when my father moved down to London many boarding houses openly said "no coloureds no irish" (he was told that as a geordie he was as bad as the irish by one landlord) ; now whilst there are still pockets of clandestine racism in the UK this form of open hostility is unthinkable. We adapt, we change; what was unthinkable becomes the norm and it is difficult to remember that we have become so different so quickly.

[Marat]

While there seems to be only a very small possibility that we will contact some alien species in the next few centuries, within that small possibility it seems that there is even a much smaller chance that the alien species we encounter will a) be friendly and interested in contact, and b) will even be able to communicate with us. Quine has suggested in his 'gavagai' problem that there may be tribes on earth which have such radically different linguistic priorities and intuitions of the natural way to formulate things that we suffer a 'radical indeterminacy of translation' when we try to talk even to these humans. So imagine if we contact alien beings whose idea of language is primarily to identify objects by their subjective feelings about them rather than by any of their objective features, or who find it absurd to call any object 'the same thing' if it is seen in a different context or against a different background. How would we ever decode what they were saying?

[imatfaal]

the problem with the indeterminacy of translation is that examples of mountains being called "your finger" or "what's that" are amusing but limited; yet examples of cross cultural dissemination of learning are everywhere. you referred in another thread (in another great post) to Wittgenstein On Certainty - and whilst "here is my hand" may be interpreted in any manner, and is suspect when claimed to be an unarguable empirical fact, as the commencing logical proposition of a series of arguments it is completely acceptable. Similarly, whilst it is completely credible that no translation (or we could go further and say no speech act) is interpretable with complete precision and without bias from one's own interpretive community; it is nonetheless logically valid to assume a measure of mutual understanding will be possible

[Doc. Josh]

I doubt a species that has accomplished those feats will come to earth to start stuff. Unless they were the human race just 1 million yrs ahead. And i suppose they are intellegent beings so there would in fact be a way of communicating properly. If not with words with gestures like back in time when other tribes and nations couldn't verbly speak to one another and make sense of it. They would give grapes wine food smiles comfort etc to show hospatality.

[Phi for All]

Now this is a big WHAT if but what if someday we make alien contact. Rather it be in person or a sort of communication, Would it be readily acceptable in modern society? Will the world accept what has happend and adapt? In 50-100-250 yrs will it be normal to have (alien) friends on face book and the world goverment have (alien) politicians.

I think it will only take 50 years for aliens to start friending people on Facebook, but it will take them another 200 years to take care of all the requests to play FarmTown. During that they will have no time for politics.

[JohnB]

I'm not sure the "gavagai" problem is relevent in the case of aliens. The translation of a totally unknown language is extremely difficult without a biligual. Note the impossibility of decoding heiroglyphs until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone trilingual. Similarly there was no headway in Cretan Linear B until the word for "King" was found on a bilingual.

 

In the case of aliens we already have a bilingual, mathematics. Simply put, you can't build a radio telescope or starship by feelings or rule of thumb so there is a class of each race that already speak the same language. From this the rest can follow.

 

However, this is not to say that understanding the thoughts behind the words will be easy. I'm sure each of us has met people whose thought processes leave us baffled. (Creationists come to mind here) We may be able to understand what they say, but we may not be able to understand them and their psychology.

 

In general I think humans are amazingly adaptable and the extraordinary becomes the mundane very quickly. Consider the difference in reaction between the Apollos 11 and 17. The world stopped for Apollo 11, but by the time Apollo 17 came around it was "Ho hum, they're going to the moon again."

 

Personally I think that this part of our makup is extremely old, going back to "Lucy" or perhaps even before. If a small, rather helpless species gets too involved in amazment over the extraordinary for too long they will miss the more mundane things that might endanger them, like the Sabretooth creeping up quietly behind them. "Extraordinary but not dangerous" becomes "mundane" so that we can continue to watch for "dangerous". 6 million years of survival as the physically weakest predator on the planet has bred it into us.

[Marat]

The radical indeterminacy of translation is likely to be limited on earth because the depth grammar of the human mind may well be quite similar among different groups. I have seen films of an early contact between Westerners and an isolated Amazon tribe, and even though the individuals involved in the filmed contact had never seen someone of the other group, they managed to communicate by gestures which were surprisingly similar, such as nodding (which is different even in Greece and Turkey from the way it is done in America) and in their respective illustrations of distance.

 

But beings from another planet could be vastly more different than these Amazon-tribe-contact cases. Perhaps they communicate by musical notes outside the range we can hear, or don't understand actions as distinct from nouns, or operate with base pi notation, or deal with numbers in a way we cannot comprehend, such as is the case now with autistic savants who seem to be able to 'see' what day of the month Easter will fall on in the year 22715 without calculating it by any sort of algorithm they can explain.