Reflection: His Master's Voice

I'll confess, I became rather frustrated in Thursday's class. Mostly because the assumptions we were making about universality were utterly and completely ethnocentric. It's something I've reflected on before--my sincere belief that alien contact is virtually impossible, not because of them, but because we are so obsessed with ourselves and so invested in the idea that what we are and what we know is law or universal that we assume everyone else will know. It's like an American who thinks, if he speaks slowly and loudly enough, that the French crepe salesman on Boulevard St. Germain will understand him. No. That's not how it works.

We can talk about concepts of math and science being universal. They probably are. But the way we see them, the way we interpret them--that's a human thing. We think in digits because, at some point, we started by counting on our fingers. We think about binary and calculus and algebra because those are the mechanisms we developed to translate the natural phenomenon that we saw. An alien species might have a totally different way of expressing things. In all honesty, when we argued in class that we didn't want the crackpots involved, my first thought was that the people you really should have on this team, studying the transmission, are the ones that don't think like everyone else. The ones that don't box themselves into that definition of human normality that seems to be limiting our understanding of anything outside ourselves. The poets and the dreamers and the schizophrenics might do a better job at figuring out this message than a bunch of scientists and bureaucrats.