If aliens landed, who would they want to talk to?
If Wikipedia is to believed, the human brain has somewhere between 80-120 billion neurons, all responsible for transforming what is essentially a puddle held together by some cellulose and protein into a fully-functional, sentient, dreaming, thinking, feeling human being. Alone, each of these neurons is just an organic blinking light, but if you light them up in the correct order at the correct time, they produce art, music, love, jealousy, greed, images of birthday parties, social missteps, poems, television jingles and, of course, the words you're reading here.
Thing is, it's a
functional calculator, too.
It not only stores all the information we've taken in and decided to utilize, it regulates body temperature, breathing, processes incoming data from the each of the senses and controls a human machine so complicated, it'd be like driving a car with a little over 600 pedals, knobs, shifters and wheels. And it does all these things so fluidly that it can work in nearly perfect synchronization, performing these functions simultaneously, 24-hours-a-day for the better part of a century.
On top of that, the human brain is technology that's around 3-million years old.
Quite impressive, but even if an aliens were to visit, I don't think we'd necessarily be the life form they'd be most interested in meeting. I think that even if an alien civilization were to visit Earth (assuming they're the friendly, E.T. sort of alien and not the man-eating, acid-blooded Ridley Scott variety) that there's not even a guarantee that we would be the biological life forms they would want to talk to.
What if they look like elephants? The elephant brain is larger than ours, with a highly developed neocortex, on par with our own. They have a language, probably a culture that we're unaware of and the ability to manipulate their environment. Perhaps these aliens are water-born. Then maybe they'd more closely identify with dolphins or pilot whales, who also have brains larger than our own and a language.
Plus, you know, cumon...
If aliens entered the atmosphere and their vessels flew over New York, over Washington and over Tokyo, London and Paris and flew into the sea...we'd probably be totally screwed--especially when they see the footage of tuna production. Just as screwed if they had trunks and four legs, but I think we'd still have an advantage.
We have machines.
They have machines.
That provides us a common language. As we speak, there are other intelligent life forms that we have yet to communicate with, because our cultures are so radically different. Hell, we don't even communicate well with our own human cultures that don't have machinery. Still though, I'm not sure if humans would be the ones they'd want to break bread with.
To be more clear, I don't know if
individuals would be the ones they were most interested in meeting.
I think they'd be more interested in communicating with this:
Image provided by www.opte.org
The internet.
You'd have to imagine that a space-born species would be built around efficiency. They have to recycle their air, their liquids, their materials. If they wanted to communicate, they'd be looking at a three primary choices: 1) They try to communicate with each of the 6 billion individuals, a very time-consuming undertaking. 2) They try to communicate with a special cross-section of individuals that speak for all of us, and our priorities in communication might not mesh with theirs, plus we don't exactly have a good track record with selecting people to fill this role. 3) They try to talk to all of us at once, and then they have to filter through tons of responses, all of which would probably be divergent, and would include blocks of radically different-minded responses.
The internet, however, would allow them to cull which forms of communication they found useful, and cross reference between different languages, regions and peoples. Inherently built into it would be hundreds of different dictionaries to decode different languages and to provide subtext where necessary. They'd also be provided with visual representations of just about anything they'd want to see.
Also, it'd be more honest with them.
Rather than having our best scholars present a carefully cultivated, scrutinized view of our planet's culture, they'd pretty much see the bare bones. The internet is a frontier with few sheriffs. In addition to our most revered academic, artistic, technological, philosophical and literary works, they'd get an eyeful of a lot of pornography, jokes, mundane details of our every day lives, pictures of things we think are cute, pictures of our families, our atrocities, our jobs, our injustices, our hobbies, our landmarks, our sappy hope, our malaise, our dreams...
They'd see us, because, in general, the internet is a free market of thought. What people want to know about is proportionately uploaded. The internet resembles a human brain: There's a big portion that caters to primal urges (especially sex), another significant portion that focuses on little comforts, a lot of visual and audio representations of things, lights and colors, thought processes in the form of advertisements, feelings in almost every word, multi-lateral criticisms that could be construed to represent everyone's internal decision making processes, and way in the back, in a vaulted place, some of the major accomplishments of our species that drive the entire machine.
All of this broken down into mathematical code: the universal language, which they could probably download in a couple of days, if they're advanced enough for interstellar travel.
Hopefully, they don't get stuck on YouTube watching videos of news anchors blowing their lines or skateboarders hitting their nuts on handrails. Then we'd probably never get them talking about how they managed to spit in the face of physics by bending space and time to get here.
Oh, and hopefully they also grace over all the films where we try to kill them out of fear that they'll eat our brains.
