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Human story tellers are very attached to humanity, so the stories tend to anthropomorphize aliens. Most alien stories rehash old religious and hero stories. What do we have to offer aliens? In the category of vague as well as less is more, Arrival/Stories of Your Life and Others are about as compelling as it gets - humanity hasn't yet achieved full potential, going further out on a limb is folly (however entertaining it might be, it becomes less compelling). The more truly alien, the less in common we have in all respects, the more boring that story turns out to be because? We're a selfish, self-interested, loathsome species who consistently overestimates its importance. The more different a fellow human is, the vast majority of people reject that individual because of their (weird) non-social behaviors. So these alien stories strike me as deification, angels, devils, i.e. the supernatural, and don't adequately explain why or how any alien civilization would take interest in us, except via our own attachments to ourselves. This is central to good science fiction because they are stories ultimately about exploring something about humanity, it's not really about aliens at all. They're entirely incidental even if they seem important, aliens are just a literary device. But getting to science-non-fiction, a factual case of aliens, that's quite hard for most humans to imagine at all. Consider how poorly most people coped with covid, and then consider how much more traumatic an alien visit would be, even assuming they were nice. In Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953) those aliens were "nice" but with a really big caveat. (And neatly explained devils.) But again, humans are the central part of that story, not aliens. It wouldn't and couldn't have been interesting to focus on the interests of the aliens without us being part of the story - we're just too self-interested by nature. The aliens' interests would have been boring to us, we just don't have the necessary common frame of reference with such beings. How could we? |