What would an Non-terrestrial Alien really look and sound like?

Wouldn’t it be most likely that an “alien” from somewhere beyond Earth, would be…. alien?

The wonderful 1998 short story by Ted Chiang entitled Story of Your Life makes the point well that ‘extraterrestrial’ aliens are in reality going to be “alien-looking”, rather than humanoid in some way.

A simple definition of an “alien” could be described as “a being or thing which belongs to, or is characteristic of, a very different place or society”, or perhaps “a being or thing which is foreign to the environment in which it now exists”.

The film and podcast industry tends to portray extraterrestrial (or even intraterrestrial) aliens as humanoid in one way or another. Even if the ‘alien’ has a reptilian appearance, or an insectoid appearance, it is portrayed as standing upright and could be recognisable to humans on Earth in a regular manner. Classic film and tv series such as Star Trek and Star Wars portray extraterrestrials as close to the human form.

Lifeforms from dimensions or constructs far, far, away are most likely going to be designed and constructed completely differently to Earth lifeforms.

Ted Chiang’s astonishingly well written story was made into the equally-wonderful 2016 film Arrival, and from the film we can see the difficulty encountered in communicating with creatures that had no human characteristics. They didn’t look human, nor sound human. Their method of communicating had no ‘human’ element.

The story tells how the interaction with these alien beings (whose crafts had landed on Earth) changed the life of a linguist appointed to try and work out a way to communicate with the aliens. The creatures made sounds in a way that the human vocal tract can’t reproduce, and their look resembled a “barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs” together with seven eyes that ringed the barrel-shape, so that the torso never turned around. The humans called them “heptapods”.

What the linguist discovered while working out how to communicate with the aliens was that they wrote and thought differently to humans. This was even more significant than their different structure. They had a different perspective on time.

The difference is this (and think how interesting this would be if it were not a story): although humans and heptapods perceived the same physical world, as they developed their consciousness over millennia, humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness.

Humans do actually experience events in a linear order, and perceive events as cause-and-effect in their lives. The Heptapods aliens on the other hand experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all.

So, heptapods knew where they would end up before they started their journey. Taking writing as an example, they knew how the entire sentence would be laid out before they could write the first stroke.

There was no past and no future, everything was now.

We, humans, do not know the end of the story when we start our journey.

Looking at this in the context of Earth life, human souls are on a journey. Humans don’t know the end; they have free will and so cannot know the future for sure. Humans cannot see that life is a cycle, a whole.

But there are no short cuts in soul development; we humans have to make the journey. One day we will see the past and the future all at once. This is the essence of Chiang’s earlier award-winning 1990 short story Tower of Babylon.

At the end of Story of Your Life, the linguist said she now “pays close attention, notes every detail” in her life. Even if one knows the end, we need to pay attention to the detail. Who does that?

But as was said in the film Arrival, “If you could see your whole life laid out in front of you, would you change things”?

To put the question another way, if we knew that down the timeline we would experience pain and loss, would we change or curtail that existence, or our time shared with a person?

The answer should be “no”, because as the aliens in Story of Your Life repeated many times, they were just here “to observe, to see”.

Perhaps we should just enjoy the journey, but note the details better.

16 December 2022

[Book review: Ted Chiang – “Story of Your Life”]