Cultural Differences Between Humans And Aliens

The assumption that extraterrestrial intelligence would be similar to present day humans cannot be made with current knowledge. Aliens would have developed under different environments, they would have their own unique cultures and they would be centuries ahead of humanity with much more advance technology that would have its own unknown impact on their culture. If they have survived long enough to develop the advanced technology needed to travel between the stars, then the negative tendencies of their past would have vanished since the technology would instead be used for destroying each other had they not rid themselves of those tendencies already. Caldwell’s view that humanity’s negative qualities could be the cause of their own extinction
This demonstrates how vastly different views of the world and others can be simply because of culture. The difference between humans and aliens are likely vast. Dick states that “I am sympathetic with Lem’s view that extraterrestrial communication may be much more challenging than we think… the problem reduces to a question of extraterrestrial epistemology, or ways of knowing. There are 3 cases… no overlap, partial overlap, and complete overlap… with no overlap between human and alien minds, there would be no communication,” (Dick). The most likely scenario being partial overlap, humans and aliens would differ widely in the way they think and thus the cultures and beliefs they create. This biological and cultural difference creates an unimaginable amount of possible variations of what an alien's nature, history and current culture could be. The possibility of them being similar in nature to humans is unlikely when considering all the other possibilities. Keeping this in mind, Dick notes that “One approach to the implications of extraterrestrial intelligence has been general historical analogies, especially physical culture contacts on Earth, which usually end in disaster.”