What might aliens from other planets really be like? In a new book, Professor Emeritus Anthony Aveni challenges assumptions.
When Anthony Aveni discusses his new book on human contact with extraterrestrial aliens, he starts with an unlikely story about natives of Papua New Guinea meeting Australian gold prospectors in the 1930s. The Indigenous people had never seen foreigners before and struggled to understand them. They were especially intrigued by their pale skin. “They thought, ‘We turn white when we die, so maybe they are our ancestors.’” They followed the new arrivals around and watched where they defecated in the field. “They go over to it, start poking it with a stick, and realize that it looks the same and smells the same as theirs,” Aveni says. “How could that be?”
The story illustrates the kind of conundrum faced when confronted with a culture very different from our own. If we ever meet aliens, we may go through a similar process of trying to understand them through our own perspective, says Aveni, Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of astronomy and anthropology and Native American studies emeritus. But like the Papua New Guineans, we may be very wrong in the conclusions we draw. “If there is intelligent life on other planets, what will we assume about it?” He explores these ideas in a new book, Aliens Like Us? An Anthropologist’s Field Guide to Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life, looking beyond the questions of whether there are alien life-forms on other planets to ask what they might be like. He finds answers in the field of anthropology. “If you look at contact among terrestrial cultures, you might find interesting examples that could help you understand, perhaps, how to posit ideas and frameworks for contact with hypothetical extraterrestrials,” Aveni says.
One of the founders of Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy, Aveni had an epiphany early in his career when he first began investigating Mayan concepts of the heavens. “I began to realize that not everyone views the universe the same way,” he says. “It changed my academic life.” Although he retired from Colgate eight years ago, Aveni continues to break new ground. His latest book explores how we might approach aliens’ cultural attitudes toward nature, music, language, and religion by examining both positive and negative meetings between people over the centuries. When the Spanish first encountered the Mayan people in the 16th century, for example, they burned all of their books as sacrilegious before realizing they might use them to learn the Mayan language. Afterward, a Spanish priest sat down with a Mayan scribe to learn his alphabet, without realizing that the Mayans didn’t have one — all of their words were based on syllables, not letters. “There is no A, B, C,” Aveni says.
In a similar way, some cultures don’t have a concept of individual ownership of land, or a linear view of time. “We think of time as a piece of string with knots on it representing events, stretching up into the future,” says Aveni — a model for progress based on science and technology from the Greeks to the Renaissance to the Industrial Age. “But must we assume other cultures have to follow that route? They may measure their progress through social or cultural means instead.” Ultimately, an alien encounter must begin by recognizing that “our ways of knowing may not be the only valid ways of understanding the universe,” says Aveni. Before beaming out recordings to distant galaxies, we should stop and anticipate how they could be received by alien life-forms who might view them with a very different framework.
So far the track record of terrestrial meetings doesn’t bode well for that eventual first contact. “It is discouraging when we don’t understand ourselves as human beings because of differences of color and language,” Aveni says. “How will we ever understand hypothetical intelligent beings from another planet?” As scientists continue to discover new habitable planets outside our solar system, however, that question might not be so hypothetical in the future, bringing new urgency to the need to study and understand the other.