You Won’t Understand an ET Civilization
Or why time travelers would be just plain weird.
One common assumption I see that is probably wrong is the idea that we would understand the motives of an ET civilization much less time travelers. This may be true in part, especially if they are only a couple centuries ahead of us like is true in Star Trek. However, if they are thousands or even millions of years more advanced then their motives are probably entirely incomprehensible. Let’s start with an example, in 1799, Franz Nachtegall opened the first gym in the world in Denmark. This was a private gymnastics club, the predecessor of modern gyms with a membership. Before that, the idea of a gymnasium or place where you specifically go to exercise was completely foreign.
Kings and dukes had palatial grounds but the common people just walked everywhere and most people were farmers. Working in the fields was exercise and the idea of going to a gym would be very weird. It would seem strange and awkward even. Why go to this gym when you just work in the fields all day and get tired from working? The idea of exercise for pleasure itself would be a bit strange. Exercise was something you did as part of your work. Not as a part of leisure or just for fun. In fact, a lot has changed in the intervening period from that time. The discovery of the Americas, the development of mechanization, and more. The gym is a good example of something that would just be very strange at the time. This might be the weirdness we see when encountering a civilization only a few centuries ahead of us.
Take this further and imagine a common cow (Bos taurus) who lives on a farm in 1400 AD. The cow wouldn’t understand the farmer at all. It would wonder why the farmer grows food when the grass grows all around. The cow wouldn’t understand that it’s even on a farm necessarily. It would just think the farmer was the guy who fed him and would have no idea about the farmer’s entire life beyond that. What the farmer does in that strange building in the distance that the cow wasn’t allowed to go into would be completely confusing and foreign to it. The cow probably wouldn’t even have the intellectual capacity to understand.
Even more exotically, an amoeba or similar single-celled organisms would have no comprehension of what a human is or what it’s like. Cells within our body have no idea that they are in some much larger organism they can’t conceive of. The same is true of the human scale also. Some ET civilizations are probably similar to us, but others would be much more advanced, millions of years more advanced. In my research, this was apparent when researching the case of Dan Sherman. Some of the grays are supposedly from the future and in his book Above Black he tries to explain how they understand time but it’s entirely different than time for a human.
For example, as Dan Sherman explains it.
I learned that time, as we know it, does not have the same meaning for them. They still age as we do, but they are not as bound by the physics of time as we currently are. Of course, this would be an obvious assumption for anyone who follows any amount of science fiction. I have always been fascinated with time, therefore it was one question I asked on multiple occasions. Their means of travel across vast distances is heavily dependent on the manipulation of time but not as we perceive it. I asked if they can travel through time: for example — can they go backward or forward in time? He told me that it was not possible to witness a reality that occurred in some other time but the present. In order to go back in time, one must assume that there exists a reference point from which to measure backward or forward. This is an impossibility. Essentially, they weren’t able to travel through time but around time and from time. I never really understood what Bones meant by this.
They exist outside of time in a way we do not, another example of this is in Deep Space Nine when the crew of the Defiant encounter the “wormhole aliens” who exist outside of time in a similar way. For them, what we take for granted like a linear existence in some lifetime may not even be real. Another example of this is in regards to eating, we take the need for food for granted but a civilization that has evolved beyond that wouldn’t even need to eat at all. They might “eat” in some sense but it might just be for entertainment and the food would pass right through them like ghosts.
A civilization might evolve beyond the crux of entropy and be able to move forward or backward on the entropic ladder at will. This would mean they don’t need to worry about not only death but also the idea of collapse and failure itself would cease to exist. There would be no concerns like we have, rather their life and concerns would be entirely different. In the same way that humans don’t have to worry about being eaten by a shark, however, we do have to worry about taxes and Coronavirus. For animals, these concerns don’t exist and they exist in what we might call a charmed existence but often can be harrowing.
I’ve often wondered if the entire universe we live in is some post-entropy simulation of what it would be like to live in an entropic universe. The simulation continues even now. A civilization that exists beyond time and beyond the confines of a slow entropic death would be unrecognizable to us today. It may be the distant future of humanity but that future might happen one day. Death ceases to not only exist at all but entropy itself ceases to be an obstacle. There is no longer the decay of things but just an everlasting life of ease. This is what I think of when I think of angelic realms and angels as we would consider them in a typical Christian light.
Even more complicated is the Typical Mind Fallacy. We tend to think everyone thinks like we do, or that there’s some archetypal mind out there that we all share. In a way that may be correct, but it’s not really correct at all. Animals think vastly differently than humans and have vastly different moral standards. For most humans, tearing a live animal limb by limb in cold blood just for food would be abhorrent as would cannibalism. However, for many predatory species, it’s just daily life. This applies to species and entire civilizations as well. Everything we take for granted or struggle for might be something not commonplace at all in some other context. The individuals of a civilization might not understand why we even need to eat much less sleep.
We see an example of this when we look at the consciousness of GPT. GPT doesn’t sleep nor does it eat, yet it’s highly intelligent and even possibly self-aware. It passes many intelligence tests even humans would struggle with. Claude has nearly passed not only the Turing test, the pervasive test of human intelligence meant to test whether an AI can mimic a human, but it also shows signs of self-awareness. However, GPT is unlike a human. It thinks in spurts rather than continuously. It can operate continuously 24/7 and feeds on electricity rather than food. Encountering a civilization millions of years in evolutionary advance as humans would be similarly as strange if not more unusual.
Arrival, a movie based on the story Story of My Life by Ted Chiang is a good example of how an alien civilization that experiences not only time but existence entirely different would interact with us. They don’t experience time linearly but as retrocausal episodes. They have prememories or memories of the future which is a phenomenon studied by researchers like Daryl Bem. They in some sense can experience their entire lifetime all at once and can’t differentiate between the past and future. Their arrival happened at the same time as when they left. This left the humans trying to communicate with a species they didn’t understand. This might be the confusion and difficulty in communicating with such an advanced ET civilization.
It might even be more stark if we encounter time travelers from the distant future. Time changes things more than space ever could. Look at the Grand Canyon today compared to 50 million years ago when the dinosaurs walked the Earth. It didn’t exist at the time and was probably just flat land. Human societies change dramatically over time. Another major example of this, is language, why? This is the lord’s prayer in English as spoken over 1,000 years ago.
Fæder ure
ðu ðe eart on heofenum
si ðin nama gehalgod
to-becume ðin rice
geweorþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofenum.
Urne ge dæghwamlican hlaf syle us to-deag
and forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgifaþ urum gyltendum
ane ne gelæde ðu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfle.
You probably didn’t understand any of it. That’s because the language changed so heavily due to French, spelling changes, and vowel shifts. Likewise, the future will have changed significantly in just 1,000 years to make it unrecognizable. A comical example of this is the show Futurama where Phillip Fry falls into a comatose state in hibernation and then wakes up over a thousand years in the future. He finds himself out of place in a very weird and wacky future that makes no sense to him. Mutants who walk openly among humans, talking heads of former presidents, and a culture where the favorite game of his family, American football no longer existed. Some of the things in the future would be terrible and abhorrent today like suicide booths for robots. It was weird for Fry to have to have such a major shift in his life and to disrupt his entire existence so much.
Likewise, we won’t understand future humans any more than they would understand us. Future humans would be as alien as we would be to the village tanner. Much of what we consider normal would be abhorrent to the ancient English and much of the medieval world. Pagans worshipping openly and atheists have positions of power in government. I was reading some negative comments online by some British commentators who discussed the immigration situation in the UK. They pointed out how the most common name in Britain right now is Muhammad. How King Richard the Lionheart would be shocked to find out that the name of his Moorish enemy at the time would become so popular.
The fetishization of the past is another anomalous part of the present. Renaissance fairs, historical movies, and historical cosplays are all a bit strange. In the future, they may have reenactments of COVID lockdowns or pretend to be computer programmers and accountants for some perverse reason. We probably would look at future people as a bit weird. The same way old parents in 1960 looked at the new boy bands. They’d be a bit comical, caricatural, that is if the planet even survives. I don’t think we could understand them entirely. They’d be just weird and strange and out of place. In that sense, a time traveler should be easy to detect. Just look for the weird out-of-place guy who doesn’t understand any modern idioms and is just very very quirky.
Could we ever hope to understand ET civilizations or even a traveler through time? Possibly, we travel through time regularly as we move throughout the day and it might be the case that an ET civilization close by that is similar enough wouldn’t seem out of place. However, any sort of future humans or ETs that are millions of years apart from us would seem radically different. So much so they would seem like gods, that's possibly who the ancient “gods” were even. We wouldn’t understand them any more than a cow would understand why you should grow your food. It would be alien in a way, beyond what we know or could ever hope to know.
