Aliens Might Be Dumb Too

Sometimes, I'll see professional-looking adults doing very stupid things. If you haven't personally witnissed this kind of thing, I invite you to people-watch in a Starbucks around lunchtime. Or follow the President's twitter feed. Presumably, these are intelligent and successful people, who have won arguments and convinced others to breed with them, but you really wouldn't know it by the way they keep looking for the sunglasses that are sitting on their forehead, to the point of real anger.

Think about the progress we've made in the last 200 years as far as infrastructure, technology, civil rights, and logistics, and then think about the fact that (humans being humans) the board room meetings, committees, and government institutions that arranged all that noise have probably all been full of the same general types of people that fill them today. The line between a smart person and an idiot blurs awfully quickly, doesn't it?

Take that a step farther, and you'll see our future. We'll still be pushing the "pull" door to get to our flying cars.

So that got me thinking about how great it would be if we made first contact with alien life, and their brains were similar enough to ours to also be idiots on occasion. Movies always show us the vastly superior aliens, studying our world and planning for every contingency, but it amuses me to think of intelligence that crosses the stars being just as susceptible to jumping to wild and inaccurate conclusions.

Illustration 1: The Sigils of Access

Bill the Alien and his colleague Dave the Alien (no relation) are in the break room of their space ship, discussing  Bill's recent abduction.

Bill:  Dave, you're not going to believe this, but I think I've just made a breakthrough in human culture. See, we've always grabbed the ones that were out by themselves in a field, but it turns out that there's lots of different kinds of them.

Dave:  Oh yeah? Do the new ones help you reconcile the human political system?

Bill:  No. These ones don't seem to support or agree with anything their government is doing either. We still don't know why they all claim to live in a democracy, but no one votes for anything.

Dave:  How are they different, then? Are you talking about the different colored ones?

Bill:  Nah, we've run all kinds of medical tests, there's literally no difference between what color they are. That was John's dumb idea anyway, and he's kinda into that sci-fi stuff.

Dave:  Mmn. Sooo...different how, then?

Bill:  So this time we abducted one from the city, and we found something interesting in his pockets. You know how whenever we abduct one, they usually have a set of those little metal slivers on a ring, and we figured they were like...religious talismans or whatever?

Dave:  Yeah?

Bill: Well, this guy had like...thirty of 'em.

Dave: Woah, thirty?

Bill: Yeah. So offhandedly, I asked about them, and the guy tells me...get this...the guy tells me that they're keys.

Dave:  How are those things keys? They're not even made of crystal, they can't resonate with locks.

Bill:  No idea, but that's what they are. And it gets better - he told me that he was presented with them as a sign of trust. This guy's job is to be entrusted with the care and upkeep of one of those big structures down there by the human superiors. I think this could be huge, Dave. If I'm right, the more metal slivers a human has, the more important they are to their civilization. Right now, the Director is in there interviewing him about aspects of human society, and it turns out that we've had these guys all wrong.

Dave:  Wow, that's great, man, good job. What now?

Bill:  Well, the survey probes have located another guy we're going to abduct tomorrow who has this giant, improbable ring of sliver-keys, there must be sixty. At this point, we're pretty sure he's the king of the region, but he's so well respected that he doesn't even need a security detail. He spends most of his time cleaning up around his building, alone. Just think about it - by next week we could know enough about human society to prep for our big landing.

Illustration 2: Bloodthirsty Savages

Admiral Greep of the first intergalactic peace expedition is on final approach to earth, by coincidence he arrives on the fourth of July. As his spaceship nears the planet, we see a lovely view of North America from space.

Greep: All hands, prepare for final approach. We'll set down on the eastern shore, we're showing a high density population of natives there.

Suddely, the sky above that region of the country erupts into a barrage of multi-colored fire.

Greep:  Holycrap! Ensign Drep, what's happening, are they firing at us?

Drep:  Frantically pushing buttons.  I...don't know how they found us, sir, we should be invisible to them!

Greep:  Okay, that's okay. change course, and aim farther inland. Maybe they have automatic defenses we don't know about.

One hour passes, and the ship is closer to Earth now.

Drep:  Admiral!  It's happening again! The whole section of land is filling their skies with explosions of that sparkly fire!

Greep:  This is impossible...the coordination it would take to pull off something like this...it would take a huge portion of the population acting in unison. That must be it - they see us somehow, and they're threatening us. What else could it be?

Drep:  Maybe...it's a festival of some kind, sir?

Greep:  If burning the sky with rockets and bombs is something that these people do for fun, they're obviously far more warlike than we thought. Either way, they aren't ready to join the galaxy, let's skip this one and move on to the next one.

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TL;DR - I hope the aliens are funny when they get here.