In a whole lot of sci-fi – Star Trek, Stargate, just about everything – first contact is always pretty easy. Not only do the aliens look like otherwise normal people with ill-conceived rubber makeup appliances stuck to their foreheads, they also conveniently either speak English or some form of alienese that the Universal Translator immediately grasps a command of. Communications, in other words, is a snap. The aliens dress funny, have a few weird practices, worship some ridiculous gods, but otherwise, they are understandable.
Of course in reality if we ever come across intelligent aliens, they will almost certainly be *alien.* Billions of years of wholly unrelated and unconnected biological evolution, ethics and beliefs and customs created under wholly alien circumstance. No reason to even assume that our sense of time will even be within orders of magnitude of each other… it might take them a week to say a single word, or they might be just a blur to us.
The main thing about “alien” is that it is essentially inconceivable and un-understandable. There have been relatively few truly alien aliens in sci-fi, and for some good reasons… they’re hard to create, and harder to depict. But if you want to get just a hint of the sense of just how alien an alien culture may well be, take a look at this. This video keeps popping up as “recommended” by YouTube since I watched that Japanese “Name Seal” vid. It’s a collection of Japanese… stuff. I honestly can’t make heads or tails of most of it. It’s as if it’s from a wholly alien culture,and here we’re dealing with a civilization that has been in contact with the West for half a millennium, really close contact for 160+ years, the people are fully human with barely detectable genetic differences from western Europeans (rather than entirely different genetics based on XNA)and with a language that is separated from English by probably no more than 5,000 or so years. And yet… WTF am I looking at?
Now imagine that *this* video was the first message the aliens were to pick up from Earth. WTF would *they* make of it???