How do you welcome a stranger into your home? It can be an awkward experience, and how you greet them depends wholly on the cultural assumptions you make about them. In this conceptually unique (as far as I am aware) column by Oman-Reagan, we are invited to think about how the inevitable cultural differences between ourselves and visiting ETI would complicate relations and communications.
This paper is not directly related to SETI, but a reminder of how our human customs flavor how we think about possible future interactions with ETI. There are many assumptions we might inadvertently make about our visitors and these are absolutely critical to how well we will be able to communicate.
The column proposes several example scenarios that would render casual communication basically impossible. There are already many many dissimilarities between human cultures and one can have a lot of fun thinking about possible differences. Maybe ET’s way of greeting new friends is offering them a piece of their own appendage to be consumed or blowing some nice gasses that its biology produces at you.
One limitation of the column is its assumption that aliens have similar senses to ours. It seems reasonable that at the minimum, ETI will be able to sense at least some of the EM spectrum, but who knows if or how they directly sense nearby molecules (smell) or if they will have specialized organs for interpreting pressure waves in their surrounding media (hearing).