The word host has many connotations. In the general context, it refers to an individual who invites guests to a welcoming event, typically as a sign of goodwill and camaraderie. In the biological world, a host is an organism that harbors another organism. Oman-Reagan, in a recent article, speculates what extraterrestrial hospitality would entail. The forms of extraterrestrial intelligence he conjures are fairly benign. He starts with a human example of horrible hospitality: a small enclosure with the bare necessities of oxygen and intravenous nutrients. While perhaps extreme, it brings focus to what properties make a good host. He makes the point that if communicating across cultures for humans is difficult, communicating across species would be worse. Is a good host someone who provides your necessities, however minimal those may be, or is it someone who does this while adapting to a guest’s preferences?
Oman-Reagan goes on to provide examples of the quirks aliens may show, albeit these largely drawn on human experiences. He states “[m]aybe [a guest] only feel comfortable when accompanied by a companion of another species, but instead of a dog or cat it’s something vastly different, like a mollusk that emits clouds of fragrant, multicolored gas on specific cycles” to show extraterrestrial intelligence with human traits in an otherwise alien situation. Other speculations include the impropriety of eating with others and the use of psychedelic drugs. Oman-Reagan argues that the immense differences in lifespan, metabolism, composition, and other factors, might suggest “a simple sentence takes a human lifetime to communicate”. He emphasizes it will require the use of human inventions, including physics, art, and biology, along with patience, generosity, and imagination to converse with extraterrestrials.
This blogger agrees with the need for plenty of imagination and notes the apparent lack of imagination in Oman-Reagan’s article. If we assume extraterrestrial intelligence, then why does it have to share so many human qualities. There are various movies and games (i.e. Halo, Metroid, anything in Kirby) where aliens are not the most welcoming. While Oman-Reagan crafts an extraterrestrial like ET (Figure 1) or Roger (Figure 2), one amenable and accepting of humanity, he appears to have never watch any horror film concerning aliens. One in particular, the Xenomorph (Figure 3), would love for humans to generously host them and would show their appreciation when emerging through said host’s chest. To consider extraterrestrial hospitality also requires one to think of extraterrestrial rudeness and potential danger to humanity. While it certainly is comforting to apply anthropology and our understanding of human communication to extraterrestrials, if this view is as myopic as the one presented by Oman-Reagan, we may be in for a surprise.
