They have studied how humans deal with ideas of the "alien," including extraterrestrials. As we think about the most ethical way to approach alien visitors, it's useful to keep Battaglia's single word — "hospitality" — in mind.
Anthropologists explain how to approach aliens parked in Earth orbit
It happens all the time in science fiction stories: aliens park their vessels in Earth orbit, and things go pear-shaped. But what if this scenario unfolded in real life? What would be the best thing for us to do? We asked several anthropologists the best way to go about communicating with truly unknown life forms.
For this thought experiment, you have to imagine a ship has parked in orbit, but has not shown any signs of hostility. It's just sitting there. So what do we do next? More importantly, what would be an ideal, ethical response, rather the fist-in-tentacles response Will Smith made famous in Independence Day?
This very question has been a topic at the annual CONTACT conference for twenty-five years running. Anthropologist Jim Funaro, who founded the conference, said anthropologists are ideal consultants for extraterrestrial communication:
Because of their century of experience in “intraterrestrial” fieldwork and their commitment to a multicultural approach, anthropologists may be the most appropriately-trained scientists to inform protocol for, and initiate encounters in, contact situations whenever and wherever they occur. A primary rule in ethnographic field work: Make no assumptions.
In other words, we first need to keep a completely open mind, and not assume anything about the aliens' culture and preferred methods of meeting new life forms.
Debbora Battaglia, an anthropology professor at Mt. Holyoke College, has studied how humans deal with ideas of the "alien," including extraterrestrials. She told io9 that if she had to sum up the best ethical response in one word it would be "hospitality." Humans should extend hospitality to the visitors as we would "to any alien entity, including the human variety illegal alien." She also speculated about some of the kinds of communication we need to prepare for:
Send a linguistic anthropologist to learn to communicate — the visitors might be nonhumans, so the anthropologist might need to crack the code of, say, jellyfish communication: this is the shape we'd take to be best adapted to long duration space travel. Jellyfish have decentralized nervous systems and "see" with their tentacles, so perhaps we'd need to translate their nonverbal language.
Then determine what they know that we don't about the pluriverse by asking them what they most want to know about us.
So don't assume that our aliens will speak or write. They may use signaling systems that we barely recognize.
David Graeber, an anthropologist and author of the bestselling book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, amplified Battaglia's points about difficulties with language. He told io9:
We simply have no idea how different they'd really be. Probably different in ways we couldn't imagine. I remember hearing [linguist Noam] Chomsky remark once that maybe one day we'll be able to see all human languages as dialects of a single language, and at first that seemed absurd, and then I thought, well, anyone who speaks Chinese can learn Quechua and vice versa, but look at dolphins - they seem to have some kind of language but despite 50 years of study we haven't even been able to figure out the units. And they're at least on the same planet. Who even knows what alien forms of communication might consist of? For all we know there are aliens monitoring us now but have made no contact because they're similarly unable to figure out our language. So I'd imagine that we'd probably have to just hope they're way smarter than we are, at least in this capacity, and would kick things off themselves.
Given these limitations, Funaro said that one possible way to communicate with the aliens would be to "perform," or act out how humans talk to each other:
more
http://io9.com/anthropologists-explain-how-to-approach-aliens-parked-i-474026110
Subject: Anthropologists Developing Thought Experiments On How To Approach Aliens Once They Park In Earth's Orbit 
Fri Apr 26, 2013 9:33 am
