I’ll keep this brief. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about SETI. What happens when we do, at some point in our existence, come into contact with another “intelligent” life form? Ideally we’d communicate with it. I think this part is a bit overlooked. How do we communicate with other life forms?

I think the best way to start is to learn to communicate with the life forms that are right here on Earth. If we can’t communicate fluently with mammals, birds, reptiles, etc then how can we expect ourselves to communicate with life forms that have (in all likeliness) evolved under completely different circumstances than us?

I think the main problem is humanity’s bar for “intelligence.” Humans, I believe, are not intelligent. We know stuff and we can do stuff and over our short existence we’ve managed to dramatically alter our evolutionary path, but I believe about %0.01 of what we’ve done is intelligent. The rest is driven by fear and greed. We’re very quick to shout our intelligence from the mountaintops whilst viewing other beings that we share this planet with as simpler or lesser.

Perhaps all the beings of this planet aren’t lesser. Perhaps they all have their own languages. Perhaps we could have talked to them at one point in our existence but now we are so incredibly intelligent that we can’t understand them anymore.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence needs to start here. We need to forget about what we know about ourselves and the rest of our world. We need to learn the language of our world and its inhabitants before we go searching for languages of other worlds.

We need to learn to listen before we talk.