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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Binder Fred" data-source="post: 6098694" data-attributes="member: 63746">Well, with a galactic war going on I'd sort of assumed we went a bit beyond politely asking (as in capture, interrogation, experimentation, dissection (all of those at Level 2 tech levels), rinse, repeat). Since that apparently didn't bring any new knowledge, I was thinking they were meant to be Unknoweable Aliens... Since that's apparently not the case, has the knowledge we gained gone missing in the War's destruction, or are they so good that we really never managed to capture a single one and *force* it to stay alive? A pretty story. Do I hear the bells of imperial propaganda jingling in the background? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Seriously though, I'd personnaly nix the "very ressource-rich" part. Hunger for ressources was a strong drive in establishing the original british empire, and is a powerful secondary motivator in any event, no matter what the original/continuing reality of the "civilizing" justification might be.Well, I would argue the main evolutianary advantage of intelligence is it's predictive ability. That could help bring us closer to our alien friends, it's true, physical phenomena being universal (though, as VV mentionned, there's the question of time perception and how narrow our experience of practical physical phenomena really is (between this and that temp, grav, speed, scale). As modern science has and continues to show us, much of the actual physics of the universe is pretty counter-intuitive compared to what our own cluged-together instictive model would seem to suggest (do you know that the human brain assumes that the sun is always above its head when judging shadows, *not* correcting for being upside down, for example? We're full of evolutionary, case-specific short-cuts like that). We could conceivably share only theorethical knowledge of what it's like to be the other - i.e. *none* of the in-built wiring - with intelligent creatures evolving in conditions that don't exactly match our own window.).Predicting/influencing/"relating" with other animals (other humans in particular), is the *other* big evolutianary advantage though (it's amazing how much of the human brain is involved with social functions), and that part would be entirely different/missing/unrecognizable in beings with significantly different bodies/evolutionary environments (see Cherryh again (Foreigner series) for what happens when you just *tweak* at the instinctual settings that govern how a race defines frienship/association). Daulphins don't even twitch the meter as far as that scale is concerned, being brachiated (fused by fleshy membranes, granted, but still), former land mammals. We might as well be twins. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />So yes, I think it's probably going to be at least *possible* to attain some sort of understanding of an alien race, if it's evolved in conditions close enough to our own. Understand, relate, connect, on the other hand? Enough to let members of each race freely interact with each other? Much, much less likely. Aliens are probably always going to be black-boxes for us, and vice versa, only to be (safely) interacted with in strictly controled conditions by professionals on bothe sides... That's not what we generally look for in our sci-fi though, as jemal said, which is why I've personnaly set the bar of excellence at "alien can be considered a different culture". <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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