Would aliens want to talk to Brian Cox anyway?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/08/aliens-brian-cox

Version 0 of 1.

If you were, say, a giant jellyfish entity or a clever sea otter in the oceans of the planet humans call Threapleton Holmes B, just how would you react to a phone call from Brian Cox? Let alone being told that you were live on air? You might find it pretty intrusive, for one thing – having a bunch of humans, of whose existence you were unaware previously, suddenly contact you and expect you to say cogent things, with a hangover, on what might well be – on Threapleton Holmes B – a wet Monday morning.

I'm not sure, in the end, that the BBC's instincts were entirely wrong when they told Cox that he shouldn't try to make first contact live on air. It's pretty silly to cite health and safety as a reason, of course, if that is indeed what happened. But the revelation that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is going to be one of the major events of human history – if it ever happens – and it's probably something that needs to be given some serious advance thought.

We do tend, for one thing, to assume that alien civilisations, however advanced, will be unitary and monocultural in a way that ours is not – any communication with aliens means communicating with their version of readers of the Daily Mail or Fox News or L'Osservatore Romano or al-Jazeera as well as their version of the Guardian. It means explaining – to a giant jellyfish entity, or sea otters, or something far stranger – that we are a bunch of hairless primates with multiple skin tones and languages and arrangements as to sex and gender, who are in the process of making our planet uninhabitable and lying to ourselves about that.

An alien civilisation might go: "Ah, puny earthlings, let us explain to you the secrets of the universe and how to solve all your problems in 10 easy stages." They might say, "that's disgusting" and go off in a huff. Or they might just say, "oh, you too? That totally sucks." It's far from clear which of those responses would be the most disheartening because, even if they tell us how to solve our problems, their solutions might be amazingly stupid. Even if they reject us as their hopeless inferiors, it might be because they are a species just as neurotic, just as riddled with petty bigotries. It might be gross inequalities that disgust them, or it might be the musical stylings of Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

Presumably, since we are not picking up broadcasts from Threapleton Holmes B, any civilisation there has not gone in for mass media, and are accordingly less likely to be already thoroughly conversant with every detail of our civilisation. Most other species in the galaxy, if there are any, probably regard us as the equivalent of the friend on Facebook and Twitter who posts every 30 seconds with invitations to games, or unsubstantiated political rumours, or photographs of cute kittens. Presumably, there are feline species out there for whom our obsession with lolcats looks unhealthily like pornography.

When we do make first contact, whether as a sort of highbrow television phone-in or a properly organised communication protocol, it will probably be best if the species we find ourselves talking to are about as messed up and mediocre as we are. Our superiors would strike us as unbearable prigs and a species nastier than us would have to be unimaginably dreadful – what we need is alien mates who might have some bad habits, sticking their tentacles in their breathing orifices, say, but with whom we could have a coffee and talk frankly about sexual matters.

There is a whole literary tradition – mostly in Europe, but not entirely – of the stranger from abroad who wanders around looking at a country's political and other arrangements, being insightfully cynical about them and occasionally complimentary. That's probably what we need the first aliens we meet, or talk to, to be like – people with fur or tentacles who find the establishment of the Church of England a little bizarre but are pleasantly polite about the idea of VAT.

More likely, of course, they'll be so much like us that our first conversations will be about the current status of Brangelina or the premature cancellation of Firefly. Maybe first contact won't be a defining moment in human history, just a story that hits the wrong point in the news cycle and goes away within hours – and be exactly the same for them.