Limitations of Communication, and Xenocultures

I've recently finished rereading Ender's Game, first book in the Ender Series by Orson Scott Card and enjoyed it, as always. Not only is the story entertaining, but some of the ideas Scott Card developes are thought provoking and I've gotten something different out of the book each time I've read it.

Without a doubt, the most moving part of the book for me, at least recently, is the fact that Ender is made complicit in a xenocide that results from a war that didn't need to be. This reminds me of Timothy Zahn's Conqueror's trilogy, where there is a similar confusion. Esssentially, humans meet a race that can communicate instantaneously over long distances using natural abilities we don't understand. In both stories, it's the aliens who attack first, but do so through their own misunderstanding of humans.

Both authors have hit upon a similar manifestation of something that could be a very real issue should we ever encounter another intelligent species. That is, the concern that, through no fault of our own, we may not be able to understand them. If you've read either book, you'll know what I mean. If not, you may be a bit confused here. After all, isn't it just a matter of learning their language?

Well, no. As these stories highlight, interspecies communication in the wider galaxy could be as much an issue of understanding how they communicate -- i.e. by what method -- as it is specifically understanding what they say.

In The Conqueror's Trilogy the aliens use both convention and unconventional means to communicate, allowing the characters to work out that there was a misunderstanding. In Ender's Game, things don't work out so well for the aliens. Even sadder is that the aliens realized their mistake before the third war (the only one of three initiated by the humans), but by then it was too late. At great difficulty, the alien Queen does learn to communicate with Ender, eventually, through imagery and mental imprint left after her death, but the message is clear -- a lack of communication can be deadly.

I suppose being a writer, in addition to having my own family, makes me particularly sensitive to communication issues. Growing up in Canada, I never would have guessed that even inter-cultural communication can be so challenging sometimes, especially when the other person simply doesn't have the same cultural frame of reference that you do.

We spend a lot of time on space exploration, working out propulsion and life support systems, how arks might function, how we might survive a long term journey. And there are some researchers who try to study xenobiology, as best they can without any real examples to base their ideas on (unusual lifeforms on Earth can only give so many suggestions). But if we do find life, any life, on Mars, on the moons of Jupiter, anywhere, then we'd better start seriously considering the idea there there are other intelligent lifeforms in our galaxy. And at that stage, as much for self preservation and for wider knowledge, we have to put serious study into xenocultures and xenocommunication. Because one of the easiest, and most avoidable, ways of ending the human race could be through a miscommunication with a powerful alien culture.

And I, for one, would be very upset if that happened.

Insight and longevity.