wrote in message
oups.com...
In any event, it was an interesting post in which she noted that in
reality, any alien extraterrestrials we would ever be likely to find
would be so alien as to be utterly outside our sphere of sympathy.

exerpt snipped

Her point is well taken nonetheless, if a bit melodramatic. Of all the
science fiction writers who have tackled this, I think that Stanislaw Lem
has handled it best (_Solaris_ and _Fiasco_), but he does not have high
hopes.

But I think of outer-space aliens in the terms of Clarke, not the terms
of Lovecraft. I think there is a common ground on which we can meet -
we can discuss the Riemann zeta function and the Gamma function...

I certainly hope so -- especially if the organization of their sensoria or
mental processing has allowed them to "see" things that we can grasp but
have been "blind" to because we are set up as we are. It would also be nice
if we could return the favor. I guess the hope would be for "strange, but
not _too_ strange."

and
agree not to particularly concern ourselves with the details of alien
family life and sociology, because we would be far less equipped for a
common understanding in those areas.

You mean that it's possible that aliens from the vicinity of Tau Ceti might
be _less_ comprehensible than my teenaged daughters? Difficult to imagine
indeed :-)

Jim McCauley