Sphere Blog Post 1: Everybody Hurts, Everybody Cries (Including Aliens)

I've been reading Sphere by Michael Crichton. I've read most of the book. A massive underwater spaceship is found; a group of scientists go down to make contact; they realize it's a US space ship from the future, but there is an alien ship on board; the alien is released and turns out to be a sentimental yet immensely powerful being that can conjure animals to kill the crew members. An important plot point is that the alien (named Jerry) is childlike and emotional, with the caveat that it kills some of the underwater scientists to amuse itself with their terrified reactions. This brings up the question; if humans land on a planet and meet intelligent aliens (or the aliens land on Earth), would they have emotions?

I think every creature has a survival instinct and the urge to reproduce. Also, many intelligent and semi-intelligent animals on Earth have been scientifically shown to exhibit emotion, though they are unlikely to be aware of their emotions, so emotions are not exclusive to humans.

If you look at BRAIN SCIENCE, the reason that people are motivated to do things besides basic survival instincts is the stress response produced by elevated cortisol levels; if you accomplish a task your cortisol level will return to normal and you will receive a reward in the form of dopamine, which will make you happy. When you think about all the tasks that would need to be accomplished to form an intelligent civilization, I would argue that some sort of motivating chemicals would be necessary. This means that at least those basic emotions of stress and pleasure will be involved in any advanced alien society that humans might meet.

This is a fairly strong argument for the general presence of emotion in aliens, but as we know from my man Spock, aliens might find a way to control their emotions. Maybe there are some collective conscious aliens that have something totally different going on. I might delve into that in a later blog post.