Designing a Team for Alien Encounter: Communicating with Aliens (Part II)

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Introduction

Where might one look for strategic clues to enrich any communication process with aliens -- extraterrestrial or otherwise? Who are the people most skilled at communicating in unforeseen contexts and ways?

Possibilities include Sun Tzu's Art of War, Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings (or its western fencing equivalents), martial arts, the game of go, or the like. Modern Asian management texts exploit such classical insights in a variety of interesting ways (see Gao Yuan, 1991; and summary Governance through confidence artistry). Such disciplines combine vigilance with subtlety in the dialogue process. Misplaced rigidity or insouciance in the assumptions about the role and skills of the person encountered are then matters of life or death. It is ironic that 'fencing' is used as a metaphor to describe some approaches to dialogue, but that the art of fencing, with its nine types of thrust (and matching parries), has not been mined for clues to more fruitful dialogue. The same might be said of 'jousting' -- indeed aliens might approach dialogue with humans within a framework equivalent to a joust. Ironically debating societies, as well as debates between presidential candidates, tend to follow a jousting model -- as do certain theological debates.

In the best encounters between well-matched opponents in the martial arts (such as aikido) the annihilation of the other is not the objective -- as with dialogue at its best. How the adversarial process is transcended is a matter of art rather than science -- for which there is little insight. How strange it would be if the aliens had evolved dialogue as humans have evolved martial arts -- so that the best human negotiator / communicators were effectively 'yellow belts' endeavouring to deal with 'black belt' alien communicators. Clues from dance and musical harmony have also not been explored.

One way to reframe the approach is through an exploration of process reality.