I just watched the movie Hail Mary. It's a pretty good feel-good movie. Frankly, I anticipated a good deal of tediousness that never came. It rolled along pretty well.
But having been a military intelligence analyst, there was a point I noted that I've not seen mentioned or discussed anywhere.
This is not a spoiler. You should know from the trailers that the human Grace meets an extra-terrestrial he names Rocky while both of them are on a mission to save their respective home worlds from the same threat.
But Rocky's first meaningful communication with this new, strange being is essentially:
"Here is my star. This is where I come from."
From a human strategic perspective, that is staggering information to volunteer.
Grace doesn't have to ask. He doesn't have to bargain for it. There is no reciprocal exchange of strategic information. Rocky doesn't first establish Grace's intentions, military capability, political organization, or even whether Grace represents his species legitimately. Rocky has just revealed the location of his entire civilization to an unknown technological species. He has provided Grace with the one piece of targeting information that can never be withdrawn.
And the important thing is that Rocky is not stupid. He is an exceptionally capable engineer. His species built an interstellar spacecraft and sent a scientific expedition to Tau Ceti; the story establishes that Erid is the Eridian homeworld around 40 Eridani A. So this isn't intellectual naïveté.
It suggests something much deeper about Eridian social psychology.
I suspect the implication is that deception, strategic concealment, and adversarial information management are simply not central to Eridian cognition in the way they are to ours. Rocky sees another person standing in front of him. That person clearly came from somewhere. Rocky came from somewhere. The obvious first step in communication is therefore:
“Hello. This is where my family lives.”
A human would think: What can this creature do with that information?
Rocky thinks: This is information necessary for us to understand one another.
And it fits Rocky's subsequent behavior beautifully. He doesn't merely trust Grace. He seems largely innocent of the elaborate process by which humans decide whether someone is trustworthy. Grace becomes his friend because Grace behaves as his friend. Rocky doesn't appear to maintain a second analytical track asking, But what is Grace's real motive?
His first substantive act is to give away the location of everyone he loves.
From Rocky's perspective, the disclosure may not even be trust. Trust requires recognition of a possible betrayal. It may be pure guilelessness. Rocky may simply lack the human strategic reflex that says, Before communicating, determine which information must be withheld. That act of pure guilelessness may tell us more about Rocky than almost anything he subsequently says.
And I would go one step further: Grace never recognizes the enormity of that gesture because Grace is himself unusually guileless by human standards.
But having been a military intelligence analyst, there was a point I noted that I've not seen mentioned or discussed anywhere.
This is not a spoiler. You should know from the trailers that the human Grace meets an extra-terrestrial he names Rocky while both of them are on a mission to save their respective home worlds from the same threat.
But Rocky's first meaningful communication with this new, strange being is essentially:
"Here is my star. This is where I come from."
From a human strategic perspective, that is staggering information to volunteer.
Grace doesn't have to ask. He doesn't have to bargain for it. There is no reciprocal exchange of strategic information. Rocky doesn't first establish Grace's intentions, military capability, political organization, or even whether Grace represents his species legitimately. Rocky has just revealed the location of his entire civilization to an unknown technological species. He has provided Grace with the one piece of targeting information that can never be withdrawn.
And the important thing is that Rocky is not stupid. He is an exceptionally capable engineer. His species built an interstellar spacecraft and sent a scientific expedition to Tau Ceti; the story establishes that Erid is the Eridian homeworld around 40 Eridani A. So this isn't intellectual naïveté.
It suggests something much deeper about Eridian social psychology.
I suspect the implication is that deception, strategic concealment, and adversarial information management are simply not central to Eridian cognition in the way they are to ours. Rocky sees another person standing in front of him. That person clearly came from somewhere. Rocky came from somewhere. The obvious first step in communication is therefore:
“Hello. This is where my family lives.”
A human would think: What can this creature do with that information?
Rocky thinks: This is information necessary for us to understand one another.
And it fits Rocky's subsequent behavior beautifully. He doesn't merely trust Grace. He seems largely innocent of the elaborate process by which humans decide whether someone is trustworthy. Grace becomes his friend because Grace behaves as his friend. Rocky doesn't appear to maintain a second analytical track asking, But what is Grace's real motive?
His first substantive act is to give away the location of everyone he loves.
From Rocky's perspective, the disclosure may not even be trust. Trust requires recognition of a possible betrayal. It may be pure guilelessness. Rocky may simply lack the human strategic reflex that says, Before communicating, determine which information must be withheld. That act of pure guilelessness may tell us more about Rocky than almost anything he subsequently says.
And I would go one step further: Grace never recognizes the enormity of that gesture because Grace is himself unusually guileless by human standards.
