If Aliens Watch Us, What Do They See?

     Star Trek: First Contact was always one of my favorite films in the series.  Who can resist its clever play on the time scale, with part of the bridge crew visiting the past, Lily Sloane thrust into an unimaginable technological wonderland, and inquisitive Vulcans ushering Zefram Cochrane's Earthlings into a stellar future?  And all the while the ruthless Borg tinker with all dimensions of time in their fanatical quest for assimilation.  Yet I cannot prevent myself from pondering, each time I revisit this movie, whether Gene Roddenberry's probing visions are completely in sync with the possibilities that could present themselves in an interspecies encounter between our race and space-faring extraterrestrials.

     With each viewing, I appreciate more and more the way the character of Lily Sloane provides a necessary focus to this temporal relativism.  She is such a genial Everyperson, emotionally shaken by the endless expanses of space, the mind-boggling science that has constructed the Enterprise, and the shock of finding herself face-to-face with a Klingon or a hive of malicious cyborgs, but adaptable and confident enough to plunge into these realities with an admirable sang froid.  It is through her that the spectator makes contact. She is a perfect lens to the brave new world -- more so than Cochrane himself, who experiences considerable difficulty dealing with a projected other self personified by the worshipful Georgi Laforge.

     What troubles my imagination most is not, however, the reactions of the humans, but rather those of the alien Borg and Vulcans.  Taking into account the entirety of the Star Trek timeline, the Borg had been aware of Earth and its inhabitants for a rather long time.  Nonetheless, their determination to conquer our planet and assimilate humans seems to come with brutal suddenness.  Admittedly, their hive mind would not be likely to waste time debating how to treat us.  Their blitzkrieg approach to interplanetary contact had already been established in TNG.  They had acquired near-total understanding of Earthlings through Locutus, and even though their cube that had shattered thirty-nine Federation ships in the Battle of Wolf 359, the attack in First Contact again involved only a single, albeit modified, ship.  Had they developed some deep-seated hubris that made them underestimate Starfleet despite their ability to destroy the initial assault?  Had they assumed Picard would have forgotten all the secrets he accessed as Locutus?  Their tactics seem more and more questionable, no matter how clear their motivation and goals.  

     If the mindset of the Borg begs some questions, that of the Vulcans seems even less plausible in many respects.  The key point that bothers me is: why did they chose to land at Cochrane's base so quickly?  The explanation offered for their landing attempts to satisfy the demands of verisimilitude.  A small Vulcan vessel on some routine business had been drawn to Earth by the warp signature of Cochrane's  rocket and the unprecedented nature of that technology had compelled them to  come have a look.  On examination, though, this thesis starts to unravel.  (Let us first set aside the question of whether the Vulcans had noticed the actions of the Enterprise and the Borg Sphere prior to Cochrane's launch.) It must be assumed that the Vulcans knew that there had been no previous warp signature in Earth space and how could they have that assumption without previous knowledge of Earthlings and their history?  After all, Vulcans have an insatiable thirst for knowledge and logic.  Nor were they distant strangers to our solar system.  Had they missed the fact that Earth had just experienced a major cataclysm caused by its own violent inhabitants?  Was it not dangerous to physically land on a planet potentially crawling with other hostile organisms besides human beings?  

     The Star Trek canon itself, especially from TNG on, provides ample evidence that the Federation took the Prime Directive quite seriously, to the point where its scientific expeditions established safe and completely secret measures to monitor the development of pre-space-faring cultures.  Even on present-day Earth, we are learning to establish distance in some contact situations, as shown by the reluctance for relief missions from Australia and New Zealand to expose the Covid-free inhabitants of Tonga from unwanted contamination.  The "just drop in" attitude does not square with the dispassionate, respectful behavior of most Vulcans.

       So we should pause before imagining that alien visitors would simply barge into our ecosystem.  Both visitors and prospective hosts would potentially have much to lose through precipitive action.  The visitation protocols might be much more like that of a Native American or a Viking emissary, who would wait before the door to be noticed and acknowledged before entering into another's space.  Even on our own world, there are significant cultural differences in the procedures involving private space.  We should not, therefore, picture  little green men (or any other culture) marching up and demanding "Take us to your leader."  Especially so, if they have been standing off and analyzing the transmissions we started sending out in the twentieth century, including the televized speeches of a friendly fellows like Adolf Hitler.