Sphere

by Michael Crichton

Basically, the problem was that everybody who had ever thought or written about extraterrestrial life imagined that life as essentially human. Even if the extraterrestrial life didn’t look human—if it was a reptile, or a big insect, or an intelligent crystal—it still acted in a human way. “You’re talking about the movies,” Barnes said. “I’m talking about research papers, too. Every conception of extraterrestrial life, whether by a movie maker or a university professor, has been basically human—assuming human values, human understanding, human ways of approaching a humanly understandable universe. And generally a human appearance—two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and so on.” “So?” “So,” Norman said, “that’s obviously nonsense. For one thing, there’s enough variation in human behavior to make understanding just within our own species very troublesome. The differences between, say, Americans and Japanese are very great. Americans and Japanese don’t really look at the world the same way at all.”