Communication would be a major problem, even if an advanced, intelligent, alien (extraterrestrial) species did appear quite humanoid.

I recall reading French undersea explorer and researcher Jacques Cousteau (in his first book, The Silent World, back in the early 1950s) how they took note of the porpoises escorting and cavorting around the prow of the ship and knowing that there had been very little work done on porpoises, including their physiology, they killed on and brought it aboard for dissection and research.

Interesting to note that all the other porpoises backed way off from the ship and generally disappeared for a number of weeks, probably the whole pod, to be replaced weeks later by another one.

Anyway, the dissection proved downright unsettling. Cousteau wrote that the internal organs looked almost identical to those of a human. The brain was practically indistinguishable—same size, convolutions, and all! And the lungs, apart from the trachea, which didn't merge with the esophagus, but emerged from the back of what would have been the neck, also looked indistinguishable from human lungs (remembering, of course, that a porpoise is an air-breather).

This proved sufficiently disturbing that Cousteau vowed never to kill another porpoise.

But many experiments have been conducted with porpoises involving various tests to check their intelligence. And this has proven to be a bit uncanny. Sometimes the porpoise's solution to the problem presented was different from what the researcher expected and proved to be downright ingenious. A whole different approach to solving the same problem.

Carl Sagan describes how they had separated male and female porpoises into two different pools (connected) because they seemed to be a bit slow, listless, and lazy during a day's experiments. Someone in the lab noticed that the males and females were "honeymooning" a lot when they thought the humans were around, so they were separated. And someone was assigned to keep a surreptitious eye on them. A couple of nights after the separation, the porpoises had figured out how to open the latch between tanks! Then, after their nights "sport and play," they separated and re-latched the gate!!

Dumb animals? I don't think so!!

The big problem is that we know they are highly intelligent, but we don't know how highly intelligent. And we haven't been able actually communicate with them, nor figure out a way in which we can! Part of it is the porpoises' vocalizations are all squeaks and whistles, and as far as we can tell (??) are primarily used like sonar for underwater navigation purposes. Whether or not they communicate with each other this way, we don't know. They do seem to communicate, but we haven't been able to figure out how! And what they may make of human speech, if they can even perceive it, we don't know.

So—when and if we ever encounter an intelligent alien species, either on their world (which may be a little time yet) ore our own (could be already, could be never), assuming it's a meeting in which the major theme is mutual curiosity, boning up ahead of time by picking up a set of Marc Okrand's "Conversational Klingon" language tapes probably isn't going to help much.

Do I think this kind of encounter will ever happen? (If not already?).

I don't know.

And neither do you!

Don Firth