Anthropomorphism - Six syllables, all about Human Nature. We tend to do it in a lot of important places, but it's nature is insidious, and therefore we do it even moreso in the details. It occurs in most cases on a level we don't recognize, because we've never had to think about anything but ourselves, and our own point of view. For the most part our perspective is that, like Vegas, what happens on Earth, stays on Earth.

We find it in the study of other Earthly species. We find it in how we view nature, and how we view religion. Ships and storms are women, and for some reason many gods are men. Even when got our first in-depth look at the surface another planet in our solar system, the popular mistake was to take astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli's "canali" and surround them with a story about a vast network of canals. We want other things to be something human, somehow. And so it is defined as:

Anthropomorphism - (an'thro-po-môr'fz'm)
Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.

This is a sort of global projection of our own limitations and concerns onto anything we can find. But I wonder, what is this in the context of Science Fiction, in which we have to deal many times with non-human culture, or more aptly, non-Earth culture. And so I, in my love for inventing vocabulary, define this as:

Earthropomorphism - (űrthro-po-môr'fz'm)
Attribution of Eartbound reasoning, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena on extra-terrestrial worlds.

Is this a bad thing? Not so much. I think it depends.

On the one side, I enjoy characters and settings that make me think outside of my own context. We get used to thinking in the same old ways, and let's face it, you can't really depart from the human perspective in the end analysis. But it's a treat to crawl inside a totally alien mindset, where you may be lacking all of the usual reference points. Sometimes in Star Wars I see characters and I think "wow - most everyone has 2 arms, 2 legs, breathes, communicates verbally - what are the odds of that?" Even Jabba the Hutt, essentially a giant slug, digs cute human babes. Which, hey, I can't fault him there.

On the other side, however, Star Wars is ultimately about the human condition, and the human viewpoint. That it's set a long time ago, in a far away place may be an opportunity, to be sure. But it's also a saga about how we view ourselves, in the best and worst of times. If it were full of characters I couldn't possibly relate to, I might not get the meat of the drama.

There are still beings that would be impossible here. There are machines that we simply don't, and may never have, and mind-bending technology is so prevalent it's practically background noise. So I think the answer is in the average. I don't expect to find cowboy hats and horses, and to the credit of Star Wars, there aren't any.

But it's still an interesting question. To my perspective, I think it even seeps into our real life and supposedly sterile scientific classifications of the potential for life on other worlds. Take SETI, for instance - they are seeking signals and indications of intelligent life that, well, are based on human ideas of how communication takes place. As we look at other worlds, now visible to us for the first time around other stars, we give preference to those that seem to be Earth-like candidates when thinking about E.T. We look for rocky surfaces, carbon-based "organic" compounds, and most importantly, water. That rather excludes Moglop who lives as a crystaline structure at the bottom of a sea of liqid hydrogen in a crushing 13g environment and communicates via vibrations with it's fellow crystal-bros. But then, I bet Moglop's science fiction has nothing in it about slimy cellular semi-solids that constanly leave bits of themselves behind and communicate via energetic compression waves in oxygen or electromagnetic frequencies. Cuz...that would just be weird.

So this, by no means, is something limited to the arena of Science Fiction, it's seemingly in Science as well. How do you maintain objectivity in when conceiving alien landscapes and people when all we have ever had to build these ideas upon are our own, on this planet, in our convenient 1g, nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, on which we are literally made mostly from water? Or water and snark with a twist of lime, in my case.

I bring it up because it's one of those interesting quandaries - a paradox about extremes. It reminds me of the mathematical principle that you can, in theory, only approach zero, but never reach it because there are an infinite number of points in between you and it, conceptually speaking. So it is in Science, and Science Fiction. It also lies in the infinities we perceive in our gods and devils. We might approximate this fantastic viewpoint, but can never really achieve it, so long as we're meatsacks on a ball of mud called Earth, and truth is, we can only see with the eyes given us.

In the end, what's amazing to me about the Earthbound mind is that even though that's true, we still try, and do quite well sometimes...

A little something to gnaw on for all you bipeds from your friendly neighborhood quadruped :0)

DM out