Alien tech writer

I've always pondered our definition of human intelligence. Civilization even. A definition that I like is — our ability to manipulate our environment.

Lately, I've been thinking about the necessity of it all. After all, we did invent all of this marvel out of necessity for better tooling, food production, shelter, and so on.

The way we perceive the world and are able to shape it naturally has made us make use of our biggest advantage — the mind.

But we know of different beings with better senses, capabilities, and even immortality. The way we perceive the world, even through sophisticated technology, might still fall short of what a mantis shrimp is able to perceive.

Now imagine a thought experiment. A vastly superior biological extraterrestrial being visits Earth. Not a civilization with better ships or weapons — a being whose very biology allows it to perceive the universe in its entirety. All the dimensions we theorize about, all the quantum phenomena we struggle to measure, all the forces and fields we can only detect through instruments built over centuries of incremental progress. To this being, the universe isn't a mystery to be solved. It's just... visible.

They look at us and see completely limited beings. Creatures harvesting energy from the elements, building tooling solutions to make up for their lack of vision and understanding. Translating the world into symbols and equations because they cannot simply see it.

And yet — they might be impressed. Because given that the only real tool at our disposal is the brain, we've gotten remarkably far.

A human rebuttal, then. In a way, that is even better. If you are a being whose understanding depends entirely on a biological gift — some innate sensory apparatus you were born with — and you lose it, you are left in the dark. Unable to navigate, perhaps unable to sustain yourself at all.

But humans figure it out. We always have. We lack the hardware, so we build it. We can't perceive ultraviolet light, so we invent sensors that can. We can't fly, so we engineer flight. We don't have the answer, so we design a process to find it.

It's better to have a thinking process than a specialized capability. Capabilities can fail. Thinking adapts.

This is how I feel as a tech writer. I don't always have the perfect tools. But I figure it out.