We're the most versital species we've ever met

I stole a few hours of free time from the theatre yesterday and had put on some Babylon 5 reruns in the background while I was doing some much-needed housework.  I won't bore anyone with the details of each episode, but they kept going on about how awesome humans were.  About how if the Membari or some other race had build the space station they would have just filled it with their own people, but humans invited all the other races to live there too and created a community.

We see that a lot in various scifi and even some fantasy; Star Trek comes immediately to mind.  There's the Klingons, who are like humans but very violent and war-like.  The Vulcans, who are like humans but very logical and emotionless.  And so on.  When Gene Roddenberry first came up with these aliens, he took a certain set of human traits and amplified them until an entire culture was built around them.  You could say the same for elves and dwarves in fantasy settings.  The kicker is that none of these so-called aliens are so alien that we can't picture a human behaving the exact same way.

Now, decades of seeing and reading about these human-like aliens has created a sort of cultural feedback in our collective self-image.  Klingons may all be warriors, and Vulcans may all be intellectuals, but humans can be any of those things!  We've begun to see versitility as our defining attribute.  It's true that our concepts of what real aliens might be like (potentially posessing motives and beliefs we would find totally incomprehensible) have expanded, but the idea of ourselves as being the most versital and adaptable has stuck.

I think of Contact, where the alien representative and it's culture are potentially so bizzare that he appears as the astronaut's father in a childhood dream.  Even so, he tells her that they have never encountered a species like humans, who are at the same time capable of both breathtaking beauty and incredible horror.

Is it a bad thing?  I don't think so.  After all, versitility has become something we pride ourselves on.  We can relate to and find common ground with anyone, no matter how alien.  Or so we think.  When we do finally encounter true aliens, you can bet that there will be those who try as hard as they can to communicate with them and to see things from their perspective.  ...And since we're such a versitile race, I'm sure there'll be some who will want to blow them all out of existence too.