Big news from the Gray Lady today:  even crayfish get anxious when you shock them. They become less willing to venture out and discover new worlds and new civilizations.  After being given a nice Librium, they relax right down and start getting down with exotic alien maidens....

I was just sitting around minding my own business....

The real question is, when is the menace of researchers administering electric shocks to anything that moves, and many things that don't, going to end?  I mean, look at that poor thing. They should be ashamed of themselves.

But, now that they've done it, it is another indication about how much our minds depend on relatively simple structures evolved millions of years ago, sometimes for other purposes. And those ancient creatures evolved relatively complicated ways of judging and reacting to reality. That evolutionary environment didn't contain nasty researchers with electric crawdad prods, but it contained things just as nasty.

That's a difficult thing about coming up with a genuine alien. It's not that species that's alien, its the entire lineage it comes from. The reactions come from choices made deep in the forgotten past. Once you start thinking of the complexities of that, you'll never get off the ground.