jedidia
shoemaker without legs
I'm afraid the X-files are a lot more popular than Lovecraft nowadays... :lol:
Alien found? Really?
- Thread starter Eli13
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I'm afraid the X-files are a lot more popular than Lovecraft nowadays... :lol:
Pinguinboy
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Hey, now I know where my ex-neighbour is! :lol:
Ghostrider
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With the upcoming The Thing pre-sidequel, maybe the standards will rise a little.
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I don't see a reason why an alien vaguely resembling human would be implausible. After all to build and operate technology human body shape is fairly good. 2 legs to efficiently move around, 2 hands to manipulate stuff, head with brain and sensors placed on top of body. You can't really make it simpler and still maintain functionality. There could be variations like 4 arms 2 legs or 4 legs 2 arms.
Surely an inteligent alien could resemble a pile of goo, but such alien would lack the abilities to build and use tools no matter how inteligent it is. Dolphin also is quite inteligent, but lack the extremities to build and use tools. Even if dolphin somehow would become as smart as human he stilll would be incapable of building advanced machinery.
I think it could be something like this. Any random alien from random planet would be highly unlikely to look like a human, but an inteligent alien that has devloped technology for starflight is much more likely to have body shape resembling human.
Surely an inteligent alien could resemble a pile of goo, but such alien would lack the abilities to build and use tools no matter how inteligent it is. Dolphin also is quite inteligent, but lack the extremities to build and use tools. Even if dolphin somehow would become as smart as human he stilll would be incapable of building advanced machinery.
I think it could be something like this. Any random alien from random planet would be highly unlikely to look like a human, but an inteligent alien that has devloped technology for starflight is much more likely to have body shape resembling human.
That isn't the point at all. The human body is a good shape, but it isn't nearly the only shape for developing tool-use.
For example, the dinosauroid (the plausible one, not the nonsense one) already has all the traits you describe, and would get along with developing technology perfectly fine (more or less- they'll certainly have a lot of ergonomic differences from humans).
Now, a dinosaur has three fingers on each hand, not our five, is digitigrade, has pointed recurved teeth instead of our crushing molars, it lacks external ears, and posesses feathers instead of hair. And most importantly, its spine is held horizontally and it uses a tail to balance (the dinosauroid study used the justification of a larger brain motivating a more erect posture, but there are many carnivorous dinosaurs with quite massive heads that hold a balance-erect posture).
And this dinosaur shares a common ancestor with us. There's nothing saying an alien species would have even those features.
That doesn't mean they'll be a pile of goo, not at all... they will likely share many traits with us, limbs, visual senses, filamentous insulation, a brain located near the front of the organism... but they don't have to resemble a human.
Not only are humans made up of intrinsic traits developed from the whim of evolution half a billion years ago, but we are also full of things that were unique solutions to pretty special problems. Like our upright stance, for example. Made perfect sense for an ape, but for a dinosaur, it is really silly, because a solution already exists.
If you took a planet, and you seeded it with a few plants and a single species of chiton, and you left it alone to evolve for 500 million years, the sapient species you could find- even if it was bipedal and had an erect stance, like a human- it would probably look nothing like us.
And arguing that only a human body can lead to an advanced civilisation is pretty silly, it's a bioconservativism with no scientific backing... I would say that the only preventative factors, would occur when an organism lacks manipulators (like dolphins) has only partial manipulative ability (like birds and elephants) or is very bulky (like elephants). And even then it might not be a good idea to discount the latter two entirely, given enough ingenuity.
I guess it also roots in a lack of imagination, sadly there is a big misconception that what has happened on Earth is the only way, or the best way... when just looking at a small portion of Earth's biodiversity, as well as its history and how it came to be, one can very easily understand the variability of life.
For example, the dinosauroid (the plausible one, not the nonsense one) already has all the traits you describe, and would get along with developing technology perfectly fine (more or less- they'll certainly have a lot of ergonomic differences from humans).
Now, a dinosaur has three fingers on each hand, not our five, is digitigrade, has pointed recurved teeth instead of our crushing molars, it lacks external ears, and posesses feathers instead of hair. And most importantly, its spine is held horizontally and it uses a tail to balance (the dinosauroid study used the justification of a larger brain motivating a more erect posture, but there are many carnivorous dinosaurs with quite massive heads that hold a balance-erect posture).
And this dinosaur shares a common ancestor with us. There's nothing saying an alien species would have even those features.
That doesn't mean they'll be a pile of goo, not at all... they will likely share many traits with us, limbs, visual senses, filamentous insulation, a brain located near the front of the organism... but they don't have to resemble a human.
Not only are humans made up of intrinsic traits developed from the whim of evolution half a billion years ago, but we are also full of things that were unique solutions to pretty special problems. Like our upright stance, for example. Made perfect sense for an ape, but for a dinosaur, it is really silly, because a solution already exists.
If you took a planet, and you seeded it with a few plants and a single species of chiton, and you left it alone to evolve for 500 million years, the sapient species you could find- even if it was bipedal and had an erect stance, like a human- it would probably look nothing like us.
And arguing that only a human body can lead to an advanced civilisation is pretty silly, it's a bioconservativism with no scientific backing... I would say that the only preventative factors, would occur when an organism lacks manipulators (like dolphins) has only partial manipulative ability (like birds and elephants) or is very bulky (like elephants). And even then it might not be a good idea to discount the latter two entirely, given enough ingenuity.
I guess it also roots in a lack of imagination, sadly there is a big misconception that what has happened on Earth is the only way, or the best way... when just looking at a small portion of Earth's biodiversity, as well as its history and how it came to be, one can very easily understand the variability of life.
fsci123
Future Dubstar and Rocketkid
Well it depends on the Commons ancestor... All vertabrates are desendants of a fish with a head in the front mouth and brain attached to the head 4 apendages in this case fins... If an alien species evolved on a different planet with the Common ancestor being a jelyfish like animal with a balloon for bouyancy and tentacles for grasping and moving you would expect any alien species to be some deriviative...
