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Can't blame the "Star Trek" writers for trying. It's not easy to get a 300-kilometer-wide space amoeba into a miniskirt and go-go boots.
I'm not even committed to 'carbon-based' or 'three-dimensional' as requirements.
Brainspore, why does it sound like you're pitching a show on "Adult Swim"?
It would also seem that the highest probablility is that these beings would be millions of years ahead of us technologically, not the "few hundred" it seems most SciFi movies presume.
Why are we always posited as being the celestial backwater? Suppose we are the most technologically, physically, emotionally and mentally advanced life forms that exist in the universe. I am just enough of a narcissist to believe this could be true.
The limits of special effects and production budgets aside, it is incredibly hard for some folks to create and accept truly alien aliens.
Beyond shape, there's culture. It's so easy to fall into the "I'm playing God and this time I'm doing it right" syndrome, and re-create some hoary trope from fiction, like the noble savage, or noble warriors, or in-tune-with-nature elves. Or seek to right a social wrong, and build a society where the ____ are in charge and the ____ suffer oppression.
Well are we talking about life, or "intelligent life?" Not that it isn't all frustratingly baseless speculation (what with our sample size of one planet), but here on our sample size of one, the probability that life is a bipedal primate is extremely low, but the probability that intelligent life is a bipedal primate is "substantial" to "certain," depending on what you mean by intelligence.
Of course, I'm guessing that encountering an AI with ET origins is probably more likely than encountering beings directly evolved from abiogenesis (like us), if only because of the potential for explosive development and lack of inherent limitations of unintelligent design. And who knows what forms that might take.
@jrhd Or at least the most advanced extant species, having not yet succumbed to the siren song of self-annihilation.
Not even Kang and Kodos are bipedal. The Simpsons -- always ahead of the game.
Almost forgot this great bit by Loren Eiseley:
"Darwin saw clearly that the succession of life on this planet was not a formal pattern imposed from without, or moving exclusively in one direction. Whatever else life might be, it was adjustable and not fixed. It worked its way through difficult environments. It modified and then, if necessary, it modified again, along roads which would never be retraced. Every creature alive is the product of a unique history. The statistical probability of its precise reduplication on another planet is so small as to be meaningless. Life, even cellular life, may exist out yonder in the dark. But high or low in nature, it will not wear the shape of man. That shape is the evolutionary product of a strange, long wandering through the attics of the forest roof, and so great are the chances of failure, that nothing precisely and indentically human is ever to come that way again."
...
"In a universe whose size is beyond human imagining, where our world floats like a dust mote in the void of night, men have grown inconceivably lonely. We scan the time scale and the mechanism of life itself for portents and signs of the invisible. As the only thinking mammals on the planet -- perhaps the only thinking animals in the entire sidereal universe -- the burden of consciousness has grown heavy upon us. We watch the stars, but the signs are uncertain. We uncover the bones of the past and seek for our origins. There is a path there, but it appears to wander. The vagaries of the road may have a meaning, however; it is thus we torture ourselves."
"Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greely overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments, handled by strange manipulative organs, may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever."
-- Loren Eiseley, "Little Men and Flying Saucers," The Immense Journey
I always thought the reverse true in sci fi movies. That most alien races are from utopian cultures who evolved past the need for violence, and are millions of years beyond us in technology.
Personally I think an alien race would be closer to us in terms of technology, not millions but maybe hundreds or even thousands of years. I base this theory on the fact it only took only 50 years to go from kicking around in the dirt to orbiting the planet. and another 50 years to start living in orbit. Couple that with Moore's Law, and we should be sending manned missions out to explore the solar system in ~200-300 years.
In a thousand+ years we very well could have the beginnings of a 'star trek' or 'star wars' civilization on our hands.
Now as for the kind(s) of life we might encounter, or that might encounter us; who knows? I'm sure a race or two might be bipedal, but depending on the planet they evolved on, they might have tentacles in stead of hands or slither in stead of walk.
Isn't part of the ST mythos that the universe we are exploring was previously populated by an alien race that seeded earth?
This is the escape-hatch I've heard to explain why every alien species we meet is pretty much an actor in a latex mask with the basic tetrapod form.
Gene Roddenberry wanted aliens that the audience could empathize with. So, they generally look like humans with baroque foreheads.
"Star Trek" was never really about aliens, space travel or even the future. All those things were just plot devices to tell stories about humanity.
Really powerful. Thanks for that.
Because if we are, the universe is in deep, deep trouble.
Well, given that our biosphere is only 3.5 billion years old, and the universe is around 13 billion, I'd say instead that we're late to the party. Of course, we are on the edge of a galaxy, but that provides some breathing room (no pesky supermassive black holes like hapless planets nearer the center have to cope with).
Yes, but humanoids have always been politically correct! Haven't you guys ever read John Campbell's rationale for expurgating Bug Eyed Monsters from geek-o-zoid science fiction circa 1940? It's really, really hard to believe in stuff that doesn't have two legs, two arms, a long spiny tail, a big weird head with crypto-ocular vision and a tiny, tiny mouth inside a big, toothy mouth! The last BEM I can remember in print was Dzanku, that card shark telepathic Rigellian with the radial symmetry who sold life insurance to marks who legally die when they faint from sudden surprises... (Ken Crossen, "The Merakian Miracle" in _Once Upon a Star_)
Yes, that was The Chase (TNG), where the original species "spread their genetic material to other planets, in the hopes of creating a rich ecosystem of Humanoids who could fulfill the joys of finding and integrating with alien cultures that these first beings never had."
For the record, Star Trek had a number of non-humanoid aliens, such as Changelings, the Nacene, the Q, the Prophets, and the living spaceship Gomtuu. Of course, all but Gomtuu could manifest themselves in a humanoid form. Just sayin', is all.
I'm just pessimistic enough to agree with your point.
I've always thought that the fact that we've never been conquered by aliens was the best proof that an FTL drive is impossible. And the fact that we've never found any signals is evidence that intelligent, technologically advanced aliens are pretty rare.
OMG, he's totally right. Star Trek should have hired alien actors to begin with.
? Suppose we are the most technologically, physically, emotionally and mentally advanced life forms that exist in the universe.
Well fuck, NOW I'm depressed.
"Star Trek should have hired alien actors to begin with."
Greenface?
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, a LOT of time. Moriarty asked the most important question, are we talking about any kind of extraterrestrial life or are we talking about extraterrestrial that's achieved a human-like level of technology. The saddest thing for me is I've never found anyone who was interested in talking about what technologically advanced extraterrestrials life would look like.
Here's what I do. First, take everything you can possibly think of that makes up what a human is and see if when you remove that trait the imaginary life form can still survive in the wild and create technology. For example, humans are air breathers, could an aquatic creature develop our level of technology? No. You can't build a fire underwater and no fire means no metal working. How would an aquatic creature discover and use electricity? If they tried they'd be electrocuted.
I believe that a technological space alien would be very much like a human. Let's look at the bipedal part of it. Based on everything we know about life on Earth, including in the fossil record there have never been six legged animals. Insects don't count because their exoskeletons keep their size too small to make them able to evolve technology like ours. All creatures with tentacles have been sea creatures. So how is a quadruped going to carry, grasp and manipulate tools? Yes there are plantigrade animals like rats and bears but they still walk on all fours and you're limited to what you can carry in your mouth. A rat's forepaws are extremely hand-like and it wouldn't be too hard to imagine a human sized rat being a black smith or carpenter. But once again that puts it back to being like a human instead of different.
There's a lot more I could mention but I really do try to keep my comments short and they always seem to come out long winded anyway.
Star Trek: The Next Generation explained why Gene Roddenberry's aliens are all humanoid in the episode 'The Chase', starring Maurice Roeves.
Essentially, the Romulans, humans, Klingons, Cardassians and Ferengi all give chase searching for fragments of an archaeological artefact scattered throughout the galaxy.
When it all comes together, they're shown a message from a millennia-dead civilisation of humanoid species that knew they were dying out, so they scattered their DNA into the primodial soup of millions of worlds - giving rise to the standard bipedal form.
madrat -
underwater electricity - electric eels? It's entirely possible that a creature could develop electrical generating power while staying immune from such effects...
Also, what about creating metal around underwater volcanoes?
Insects during the Dinosaur ages were much larger - the only difference if I remember my high school biology, was temperature. A few degrees difference is all it takes. Although I think that there is a definite range of sizes that a creature could be, well outside "human sized" (on both ends of the scale), and still be able to create useful technologies.
Why do sea creatures have tentacles? Is it because the buoyancy of the water allows for less strong limbs to work effectively? What about creatures with a denser atmosphere than air, or a lower gravity?
Of course, none of this takes into account the concept of a hivemind-type creature such as ants, which would go against much of what you have said, yet could conceivably create complex technology.
@ kaiza (#28) The insects you're thinking of were from the Carboniferous Period, before dinos and even before synapsids like Dimetrodon. In addition to higher temperatures, the oxygen content of the atmosphere was higher. (Fires touched off by lightning were probably not uncommon.) This allowed bugs to grow much larger than they do now (dragonflies the size of kites, centipedes as long as a Volkswagen). By the time dinos came along, bug sizes averaged what they are now. Otherwise, your statement is quite correct!
A few years ago, I wrote a little book on extraterrestrial life to answer a student's question. I touched on the various forms life takes, the problems of defining & measuring "intelligence," the vast distances between stars. Later I found the chemical explanation for why water is a necessary component for life even off of the Earth (I had assumed that if organisms lived in Jupiter's atmosphere, they'd be ammonia-based; it turns out that ammonia doesn't bond to other elements as readily as hydrogen, and thus the possibility of life emerging from an ammonia atmosphere are probably too low). I mentioned that the fact that we can't travel to another country and drink the tap water precludes the idea of aliens coming here to eat us. In my little book I rather wave aside much of UFO lore as "interesting, but probably not what it sounds like." In a novel I wrote, unrelated to this, an alien "invasion" takes place, and while they use vehicles to protect themselves, they arrive via artificial wormholes. Some characters speculate that these "aliens" might actually be a later edition of ourselves, as a wormhole would take one to a different time as well - which would explain why they're humanoid in shape.
Hmmm, the article states "Of all the vertebrates, only mammals evolved brains big enough for higher intelligence" which isn't quite true. The freshwater Elephant Fish, not to be confused with the Australian Ghost Shark, has about the same brain/body mass ratio that we do. As fish they can directly sense the bio-electric fields of other fishes which helps with the whole telepathy/hive-mind thing.
"Why are we always posited as being the celestial backwater? Suppose we are the most technologically, physically, emotionally and mentally advanced life forms that exist in the universe. I am just enough of a narcissist to believe this could be true."
Probability!
We've been a civilization for maybe ten-thousand years; we've existed as a species for maybe 100,000. We started industrializing a few centuries ago, and first sent a human to space about fifty years ago.
The universe has been here for about 13 billion years, at least. Yes, at first there was really no chance of life forming (not enough heavy elements), but for the past several billion years, life, including intelligent life, could have evolved anywhere at any time.
So an alien industrial civilization could have arisen sometime in the past few decades/centuries, and be less advanced than us (though an agrarian society less advanced than us could be thousands of years older).
Or, it could have arisen tens of thousands to millions of years earlier than us, and be outrageously more advanced. This kind of civilization would also be much more likely to spread across many worlds.
If there are alien races out there, they're more likely to be older than us than younger. Older races have had more time to develop technologically, and to spread out over a larger region of space.
"I've always thought that the fact that we've never been conquered by aliens was the best proof that an FTL drive is impossible. And the fact that we've never found any signals is evidence that intelligent, technologically advanced aliens are pretty rare."
To be fair, we've only had the capabilities to detect (at least as far as we think we know) "signals" for what, about under 100 years? To me, that isn't a long enough time frame to make a statement that strong. And, given the apparent size of the universe, or at least what we know about it, there's a good chance it could be a long, long while before first contact. And who's to say we haven't already been contacted, a la Chariots of the Gods (albeit some of that stuff can be a stretch). In short, we've only just begun, and we have so much to learn...about everything!
-rob
the fact that we've never been conquered by aliens
Alien conquerors may come in all shapes and sizes.
kaiza
An interesting idea. I haven't given it much thought but yes, it seems possible that an electrical creature could discover how it's electrical body works. The question is one of odds. How many aquatic creatures can generate large voltages? As far as I know, only one. Could it gain a human-like level of intelligence and evolve technology so it'd be able to figure out how to make electric motors? Could its knowledge electronics evolve to the point it could build computers when the human path to computers evolved from audio and radio electronics neither of which work well underwater?
When I first started thinking about underwater civilizations and metal working I also thought of volcanoes. Here's the problem: You would need to do all your black smithing in an active volcano. That means you'd have to find one and hope it didn't erupt while you were working and that the lava doesn't stick or worse, harden onto the metal you're working. Water boils at 100c/212f. Even if you want to work a metal like Zinc that melts at relatively low 420c/787f you'll have boiling water all around you and you'll be trying to keep your metal hot while it's being quenched underwater.
Yes insects can get large but there's a limit to how big you can get with an exoskeleton, not because of oxygen but because of weight. The larger the insect the thicker the shell; to move the thicker shell you need larger muscles and that means an even larger, thicker shell. The exoskeleton problem snowballs. There are other problems but you get the idea.
Having a tentacled, intelligent creature in an atmosphere denser than air really is an exciting idea. I'm going to have to give that some thought. At frist glance it seems like it could work, although I don't know what that atmosphere would be made if and if it could be that dense. Lower gravity would be pretty hard to make work because it wouldn't be strong enough to keep the atmosphere attached to the planet.
Hivemind creatures are interesting but how would they work? How would thoughts travel from individual to individual with the same speed they do in an individual brain? No creature on Earth has ever evolved in that way.
This is the same Michael Shermer who wrote, "Environmental groups who cry doom and gloom to keep donations flowing only hurt their credibility," and made a career out of denying global warming until evangelical Christians told him it was true?
Oh yeah, him.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-flipping-point
First of all as sentient beings on this planet we make think we're the most intelligent and greatest race in our galaxy, Which may in fact be true but remember this nothing is impossible. Improbable yes but not impossible for example we're still discovering creatures on our own planet we didn't even know about and yeah we've explored our solar system but there's still an unfathomable amount of space we haven't even peeked into yet. Not accounting dimensions or time, we are ignorant beings and it only proves my point further if you get offended by what i just said for all we know there could be other sentient races out there that are far more intelligent then us but just because you can't determine that they're there or not doesn't mean they don't exist.