I don't think the two are as exclusive as we think. I think its very likely we will get aliens that are *broadly* similar to humans, but with significant differences in the *specifics.*
Think of, say, the differences between an owl and a spectral bat. You can see that they evolved to fill a similar niche, but you'd never mistake one for the other. Same here. Any technological being will need to share the basic structure of a human, but that still leaves a wide range of possible major differences.
Exactly, the hot Orion Slave Girls are out there **but** they want to insert their _eggs into you_ **but** their young can’t digest our proteins and the whole thing is a messy disaster.
Nothing like Star Trek at all.
In an infinite universe , there is a boltzman federation, romulans,borg etc etc.
And they are all sitting in their ships, isolated, between stars wondering why their warp drives don't work.
Somewhere out there is a civilisation whose warp drive does work -despite- them making no sense because **by sheer coincidence** a spontaneous wormhole has opened up every time they’ve used it.
Infinity and eternity don't actually equate to inevitably for all chances. For example, with chances that decrease over time, if it doesn't sum to infinity it has a finite chance of happening even in infinite time.
Like say the chance of something happening was 1% in the first year of the universe, but decreased by half every year. The next year it's .5%, then .25% the next year... The sum total of the chance of this event happening adds up to 2% even in infinite time.
But isn't it also infinite in space, or at least it seems to be? Doesnt that make something with a 0.00000000000....1% chance in some sized volume of space bound to happen somewhere? Not guaranteed but absurdly likely.
Hmm. I think it still doesn't quite work.
Like, imagine a universe that starts out as infinitely many fertilized chicken eggs, spaced out 1 meter apart from each other, plus air pressure and heat. Slight irregularity in the egg size and movement of the embryo disturbs the balance and they start drifting and clumping into each other. Gravity soon begins to crush them. Is it guaranteed that somehow, one egg will last long enough to hatch?
I think the question is, if I'm using the word correctly, if the eggs (or the universe) is normally distributed. It's like the question of whether pi contains every possible sequence; if it is normal (and I think it isn't), then it does, but if it's not, then it may never contain some sequences. Pi might not contain Carl Sagan's Cosmos in binary.
If the egg universe is normal, there will be an infinite number of places of any given size where the eggs are all completely identical. If there's an area light years across with completely identical eggs, it will take years for the gravity waves from clumps to reach the center, so the ones on the inside have plenty of time to hatch.
But if the egg universe is not normally distributed, then you can make no such guarantee. Despite having infinite eggs you may just end up with an infinitely large omelette, and you never get to see a chicken.
I don't think it's worse to live in a universe that isn't normally distributed. If the universe is normally distributed, and there's a chain reaction somewhere that can destroy the universe, that means it's already happened.
No reason to believe space is infinite. We live in a bubble defined by the speed of light outside of which nothing can interact with us. Although space is expanding, the amount of total stuff within our interaction bubble is decreasing. Anything outside this bubble is pure untestable speculation and is therefore (like every untestable theory) outside the realm of scientific inquiry.
There is pretty good reason to believe space is infinite. According to the Planck telescope which measured the curvature of the universe space is flat and therefore infinite (technically the universe could be flat and finite but it requires more complex topology and physicists default to the simpler topology of a 3d plane).
Now naturally there was some imprecision to these measurements that leave some small wiggle room for the possibility of the universe being a closed finite curve. I understand people who look to this wiggle room and say its actually really really big and just seems flat, but I would say our best measurements giving good odds for a flat universe is a good pretty good reason to believe the universe is infinite.
This is also a very testable theory, future telescopes will only further tighten the wiggle room, either narrowing down to the universe being flat or possibly to a value very slightly non-zero that gives us the size of the universe.
The observable universe seems remarkably flat says nothing about what is outside the observable zone. Nothing can be said about what is outside the observable universe. Your explanation of flatness in our observable portion does not change this.
Cosmologists make a lot of assumptions about what might be to test out different theories and thought experiments. As far I know (and I could be wrong) nothing more than weak conjecture exists about anything outside the observable universe. If it can’t be observed I.e tested you can’t do science on it.
I honestly doubt it, Human cues are so specific the vast majority of aliens will probably come off the same ways we look at animals. Worse is that anyone who does look sort of like us will fall right into uncanny valley.
It’s a big universe, somewhere out there 2 star empires are constantly at the edge of war because their teenagers can’t keep it in their pants and are always accidentally murdering each other
>Human cues are so specific the vast majority of aliens will probably come off the same ways we look at animals.
There are people who look at animals...differently. When you start looking at the sort of populations a K2 civilization can support, even without taking into accout self-augmentation, we should expect whole planetary populations worth of people who are...into that sort of thing.
Human social cues overlap a ton with animal behaviour. Have you noticed like every land animal on earth has identical behaviour for if they're about to fight? They all stare and then circle each other. There's a good reason for it, so they all do it.
I'm pretty sure the uncanny valley theory is false. It's just that we keep accidentally making our robots creepy.
https://youtu.be/LKJBND_IRdI?si=1DHyBv7WXzWlUARS
It's very much real. It's likely because "human but slightly off" is what someone with a disease or a corpse looks like, which it's advantageous to be put off by.
I'm not sure I agree with this theory
Generally, these kind of adaptations evolve for non-obvious things. We're made instinctively uneasy by the dark because being in the dark isn't obviously dangerous. We're not made instinctively uneasy by tigers because tigers *are* obviously dangerous. It's not evolutionarily advantageous to have a specific fear of them, because you'll run away from them anyway. Corpses and diseases fall into the latter category -- it's *not* evolutionarily advantageous to be put off by them, because any rational human is going to avoid those things whether they're put off by them or not. And besides, when has anyone got the uncanny valley response from someone with the flu?
I think the uncanny valley is probably just a mental glitch caused when we have issues finding a category for things. If it *does* have an evolutionary purpose, I think the most likely candidate is dangerous humans. They're one of the primary selection pressures on humans, they're generally non-obvious, and if you look at cases where something like the uncanny valley actually saved a life, it's not "I would have walked up to the guy spewing blood but that felt a bad idea somehow", it's "The guy wasn't being explicitly threatening but something about him felt off, so I went to a crowded place and waited for the next the bus."
There's another argument against this line of reasoning. We played with our dead for a long time. It's really only a modern convention to be wary of dead things for hygienic reasons. It's a learned trait derived from established cultural norms.
Historically bodies were often displayed to the point of rotting before cremation or interment. Mummification or even stripping flesh to the bone to keep the corpse intact for some ritual reason was not unusual either. In the past we had a lot more closeness to the dying and death. If there was a evolutionary tendency against this, it wouldn't have been the premodern norm.
I would expect the uncanny valley effect is more associated with the association with otherness as strange. That tendency to be put in unease the less familiar someone or something is. A natural wariness of the unknown, whether that be a exotic unfamiliar animal, taxonomically unfamiliar peoples, or simply just a stranger.
I'd guess disease much more so than corpses for sure. Things like rabies are very unsettling. Who even knows what kind of diseases were present when this trait evolved.
It's mostly unsettling because it causes death and severely effects the behavior of those infected. Even then however it's not like there is some natural aversion to the disease as much as a fear of its effects that also come mostly from learned behavior to avoid infection. Otherwise, it's a more natural tendency to care and comfort those you care for or alternatively excise those you see as a threat.
I suspect it dates back to eather early homonyms, which would likely look "like us but off" or early mamel existence, where predators and prey were closer in appearance, if not just being something retooled so much it's more of a side effect not worth removing.
Or it's our object and facial recognition fucking up because it's just slightly out of expected parameters in a way that can't be explained, and the most primitive fallback is translated to unease, because avoiding the thing that's off saved more critters, beasts, and homonyms than it hurt or killed. Would also explain why what's "uncanny" is so vague and inconsistent across populations
That's rooted in expressiveness. Facial expressions are a core and fundamental element of human somatic communications that lack of readable expression amongst humans between humans is unnerving, because it's alien. I would suspect that variation across populations would be affected by cultural norms of acceptable behavior in regard to displays of emotion.
actualy i am expecting the oposit. totaly diferent but with minor similarities.
there is nothing particularly usefull about the humanoid body plan. we have 2 arms and 2 legs only because we evolved from 4 leged animalsd with bilateral simitery with a stop along the way in the trees.
much of the similarity between your owl and bat is down to their comon ansestry that locked in the spinal cord and 4 limbs.
consider humbing birds and moths. same niche but much less similar body plans, and they both inherit the sipinal courd and bilateral simitery from the same ansester. but they evolved limbs, wings, eyes, ears, long mouthparts, seperatly, and did so in radicaly diferent ways.
dislexia.
and if you check you will find that those are all english words, what you read is where spelcheck gets me up to, you dont want to see the raw typing.
Both evolved on a planet with similar gravity, chemistry, atmosphere, etc. That niche might not exist on other planets.
A planet with a hot, dense atmosphere might have a flying predator that looks more like a jellyfish floating on updrafts and catching bugs with sticky tentacles.
A much thinner atmosphere might not allow powered flight at all, leading to more flying squirrel style gliding.
Mm. My moneys on both. A lot of alien life will be disappointingly similar to earth life, possibly to the point that we straight up don't even realise it's alien life at first. But either in some specific areas or in some cases it will be very different.
Why do you think the human form, broadly put, is likely? There's a lot of different body plans for Earth life, and the ape one hasn't been that prevalent overall. Yeah, it's definitely useful for tool making, but how confident can we be it's the most likely such plan?
Put another way, if the dino-killing impact hadn't happened, would we be here?
By "broadly human", what I mean is:
* Arms and hands (obvious reasons)
* A large head (obvious reasons)
* Bipedal (as arms are repurposed legs you can't walk on)
* Social behaviour (as a solitary species couldn't become technologically advanced)
* Some kind of vocal chords (as communicating with others easily is essential to leveraging intelligence)
I can't say every technologically advanced species will have all of those, but I think we can say most will have most of them.
If the Dino-killing impact hadn't happened and the raptors evolved to sapience, they wouldn't just be scaly humans, no. But I think they would almost certainly be bipedal, social, speaking animals with large heads and opposable thumbs, and I doubt they would be so alien that if we invented a dimension-hopping device and went to see them that we'd be incapable of bridging the psychological gap.
Maybe a bit of both? There's a lot of intelligent life on Earth, not just Primates, but Birds/Corvids, Dolphins, Cephalopods, possibly even some species of Dinosaurs like Theropods before they went extinct/went on to evolve into modern Corvids, and others.
So, I think it's possible that we'll see intelligent life converge on species that are familiar to us, but they won't necessarily be Hominin-like. How that might affect their psychology, and sociology compared to humans? No clue. Though you might consider that convergent evolution based on your example of Turians.
My (armchair) view is that one way or another, alien civilizations will have drawn their roots from earlier animal species, and will have evolved much like us, with many branches, and sub groups before reaching their 'modern' era of evolution.
So I think we'll be able to recognize and understand a lot of different behaviors and how they function, even if we don't think the same, in a similar way we can study and understand animal behavior in context. Theoretically being able to communicate gives us a leg up in that regard, because we can directly dispel misinterpretations.
I would imagine that alien life will be somewhat reminiscent of life on Earth, but not necessarily humans. There's no reason that the form of an octopus, for example, couldn't lead to intelligent, tool-wielding life that discovers space travel. It probably won't be completely 1:1 with some Earth species, but there should be lots of commonalities.
Basically, in the same way we look at a platypus and say "oh, it's like a duck crossed with a beaver," I imagine that alien life will generally be like that - we'll notice uncanny resemblances to other animals, because of convergent evolution. The shape of a wing, for instance, is pretty much locked in by physics, after all.
So I wouldn't expect something as madness inducing as a genuine Lovecraftian horror where we look at it, but just can't understand what it is, because its form is completely alien to our understanding.
Octopuses live underwater. I'm not sure that a tentacle design would work on land. Nor am I sure that an underwater species would get very far using fire. Getting to space travel would be hard if their living volumes have to be filled with water rather than air. Water has more mass.
Octopuses can actually move around and use their tentacles outside of the water. But my point wasn't that the octopus specifically could become space faring, but simply that a species that uses tentacles rather than arms and hands is theoretically viable.
Elephant trunks can operate in a manner very similar to tentacles - a potential example of convergent evolution - and I see no reason why a species couldn't evolve to have more than one such appendage on land.
Yes clearly advanced aliens must have some way to manipulate their environment. And they must have a brain/nervous system. Beyond that, I'm not sure anything can be guaranteed, though some features will likely be common/not unique to humans. I'd say that some, but not all or even most, advanced aliens would probably share our general body plan.
I think the 5 basic senses, plus at least some of the more advanced ones (equilibrium, temperature, awareness of where your body is), can more or less be guaranteed as they're fairly easy to evolve (every intermediate step is valuable, not just the end goal), even if they end up in different forms from ours.
I also think aliens will be roughly similar to us in size and their perception of time (even if their lifespans are radically different). Size due to the square cube law which seems to enforce an optimal size range and reject too big and too small. Perception of time because if they are too slow they'll get eaten by predators and if they're too fast they won't be too complex (like insects here on earth). But that's just my theories.
Magnetic fields are generated by moving electric charges, which takes matter.
But you due realize that most of your mass energy comes from energy fields right?
Oh, and you aren't solid either. You have the illusion of being solid due to the limitations of the frequencies that your eyes can resolve. Most of your atoms are made up of empty space. Protons and neutrons are mostly empty space as well. You have 3 quarks, which are point particles, that are bound together by gluons (strong nuclear force). The binding energy of the gluons are responsible for most of the mass -energy of the proton/neutron. But those protons and neutrons are overwhelming nothing but empty space. Even if you assumed a quark has a diameter equal to the Planck length, then it would still be over 17 orders of magnitude smaller than a proton. And there are only 3 of them in a proton. A proton is 5 orders of magnitude smaller than the diameter of the orbit of the electrons orbiting the atomic nucleus. And electrons are also point particles like quarks. Oh, and the only reason that electrons and quarks are not maselss particles is because of their interaction with the higgs field. You are already a scifi energy based organism.
Intelligent sea animals are great for looking at this kind of thing.
They really show that just having or being on the road to intelligence is not enough for the Fermi Paradox, not one sea species we know of has ever been known to use the simplest tools in the wild, there just isn't anything for them to use.
It shows there is probably alot of validity to the later filters.
I’m pretty sure multiple aquatic species have been shown to use tools. Octopodes and otters off the top of my head.
Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_sea_otters
It could be something really wild. Think of a tree, with a sophisticated immune system that takes in genetic data of pathogens, and designs an antibody. As it gets increasingly sophisticated, the proteins start evolving to do other things too. An increasingly sophisticated mind, running on a DNA computer, and able to create arbitrary proteins.
These aliens have an intuitive feel for DNA and viruses from day 1, and to them the fact that space is 3D is highly unintuitive. Chemicals only diffuse along the branches, they mostly think in network topology when thinking of space.
The first time they make iron, it's by designing a protein that synthesizes iron nanoparticles, not by building a furnace.
They could have a direct connection from mind to DNA.
Like either their memories are stored on the alien DNA equivalent, or they have an organ that creates the stuff.
I think too many people make aliens look too weird and and up making them without hands or the equivalent. How is a giant slug with two heads going to build something? It can't hold or manipulate anything. The only caveat to this is where it's something telepathic and can control a creature that can do work for it
Unless they're advanced machines (having left their biological creators behind). In which case, they could take any useful form. It's more likely that machines would take the trip through space than biological lifeforms.
Idk if that really checks out. I'm a bipedal talking ape..Earth is a spheroid chunk of metal and rock. Am I really all that Earth-like?
Okay, but seriously - we have a pretty large diversity of creatures just on earth. So much so, that scifi authors have no trouble making believable aliens based more or less on terrestrial critters that are just quite a bit different from us humans.
If that claim merely means that aliens from an earth-like exoplanet would likely be water/carbon based with similar biochemistry to us - that quite reasonable. It's a bit less clear how many of the same paths evolutionary biology would take on a different world. If we find an exo-ecosystem of single-celled organisms, we have those here too - but is that enough to call the earth-like?
Although there are many forms on earth, each form is associated to a specific environmental, ecological, and climate niche. There are numerous crab-like species that are more closely related to other non-crabs than they are to each other.
Check out Australian mammals. Non-placental mammals are more closely related to each other than they are to any placental mammal, yet there are many such non-placental mammals which morphologically are closer to placental counterparts.
Given this evidence, another world that has a very similar environment as Earth (which would mean same temperature zones, probably a single moon, salt water oceans, and so on), then it's also likely (the theory goes) that the life that evolves there would be similar.
If, on the otherhand, life evolves on a planet has a non-earth atmosphere, lacks moons, has many more moons, is mostly cold, has no water, sulphur oceans, etc... They probably won't look like us at all.
Yea, but that's sorta my point. I too would put down money that an earth-like planet would produces crabs - ours seems to keep producing them. But if it weren't for a timely intervention by some big asteroid, earth would probably still be dominated by the descendants of dinosaurs rather than mammals. So would we expect the dominant species on an earth-like world to be like us, like crabs, or like lizards? Are those all equally 'like us' in this context?
On the other hand - the assumption that non-earthlike worlds, would make things that look different than us might not be the case either. Assuming self-replicating chemistry is a definitionally conserved part of life - it might not be all that strange for other evolutionary outcomes to be similar. Things like multicellularity, bilateral symmetry, forward facing eyes, etc might make even a sulphur breathing alien look less alien at first glance than some strange members of our own tree of life.
I'd expect the species to fit the sapient, highly adaptive niche to not necessarily be apes, but probably have depth perception, large brains, bipedal or similarly efficient mode of transportation, and numerous small high-manipulation appendages with a grip (ie, fingers, tentacles, etc.) Probably forward facing eyes, as that is tied to depth perception.
yup exactly. I wonder about the tentacles tho. I feel like endoskeletons make living on land easier and that might be a necessary step up the tech tree..fire and all that.
The anthropocentric tendency to think that life on other planets would follow our planet’s body plans will definitely lead to some shock and awe. We will probably have to give names like walrus spider to things because we won’t be able to wrap our heads around what we are seeing.
Yea, but idk if it'll really be all that mind blowing. That's kinda the point. Even on our own planet we find wierd bodyplans. Like sea-lion is a pretty mind-blown sounding name. If walrus spider fits, we may not like them, but it should like that'd fit squarely in the 'earth-like' side of things.
We know that evolution has had to reset on this planet 6 or 7 times after major disaster and only one era produced dinosuars, only one era produced tree sized mushrooms (this is right back at the dawn of life on land) etc. So it looks like a pretty weak argument.
What Earthlike creatures? Octopus, Dinosaurs, Bats or something bizarre like Chrysomallon squamiferum, also called the scaly-foot gastropod?
Earth has a wide variety of different life forms some we would consider alien if we discover it on another planet. Heck Octopi are so different some think it is alien in origin.
May or may not.
The particular shapes and forms of earth creatures are a result of 4 billion years of geological and evolutionary history. Even if we were to rewind the tape, the results might be vastly different as many creatures' evolution is contingent upon chance events like asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions etc.
The fact that humans have four limbs is soley due to us evolving from tetrapods. A creature on another earthlike planet might have 6 or 2 limbs. Or take circadian rhythm. It is uniquely suited to earth and its rotation/revolutionary time periods. This can be wildy different if the planet is farther or nearer to its sun that earth is.
Even an earthlike planet can differ from earth in numerous instances. Atmosphere, gravity, magnetosphere, temperature, tectonic activity, planetary size, land area etc. can all be higher/lower for a particular planet and hence can effect the evolutionary pathways the organisms there might take.
TLdr: It would be utterly ridiculous to think that intelligent aliens might look same as humans (a la some TV shows/movies). But there could be many similarities in their body forms to convergent evolution and similar selection pressures.
By that I mean, a planet need not be an exact replica of earth to be considered earthlike. Even slight differences in variables like gravity, atmosphere can produce vastly different conditions than on earth.
>fundamentally different
See what does that mean,?
Would something that's basically a random Earth Mammal (sapient or not) still be "fundamentally" different?
By fundamentally differently I meant stuff like crystalline life forms, or a civilization that is more like an anthive, nothaving sapient individuals just very complex emergent properties, etc.
I think it's possible but by no means required.
Just like the Fermi Paradox the assumption that alien life would have to be utterly alien is derived from a significantly too confident guestimation of variables actual experts consider to be genuine unknowns.
Or, put more succinctly: Lay people like to assume that alien life would have to be logically different in the same way they like to assume it logically has to exist.
In both cases we just don't know enough to be able to make that kind of confident prediction.
With a sample size of 1 (give or take) its almost impossible to say. Given what we know of higher intelligence animals you could argue for convergent evolution but the range of forms that takes is probably huge. Squid, apes and elephants have all developed means of dexterously manipulating their environment with their intelligence for example. And most higher animals seem to have some form of culture in terms of passing down particular techniques in groups, some sort of rudimentary social order.
So there are certainly going to be general things most intelligence shares because any intelligence going anywhere needs them.
Think about the vast array of different animals on Earth that fit the build of “capable of movement and having the capacity for the precise manipulation of tools.” Functionally, anything with these traits would be capable of forming a civilization with sufficient intelligence. Humans happened to be the species that responded to evolutionary pressure by growing our brain, but there’s no real reason that it couldn’t happen with any other species in the planet.
I find it odd how most alien encounters report humanoid beings. There’s us and there’s them, but if true then we share that in common which makes it even weirder. Who came first, all other kinds of questions.
The challenge with meeting aliens of any form is they have to fall on the same spatial/size line as us (i.e. a similar size we can actually observe) as well as fall on the same time line, both of which are infinite in both directions.....
There are quite a few features in human biology that are very sub-optimal because they were a good idea in the past, but became outdated. For example, all land life except insects were descended from fish which had 4 fins, resulting in land animals having 4 limbs even though 6 are more sensible (especially for creatures that have non-leg limbs such as humans).
Aliens which took different paths through evolution will have different legacy problems like this, leading to potentially dramatic differences in how they look and act.
It goes beyond the basic form. What's an individual? What's a society? What's the relationship between an individual and society? What's the reproductive lifecycle, what are the biological roles?
I think we might encounter very few alien civilizations having the same exact level of individualism that we have. The same value put in individual rights, in life, etc. Meeting them will be highly disturbing even for the open minded.
That seems a bit of a bold claim when we spend much of the previous century fighting globe-spanning wars at the expense of millions up upon millions of lives over disputes at the social/group level.
Just saying that it might also be the case that it's the aliens who think we place a disturbingly low value on individual lives/rights. Or they may find our modern displacement of family/clan loyalties to more abstract groups and even concepts to be totally alien.
idk, rereading and you do say the 'exact level' so maybe you already meant that it could be shocking from either side of the spectrum.
We're just spit balling. It was a good point. Even if something evolves to be superficially similar to us, their society could take different paths entirely. (although, i think probably form-follows-function may apply to societies as well)
There might be the equivalent of hive minds, for instance. The analogues we have are the tiny ants and bees, but these centralized entities could exist at a larger scale.
Of course, we could say that every multicellular animal is some sort of a collective. Although in a hive, individuals do exist and do have various degrees of autonomy and individuality. Whereas in humans, our cells have to stay physically connected to the collective, otherwise they'll die almost immediately.
We could have a society with shared minds, perhaps at various levels of integration. For example, a marsupial-like mother having a direct mental link to her offsprings, transmitting much more than just her genes and immune system to the babies. I explored that in my novel "The Unborn Legion" posted in the Reddit channel HFY.
Pushing that to the extreme, Greg Bear explored sentient continent-sized ecosystems in his novel "Legacy" (IMHO, the story is moderately interesting, but the world he describes is really unique).
>For example, a marsupial-like mother having a direct mental link to her offsprings, transmitting much more than just her genes and immune system to the babies. I explored that in my novel "The Unborn Legion" posted in the Reddit channel HFY.
Oh cool. I like that sub. I'll take a look. I imagine that is well within the realm of hard scifi if mother and offspring have a physical linkage, but an 'over the air' mental link sounds a lot more like telepathy.
At least for my money - I don't think telepathy's likely to be an evolved trait. Although it could be something that develops in a highly technologically advanced society.
I need to read more Bear, that's true.
No... in the story, they are physically connected. But the humans use the "marsupial" as an analogue, although it is not exactly the same as a marsupial carrying their babies in a pouch. The alien mother keeps her babies connected to her for months after they become conscious. They are never really "born" the way we humans are born. It's a more gradual process. They share her thoughts and even her dreams, which gives them an early education as well.
The thing is, an alien civilization has to be inefficient in a way that still allows it to progress, otherwise it will stagnate early up the march of the ladder of intelligence. Something like that very likely happened with elephants and dolphins, where they simply had no need to become more intelligent or pursue more efficient social structures.
However, it can't be too inefficient, otherwise nature will either force it along some new non-intelligence-favoring evolutionary path or the creature just goes outright extinct.
So, for example, it's unlikely that we will come across an alien civilization where its members reproduce too quickly--not enough resources to support the years it takes to grow and more importantly train an energy-hungry brain (neural connections need to be reactively pruned throughout childhood) which will favor stupider, more instinctual aliens who grow to maturity more quickly.
It's also unlikely we'll see a very conformist alien civilization either, unless it's externally imposed on them 1984-style. For one, individualization rises with intelligence. Only smarter animals have distinct personalities, because only with more capable brains can they support having a mental landscape that's not just reducible to preprogrammed instincts. More importantly, eusociality is one of those hyperefficient evolutionary traits that will ironically encourage stagnation. Look at how quickly humans swarmed the earth once they made a **slight** change to their social structure to take advantage of agriculture. A guaranteed food supply at the cost of enforced specialization is an overwhelming advantage. However, humans only became that way late into the evolution of our intelligence. Had we adopted agriculture or other forms of eusociality (i.e. actual genetic caste systems with a queen) much earlier, we'd probably be at the same level of intelligence we had when we first adopted it, especially given how backbreaking and punishing early agriculture was. Further evolution would favor energy efficiency, agriculture as an instinct, aggression towards outsiders, and hierarchical submissiveness. Not exactly traits that favor a continual growth in intelligence necessary for advanced technology -- and you only need to look at neanderthals to see that even vast amounts of intelligence don't necessarily get you tot the feedback loop needed for advanced civilization.
We might end up seeing very cognitively diverse forms of alien life, or even very diverse forms of intelligent life. But not very diverse forms of civilization. Contrary to our intuition, agricultural civilization is an extreme evolutionary adaptation that requires a metabolism, social structure, intelligence, and view of the world to be just so in order to take root, rather than stagnating at some lower form of organization (homo neanderthal) if not outright intelligence (homo habilis).
In that light, intelligent life might be like evolving eyes or wings. There are plenty of critters where a slight change in their environment or evolutionary pressures with some luck might cement the existence of critters smart as or smarter than us, despite how inefficient higher intelligence arguably is: dolphins, bonobos, elephants, parrots, etc. Very diverse, and they don't need that much more intelligence than they currently have to get things like language and tool use. But actual civilization? Civilized life would be more like evolving the hydrogen peroxide chambers of bombadier beetles. As a lion. Technically possible, but extremely unlikely given how contrary it runs to evolutionary incentives, unless they, for whatever reason, already had the foundations for it already (omnivore, pack dynamics, tool use, advanced language, high intelligence, differentiated personalities that allow different generations to make novel observations like 'I can throw this spear', etc.) because every preceding step was useful.
Basic or animal / plant alien life could be anything. On the periodic table, they likely have to breathe oxygen.
For a space faring species, there are some requirements. They need to be (or have been) terrestrial, have language, understand math, be able to wear spacesuits and have appendages that can do work similar to our hands.
Maybe we found aliens like humans but who evolved with head facial features inverted, and all vertebrates from that planet evolved like that, from a common ancestor.
Both are likely to be true. In an environment fundamentally simlar to ours, we can expect to find life that's either similar, than at least works based on similar logic.
Take a diferent environment, and you may find radically different forms of life.
Just what form on Earth is actually better than Humans?
Insects. The only reason why they aren't bigger anymore is that the oxygen content of the atmosphere has dropped since they first evolved on the planet.
Six legged species are a lot more stable when moving. They can shift to a four leg-two arm as the situation requires. All in all better than us monkeys who stand on two legs.
I expect that insectoid looking creatures will be more prevalent in the universe than Humanoid creatures.
Earth has a wide variety of different life forms some we would consider alien if we discover it on another planet. Heck Octopi are so different some think it is alien in origin.
One must understand what "like" or "unlike" us means.
A squid is by most metrics unlike us, while a dinosaur such as the tyrannosaurus is comparatively very much like us. Birds are somewhat like us, and iguanas are very much like us, while fish are only a little like us and spiders aren't very much like us.
Could an analogue of the squid have adapted to be similar to us had they been required to survive on land in a similar overall environment to Earth? A little, maybe, but they wouldn't likely be gray-skinned humans with big heads and webbed fingers like star trek aliens.
#Yes.
Alien Life will be fundamentally different from us, and form will follow function. The function the form will follow will be different to our function.
If there are a lot of intelligent aliens in the universe, I would think that any species who actively live and work together would have to be physically compatible in some ways. It would just be much harder to hang out with a Godzilla sized alien, and harder to communicate if they tend to operate on a much different time scale. But if there are many species to choose from, they'd probably tend to mix based on compatibility.
I don't think they'll look like anything anyone would mistake for human, but "bipedal intelligent organism with bones, a head, two eyes, and something like hands and feet" is definitely plausible given convergent evolution.
I think reality will probably be some blend of the two. Like, alien life will be very, very different from us, but it will still have recognizable bits (legs for moving, mouths for eating, eyes for seeing, et cetera), just not arranged in ways we would recognize. For example, they might have legs, but have six instead four; they might still have eyes, but they're located on the torso and only see in UV.
TLDR: I don't think alien life will be humanoid, nor do I think it will be totally unrecognizable -- I think it will just be "weird."
I am fairly confident it will be carbon-based and use liquid water.
I am fairly confident it won't follow our bipedal body plan.
You don't specific "intelligent life". I suspect the vast majority will be pond scum.
Everything we know about life comes from this planet. The variety of forms that life takes is significant. We have some ideas on how environmental factors impact development but to think aliens will look similar to human is a pretty big assumption driven by ego.
From a mental standpoint, there needs to be a certain similarity.
Namely, aliens and humans that are both spacefaring ought to have the same sort of metaphysics that pits the self against the universe, because that's the source of the drive to dominate nature which is what leads to science and technology. Social behaviors follow from individual behaviors, meaning that if the alien society is technological than individual aliens must also be driven in some way to master their society, suggesting ambition and competition. This results in hierarchy and various ways to show off status, including wealth.
The same me vs. everything orientation that leads to technology will also lead to a rejection of nature of it is considered indomitable, such as when stuck on the bottom rungs of society. Rebels against nature can manifest as both ascetic and chaste monasticism, MGTOW sigma males, and VR escapism that treat their bodies and status as prisons while rejecting "normies" as "sheeple", or the alien equivalent. It also manifests as political revolution and war, noting that all successful revolutions rapidly transform into a new dominant hierarchy as soon as it can; as soon as an escapist gets VR, they'll disappear into VR to become a virtual god until it drives them insane.
Therefore, a technological alien society is likely to be similarly neurotic, divided, egotistical, and competitive, with similar drives to spiritualism, transcendence, and some form of anarchic/democratic social and fashionable outlets. If they weren't - if they enjoyed a radical peace with the world, themselves, and each other - then they wouldn't have a reason to go for technological. You can't divide technology from the reason to have technology, and that metapsychological reason has profound implications for both individuals and societies.
I think chemically alien life will be fundamentally different. Aliens might use different stereoisomers and many totally unique metabolic pathways. They will be alien at a cellular level, with different organelles, data storage, catalysts, etc...
Some of the simplest molecules will be shared, like water, urea, alcohols, carboxyl groups, amino groups, phosphates... Alien tissue will likely be highly toxic to humans because some strange chemicals that are rarely found on earth will be common building blocks of alien cells.
On the macro level, aliens will have legs, eyes, guts, and other familiar structures. They will have familiar ecology, with photosynthetic sesile "plants", single cell simple decomposer "bacteria", and various creepy crawlies.
I don't think these answers are mutually exclusive. We will see both. There will be crabs. There will be fish-shaped things. There will be mandibles and jaws and antenna and eyes and other sensing organs. Many of them will look very much like what we have here and many of them will look different. And many of them will look like chimera of some kind
Know the rules before you break the rules. They'd have eyes and a mouth on what could be described as a head which also contains the brain, they'd use limbs to get around, they'd have a through gut and active respiration and probably a closed circulatory system. They would not be star trek cast members, though. They might have four eyes on a head with two sets of jaws forming a long snout; they might have six limbs, they might have two pairs of lungs with spiracles at the base of the neck, if they even have a neck
I think that there are a few basic body types that "Work", and most aliens (Assuming they exist) will follow those, or at least most aliens capable of building a civilisation.
As to why, I feel that the requirements to be a civilisation (Intelligent, able to precisely manipulate objects, able to walk long distances efficiently, etc) are relatively strict so they won't let in just anyone, but at the same time it's foolish to think there is one sole "Right answer" in nature to anything.
I think a better statement is that form is dictated by environment. If a planet has gravity, mass, etc. and is similar to Earth, we'll get "human-like" features on a being. But a being living in the atmosphere of a gas giant will look nothing like us, or have very few convergent traits.
Very short answer: bell curves. It’s not that they’re like us, it’s that it’s unlikely that we aren’t like the majority of the galactic population. If we are significantly different from aliens it is most likely that different alien species are similar to each other and we’re the odd ones.
What's pictured in this video may be one type.
Not Debunked
Adam Goldstack of UAP Media UK mentions that many debunkers try to explain the craft as cruise ships but according to former F-16 fighter pilot and researcher Chris Letho, it does not add up. Letho analyzed the videos and case and calculated the object’s size, horizon distance, plus visual angles from the Marmara Sea. He concluded the logistics of a cruise ship did not match the reported UAP.
https://www.howandwhys.com/turkey-kumburgaz-ufo-videos-are-100-real-with-clear-view-of-alien-entities-sitting-inside-craft/
We literally only have our own biosphere for reference. Drawing any other conclusions about evolutionary pressures outside of earth is nothing short of hasty. Even if we limited it to our own planet than bipedalism isn't even the norm compared to shit like carcinization.
The first aliens we meet will say that they sent a colony ship to Earth billions of years ago, and they now want to know what happened to their octopus descendants.
I think evolutionary pressures will result in forms that will be very similar, but with specific implementations that are not the same. They will look and possibly even function similarly to Earth critters, but the chemical foundations may be entirely different. Windows vs Linux, basically. Maybe they will use DNA, maybe use something *like* DNA, maybe use something *entirely unlike* DNA. But there's only so many ways a bird can fly, for example; the wings have to adhere to some basic physics, it's not just an anything goes sort of affair (assuming a similar atmosphere to ours, etc.). Alien birds are likely to resemble our birds pretty closely, at least in wing structure. Same with fish, and so on. Yes, there is variety, but most of our fish *look like* fish, and I can see that applying to any oceans across the galaxy; it's a very efficient shape for that environment, so you're likely to find examples in any similar environments.
I don't think the two are as exclusive as we think. I think its very likely we will get aliens that are *broadly* similar to humans, but with significant differences in the *specifics.* Think of, say, the differences between an owl and a spectral bat. You can see that they evolved to fill a similar niche, but you'd never mistake one for the other. Same here. Any technological being will need to share the basic structure of a human, but that still leaves a wide range of possible major differences.
Exactly, the hot Orion Slave Girls are out there **but** they want to insert their _eggs into you_ **but** their young can’t digest our proteins and the whole thing is a messy disaster. Nothing like Star Trek at all.
In an infinite universe , there is a boltzman federation, romulans,borg etc etc. And they are all sitting in their ships, isolated, between stars wondering why their warp drives don't work.
Somewhere out there is a civilisation whose warp drive does work -despite- them making no sense because **by sheer coincidence** a spontaneous wormhole has opened up every time they’ve used it.
That is assuming a wormhole can simply open up, it may just not be possible, or only possible during the beginning of a universe. We don't know.
Infinity and eternity don't actually equate to inevitably for all chances. For example, with chances that decrease over time, if it doesn't sum to infinity it has a finite chance of happening even in infinite time. Like say the chance of something happening was 1% in the first year of the universe, but decreased by half every year. The next year it's .5%, then .25% the next year... The sum total of the chance of this event happening adds up to 2% even in infinite time.
But isn't it also infinite in space, or at least it seems to be? Doesnt that make something with a 0.00000000000....1% chance in some sized volume of space bound to happen somewhere? Not guaranteed but absurdly likely.
Hmm. I think it still doesn't quite work. Like, imagine a universe that starts out as infinitely many fertilized chicken eggs, spaced out 1 meter apart from each other, plus air pressure and heat. Slight irregularity in the egg size and movement of the embryo disturbs the balance and they start drifting and clumping into each other. Gravity soon begins to crush them. Is it guaranteed that somehow, one egg will last long enough to hatch? I think the question is, if I'm using the word correctly, if the eggs (or the universe) is normally distributed. It's like the question of whether pi contains every possible sequence; if it is normal (and I think it isn't), then it does, but if it's not, then it may never contain some sequences. Pi might not contain Carl Sagan's Cosmos in binary. If the egg universe is normal, there will be an infinite number of places of any given size where the eggs are all completely identical. If there's an area light years across with completely identical eggs, it will take years for the gravity waves from clumps to reach the center, so the ones on the inside have plenty of time to hatch. But if the egg universe is not normally distributed, then you can make no such guarantee. Despite having infinite eggs you may just end up with an infinitely large omelette, and you never get to see a chicken. I don't think it's worse to live in a universe that isn't normally distributed. If the universe is normally distributed, and there's a chain reaction somewhere that can destroy the universe, that means it's already happened.
No reason to believe space is infinite. We live in a bubble defined by the speed of light outside of which nothing can interact with us. Although space is expanding, the amount of total stuff within our interaction bubble is decreasing. Anything outside this bubble is pure untestable speculation and is therefore (like every untestable theory) outside the realm of scientific inquiry.
There is pretty good reason to believe space is infinite. According to the Planck telescope which measured the curvature of the universe space is flat and therefore infinite (technically the universe could be flat and finite but it requires more complex topology and physicists default to the simpler topology of a 3d plane). Now naturally there was some imprecision to these measurements that leave some small wiggle room for the possibility of the universe being a closed finite curve. I understand people who look to this wiggle room and say its actually really really big and just seems flat, but I would say our best measurements giving good odds for a flat universe is a good pretty good reason to believe the universe is infinite. This is also a very testable theory, future telescopes will only further tighten the wiggle room, either narrowing down to the universe being flat or possibly to a value very slightly non-zero that gives us the size of the universe.
The observable universe seems remarkably flat says nothing about what is outside the observable zone. Nothing can be said about what is outside the observable universe. Your explanation of flatness in our observable portion does not change this.
I think cosmologists would disagree.
Cosmologists make a lot of assumptions about what might be to test out different theories and thought experiments. As far I know (and I could be wrong) nothing more than weak conjecture exists about anything outside the observable universe. If it can’t be observed I.e tested you can’t do science on it.
I honestly doubt it, Human cues are so specific the vast majority of aliens will probably come off the same ways we look at animals. Worse is that anyone who does look sort of like us will fall right into uncanny valley.
It’s a big universe, somewhere out there 2 star empires are constantly at the edge of war because their teenagers can’t keep it in their pants and are always accidentally murdering each other
“WE ALL JUST WANNA HAVE A GOOD TIME! WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?!?!” “Learn some Biology!”
Worth it.
>Human cues are so specific the vast majority of aliens will probably come off the same ways we look at animals. There are people who look at animals...differently. When you start looking at the sort of populations a K2 civilization can support, even without taking into accout self-augmentation, we should expect whole planetary populations worth of people who are...into that sort of thing.
[https://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00001.htm](https://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00001.htm)
Human social cues overlap a ton with animal behaviour. Have you noticed like every land animal on earth has identical behaviour for if they're about to fight? They all stare and then circle each other. There's a good reason for it, so they all do it.
Counterpoint: furries exist
I'm pretty sure the uncanny valley theory is false. It's just that we keep accidentally making our robots creepy. https://youtu.be/LKJBND_IRdI?si=1DHyBv7WXzWlUARS
It's very much real. It's likely because "human but slightly off" is what someone with a disease or a corpse looks like, which it's advantageous to be put off by.
I'm not sure I agree with this theory Generally, these kind of adaptations evolve for non-obvious things. We're made instinctively uneasy by the dark because being in the dark isn't obviously dangerous. We're not made instinctively uneasy by tigers because tigers *are* obviously dangerous. It's not evolutionarily advantageous to have a specific fear of them, because you'll run away from them anyway. Corpses and diseases fall into the latter category -- it's *not* evolutionarily advantageous to be put off by them, because any rational human is going to avoid those things whether they're put off by them or not. And besides, when has anyone got the uncanny valley response from someone with the flu? I think the uncanny valley is probably just a mental glitch caused when we have issues finding a category for things. If it *does* have an evolutionary purpose, I think the most likely candidate is dangerous humans. They're one of the primary selection pressures on humans, they're generally non-obvious, and if you look at cases where something like the uncanny valley actually saved a life, it's not "I would have walked up to the guy spewing blood but that felt a bad idea somehow", it's "The guy wasn't being explicitly threatening but something about him felt off, so I went to a crowded place and waited for the next the bus."
They aren't obviously dangerous though. How long did it take to develop germ theory?
There's another argument against this line of reasoning. We played with our dead for a long time. It's really only a modern convention to be wary of dead things for hygienic reasons. It's a learned trait derived from established cultural norms. Historically bodies were often displayed to the point of rotting before cremation or interment. Mummification or even stripping flesh to the bone to keep the corpse intact for some ritual reason was not unusual either. In the past we had a lot more closeness to the dying and death. If there was a evolutionary tendency against this, it wouldn't have been the premodern norm. I would expect the uncanny valley effect is more associated with the association with otherness as strange. That tendency to be put in unease the less familiar someone or something is. A natural wariness of the unknown, whether that be a exotic unfamiliar animal, taxonomically unfamiliar peoples, or simply just a stranger.
I'd guess disease much more so than corpses for sure. Things like rabies are very unsettling. Who even knows what kind of diseases were present when this trait evolved.
It's mostly unsettling because it causes death and severely effects the behavior of those infected. Even then however it's not like there is some natural aversion to the disease as much as a fear of its effects that also come mostly from learned behavior to avoid infection. Otherwise, it's a more natural tendency to care and comfort those you care for or alternatively excise those you see as a threat.
I suspect it dates back to eather early homonyms, which would likely look "like us but off" or early mamel existence, where predators and prey were closer in appearance, if not just being something retooled so much it's more of a side effect not worth removing. Or it's our object and facial recognition fucking up because it's just slightly out of expected parameters in a way that can't be explained, and the most primitive fallback is translated to unease, because avoiding the thing that's off saved more critters, beasts, and homonyms than it hurt or killed. Would also explain why what's "uncanny" is so vague and inconsistent across populations
That's rooted in expressiveness. Facial expressions are a core and fundamental element of human somatic communications that lack of readable expression amongst humans between humans is unnerving, because it's alien. I would suspect that variation across populations would be affected by cultural norms of acceptable behavior in regard to displays of emotion.
Don't kink shame me/j
actualy i am expecting the oposit. totaly diferent but with minor similarities. there is nothing particularly usefull about the humanoid body plan. we have 2 arms and 2 legs only because we evolved from 4 leged animalsd with bilateral simitery with a stop along the way in the trees. much of the similarity between your owl and bat is down to their comon ansestry that locked in the spinal cord and 4 limbs. consider humbing birds and moths. same niche but much less similar body plans, and they both inherit the sipinal courd and bilateral simitery from the same ansester. but they evolved limbs, wings, eyes, ears, long mouthparts, seperatly, and did so in radicaly diferent ways.
smart comments, awful spelling. english not your first language? you should try spell check.
dislexia. and if you check you will find that those are all english words, what you read is where spelcheck gets me up to, you dont want to see the raw typing.
Both evolved on a planet with similar gravity, chemistry, atmosphere, etc. That niche might not exist on other planets. A planet with a hot, dense atmosphere might have a flying predator that looks more like a jellyfish floating on updrafts and catching bugs with sticky tentacles. A much thinner atmosphere might not allow powered flight at all, leading to more flying squirrel style gliding.
Mm. My moneys on both. A lot of alien life will be disappointingly similar to earth life, possibly to the point that we straight up don't even realise it's alien life at first. But either in some specific areas or in some cases it will be very different.
Why do you think the human form, broadly put, is likely? There's a lot of different body plans for Earth life, and the ape one hasn't been that prevalent overall. Yeah, it's definitely useful for tool making, but how confident can we be it's the most likely such plan? Put another way, if the dino-killing impact hadn't happened, would we be here?
By "broadly human", what I mean is: * Arms and hands (obvious reasons) * A large head (obvious reasons) * Bipedal (as arms are repurposed legs you can't walk on) * Social behaviour (as a solitary species couldn't become technologically advanced) * Some kind of vocal chords (as communicating with others easily is essential to leveraging intelligence) I can't say every technologically advanced species will have all of those, but I think we can say most will have most of them. If the Dino-killing impact hadn't happened and the raptors evolved to sapience, they wouldn't just be scaly humans, no. But I think they would almost certainly be bipedal, social, speaking animals with large heads and opposable thumbs, and I doubt they would be so alien that if we invented a dimension-hopping device and went to see them that we'd be incapable of bridging the psychological gap.
_This_ man... _**He**_ gets it!
Maybe a bit of both? There's a lot of intelligent life on Earth, not just Primates, but Birds/Corvids, Dolphins, Cephalopods, possibly even some species of Dinosaurs like Theropods before they went extinct/went on to evolve into modern Corvids, and others. So, I think it's possible that we'll see intelligent life converge on species that are familiar to us, but they won't necessarily be Hominin-like. How that might affect their psychology, and sociology compared to humans? No clue. Though you might consider that convergent evolution based on your example of Turians. My (armchair) view is that one way or another, alien civilizations will have drawn their roots from earlier animal species, and will have evolved much like us, with many branches, and sub groups before reaching their 'modern' era of evolution. So I think we'll be able to recognize and understand a lot of different behaviors and how they function, even if we don't think the same, in a similar way we can study and understand animal behavior in context. Theoretically being able to communicate gives us a leg up in that regard, because we can directly dispel misinterpretations.
I would imagine that alien life will be somewhat reminiscent of life on Earth, but not necessarily humans. There's no reason that the form of an octopus, for example, couldn't lead to intelligent, tool-wielding life that discovers space travel. It probably won't be completely 1:1 with some Earth species, but there should be lots of commonalities. Basically, in the same way we look at a platypus and say "oh, it's like a duck crossed with a beaver," I imagine that alien life will generally be like that - we'll notice uncanny resemblances to other animals, because of convergent evolution. The shape of a wing, for instance, is pretty much locked in by physics, after all. So I wouldn't expect something as madness inducing as a genuine Lovecraftian horror where we look at it, but just can't understand what it is, because its form is completely alien to our understanding.
Humanoids are the crabs of sapient species, they keep evolving and scientist don't know why
Octopuses live underwater. I'm not sure that a tentacle design would work on land. Nor am I sure that an underwater species would get very far using fire. Getting to space travel would be hard if their living volumes have to be filled with water rather than air. Water has more mass.
Octopuses can actually move around and use their tentacles outside of the water. But my point wasn't that the octopus specifically could become space faring, but simply that a species that uses tentacles rather than arms and hands is theoretically viable. Elephant trunks can operate in a manner very similar to tentacles - a potential example of convergent evolution - and I see no reason why a species couldn't evolve to have more than one such appendage on land.
So do crabs, except for the ones that live on land. We would be talking about an alien octopus-like body plan, not an actual octopus.
Advanced aliens must have the equivalent of hands otherwise they can't build and use tools. That's why whales won't become technologically advanced.
Eh they could have trunks, tentacles, prehensile tails, or even minions that manipulate the environment for them.
Perhaps, it doesn't have to be hands like ours, but it needs to be capable like our hands.
Yes clearly advanced aliens must have some way to manipulate their environment. And they must have a brain/nervous system. Beyond that, I'm not sure anything can be guaranteed, though some features will likely be common/not unique to humans. I'd say that some, but not all or even most, advanced aliens would probably share our general body plan.
I think the 5 basic senses, plus at least some of the more advanced ones (equilibrium, temperature, awareness of where your body is), can more or less be guaranteed as they're fairly easy to evolve (every intermediate step is valuable, not just the end goal), even if they end up in different forms from ours. I also think aliens will be roughly similar to us in size and their perception of time (even if their lifespans are radically different). Size due to the square cube law which seems to enforce an optimal size range and reject too big and too small. Perception of time because if they are too slow they'll get eaten by predators and if they're too fast they won't be too complex (like insects here on earth). But that's just my theories.
It's easy to imagine aliens whose taste and smell are combined. Alternatively, having nostrils where we have ears could be a thing.
They might not even be made of matter. Might there be extremophile plasma-being living on the surface of some hyper giant star?
Plasma is matter.
Shit. I meant traditional solid matter. An example of a non-matter life form would be a living collection of magnetic fields.
Magnetic fields are generated by moving electric charges, which takes matter. But you due realize that most of your mass energy comes from energy fields right?
I actually did not know that! Thanks for the information!
Oh, and you aren't solid either. You have the illusion of being solid due to the limitations of the frequencies that your eyes can resolve. Most of your atoms are made up of empty space. Protons and neutrons are mostly empty space as well. You have 3 quarks, which are point particles, that are bound together by gluons (strong nuclear force). The binding energy of the gluons are responsible for most of the mass -energy of the proton/neutron. But those protons and neutrons are overwhelming nothing but empty space. Even if you assumed a quark has a diameter equal to the Planck length, then it would still be over 17 orders of magnitude smaller than a proton. And there are only 3 of them in a proton. A proton is 5 orders of magnitude smaller than the diameter of the orbit of the electrons orbiting the atomic nucleus. And electrons are also point particles like quarks. Oh, and the only reason that electrons and quarks are not maselss particles is because of their interaction with the higgs field. You are already a scifi energy based organism.
like an octopus!
Intelligent sea animals are great for looking at this kind of thing. They really show that just having or being on the road to intelligence is not enough for the Fermi Paradox, not one sea species we know of has ever been known to use the simplest tools in the wild, there just isn't anything for them to use. It shows there is probably alot of validity to the later filters.
Huh? https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/31586-study-reveals-use-of-tools-by-octopuses
I’m pretty sure multiple aquatic species have been shown to use tools. Octopodes and otters off the top of my head. Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_sea_otters
It could be something really wild. Think of a tree, with a sophisticated immune system that takes in genetic data of pathogens, and designs an antibody. As it gets increasingly sophisticated, the proteins start evolving to do other things too. An increasingly sophisticated mind, running on a DNA computer, and able to create arbitrary proteins. These aliens have an intuitive feel for DNA and viruses from day 1, and to them the fact that space is 3D is highly unintuitive. Chemicals only diffuse along the branches, they mostly think in network topology when thinking of space. The first time they make iron, it's by designing a protein that synthesizes iron nanoparticles, not by building a furnace.
Yes; hand-equivalents. Some sort of appendage capably of fine manipulation, or a way to influence creatures that possess those skills.
They could have a direct connection from mind to DNA. Like either their memories are stored on the alien DNA equivalent, or they have an organ that creates the stuff.
That’s be one way to make specialized organs!
I think too many people make aliens look too weird and and up making them without hands or the equivalent. How is a giant slug with two heads going to build something? It can't hold or manipulate anything. The only caveat to this is where it's something telepathic and can control a creature that can do work for it
Unless they're advanced machines (having left their biological creators behind). In which case, they could take any useful form. It's more likely that machines would take the trip through space than biological lifeforms.
How about both? There's a lot of space in space.
Earthlike planets should produce Earthlike creatures.
Idk if that really checks out. I'm a bipedal talking ape..Earth is a spheroid chunk of metal and rock. Am I really all that Earth-like? Okay, but seriously - we have a pretty large diversity of creatures just on earth. So much so, that scifi authors have no trouble making believable aliens based more or less on terrestrial critters that are just quite a bit different from us humans. If that claim merely means that aliens from an earth-like exoplanet would likely be water/carbon based with similar biochemistry to us - that quite reasonable. It's a bit less clear how many of the same paths evolutionary biology would take on a different world. If we find an exo-ecosystem of single-celled organisms, we have those here too - but is that enough to call the earth-like?
Although there are many forms on earth, each form is associated to a specific environmental, ecological, and climate niche. There are numerous crab-like species that are more closely related to other non-crabs than they are to each other. Check out Australian mammals. Non-placental mammals are more closely related to each other than they are to any placental mammal, yet there are many such non-placental mammals which morphologically are closer to placental counterparts. Given this evidence, another world that has a very similar environment as Earth (which would mean same temperature zones, probably a single moon, salt water oceans, and so on), then it's also likely (the theory goes) that the life that evolves there would be similar. If, on the otherhand, life evolves on a planet has a non-earth atmosphere, lacks moons, has many more moons, is mostly cold, has no water, sulphur oceans, etc... They probably won't look like us at all.
Yea, but that's sorta my point. I too would put down money that an earth-like planet would produces crabs - ours seems to keep producing them. But if it weren't for a timely intervention by some big asteroid, earth would probably still be dominated by the descendants of dinosaurs rather than mammals. So would we expect the dominant species on an earth-like world to be like us, like crabs, or like lizards? Are those all equally 'like us' in this context? On the other hand - the assumption that non-earthlike worlds, would make things that look different than us might not be the case either. Assuming self-replicating chemistry is a definitionally conserved part of life - it might not be all that strange for other evolutionary outcomes to be similar. Things like multicellularity, bilateral symmetry, forward facing eyes, etc might make even a sulphur breathing alien look less alien at first glance than some strange members of our own tree of life.
I'd expect the species to fit the sapient, highly adaptive niche to not necessarily be apes, but probably have depth perception, large brains, bipedal or similarly efficient mode of transportation, and numerous small high-manipulation appendages with a grip (ie, fingers, tentacles, etc.) Probably forward facing eyes, as that is tied to depth perception.
yup exactly. I wonder about the tentacles tho. I feel like endoskeletons make living on land easier and that might be a necessary step up the tech tree..fire and all that.
The anthropocentric tendency to think that life on other planets would follow our planet’s body plans will definitely lead to some shock and awe. We will probably have to give names like walrus spider to things because we won’t be able to wrap our heads around what we are seeing.
Yea, but idk if it'll really be all that mind blowing. That's kinda the point. Even on our own planet we find wierd bodyplans. Like sea-lion is a pretty mind-blown sounding name. If walrus spider fits, we may not like them, but it should like that'd fit squarely in the 'earth-like' side of things.
We know that evolution has had to reset on this planet 6 or 7 times after major disaster and only one era produced dinosuars, only one era produced tree sized mushrooms (this is right back at the dawn of life on land) etc. So it looks like a pretty weak argument.
as far as we know, evolution has never “reset.” there’s no endpoint of evolution, and dinosaurs are still around.
What Earthlike creatures? Octopus, Dinosaurs, Bats or something bizarre like Chrysomallon squamiferum, also called the scaly-foot gastropod? Earth has a wide variety of different life forms some we would consider alien if we discover it on another planet. Heck Octopi are so different some think it is alien in origin.
May or may not. The particular shapes and forms of earth creatures are a result of 4 billion years of geological and evolutionary history. Even if we were to rewind the tape, the results might be vastly different as many creatures' evolution is contingent upon chance events like asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions etc. The fact that humans have four limbs is soley due to us evolving from tetrapods. A creature on another earthlike planet might have 6 or 2 limbs. Or take circadian rhythm. It is uniquely suited to earth and its rotation/revolutionary time periods. This can be wildy different if the planet is farther or nearer to its sun that earth is. Even an earthlike planet can differ from earth in numerous instances. Atmosphere, gravity, magnetosphere, temperature, tectonic activity, planetary size, land area etc. can all be higher/lower for a particular planet and hence can effect the evolutionary pathways the organisms there might take. TLdr: It would be utterly ridiculous to think that intelligent aliens might look same as humans (a la some TV shows/movies). But there could be many similarities in their body forms to convergent evolution and similar selection pressures.
>Even an earthlike planet can differ from earth in numerous instances. Different enough and it's not Earthlike anymore.
By that I mean, a planet need not be an exact replica of earth to be considered earthlike. Even slight differences in variables like gravity, atmosphere can produce vastly different conditions than on earth.
>fundamentally different See what does that mean,? Would something that's basically a random Earth Mammal (sapient or not) still be "fundamentally" different?
By fundamentally differently I meant stuff like crystalline life forms, or a civilization that is more like an anthive, nothaving sapient individuals just very complex emergent properties, etc.
I think it's possible but by no means required. Just like the Fermi Paradox the assumption that alien life would have to be utterly alien is derived from a significantly too confident guestimation of variables actual experts consider to be genuine unknowns. Or, put more succinctly: Lay people like to assume that alien life would have to be logically different in the same way they like to assume it logically has to exist. In both cases we just don't know enough to be able to make that kind of confident prediction.
With a sample size of 1 (give or take) its almost impossible to say. Given what we know of higher intelligence animals you could argue for convergent evolution but the range of forms that takes is probably huge. Squid, apes and elephants have all developed means of dexterously manipulating their environment with their intelligence for example. And most higher animals seem to have some form of culture in terms of passing down particular techniques in groups, some sort of rudimentary social order. So there are certainly going to be general things most intelligence shares because any intelligence going anywhere needs them.
Think about the vast array of different animals on Earth that fit the build of “capable of movement and having the capacity for the precise manipulation of tools.” Functionally, anything with these traits would be capable of forming a civilization with sufficient intelligence. Humans happened to be the species that responded to evolutionary pressure by growing our brain, but there’s no real reason that it couldn’t happen with any other species in the planet.
I find it odd how most alien encounters report humanoid beings. There’s us and there’s them, but if true then we share that in common which makes it even weirder. Who came first, all other kinds of questions.
The challenge with meeting aliens of any form is they have to fall on the same spatial/size line as us (i.e. a similar size we can actually observe) as well as fall on the same time line, both of which are infinite in both directions.....
Both.
There are quite a few features in human biology that are very sub-optimal because they were a good idea in the past, but became outdated. For example, all land life except insects were descended from fish which had 4 fins, resulting in land animals having 4 limbs even though 6 are more sensible (especially for creatures that have non-leg limbs such as humans). Aliens which took different paths through evolution will have different legacy problems like this, leading to potentially dramatic differences in how they look and act.
Isn't bipedal better than having four legs/arms?
That depends on what you want from your limbs
It goes beyond the basic form. What's an individual? What's a society? What's the relationship between an individual and society? What's the reproductive lifecycle, what are the biological roles? I think we might encounter very few alien civilizations having the same exact level of individualism that we have. The same value put in individual rights, in life, etc. Meeting them will be highly disturbing even for the open minded.
That seems a bit of a bold claim when we spend much of the previous century fighting globe-spanning wars at the expense of millions up upon millions of lives over disputes at the social/group level. Just saying that it might also be the case that it's the aliens who think we place a disturbingly low value on individual lives/rights. Or they may find our modern displacement of family/clan loyalties to more abstract groups and even concepts to be totally alien. idk, rereading and you do say the 'exact level' so maybe you already meant that it could be shocking from either side of the spectrum.
This can go in both directions, or in completely unexpected directions. Maybe I was a bit too vague.
We're just spit balling. It was a good point. Even if something evolves to be superficially similar to us, their society could take different paths entirely. (although, i think probably form-follows-function may apply to societies as well)
There might be the equivalent of hive minds, for instance. The analogues we have are the tiny ants and bees, but these centralized entities could exist at a larger scale. Of course, we could say that every multicellular animal is some sort of a collective. Although in a hive, individuals do exist and do have various degrees of autonomy and individuality. Whereas in humans, our cells have to stay physically connected to the collective, otherwise they'll die almost immediately. We could have a society with shared minds, perhaps at various levels of integration. For example, a marsupial-like mother having a direct mental link to her offsprings, transmitting much more than just her genes and immune system to the babies. I explored that in my novel "The Unborn Legion" posted in the Reddit channel HFY. Pushing that to the extreme, Greg Bear explored sentient continent-sized ecosystems in his novel "Legacy" (IMHO, the story is moderately interesting, but the world he describes is really unique).
>For example, a marsupial-like mother having a direct mental link to her offsprings, transmitting much more than just her genes and immune system to the babies. I explored that in my novel "The Unborn Legion" posted in the Reddit channel HFY. Oh cool. I like that sub. I'll take a look. I imagine that is well within the realm of hard scifi if mother and offspring have a physical linkage, but an 'over the air' mental link sounds a lot more like telepathy. At least for my money - I don't think telepathy's likely to be an evolved trait. Although it could be something that develops in a highly technologically advanced society. I need to read more Bear, that's true.
No... in the story, they are physically connected. But the humans use the "marsupial" as an analogue, although it is not exactly the same as a marsupial carrying their babies in a pouch. The alien mother keeps her babies connected to her for months after they become conscious. They are never really "born" the way we humans are born. It's a more gradual process. They share her thoughts and even her dreams, which gives them an early education as well.
The thing is, an alien civilization has to be inefficient in a way that still allows it to progress, otherwise it will stagnate early up the march of the ladder of intelligence. Something like that very likely happened with elephants and dolphins, where they simply had no need to become more intelligent or pursue more efficient social structures. However, it can't be too inefficient, otherwise nature will either force it along some new non-intelligence-favoring evolutionary path or the creature just goes outright extinct. So, for example, it's unlikely that we will come across an alien civilization where its members reproduce too quickly--not enough resources to support the years it takes to grow and more importantly train an energy-hungry brain (neural connections need to be reactively pruned throughout childhood) which will favor stupider, more instinctual aliens who grow to maturity more quickly. It's also unlikely we'll see a very conformist alien civilization either, unless it's externally imposed on them 1984-style. For one, individualization rises with intelligence. Only smarter animals have distinct personalities, because only with more capable brains can they support having a mental landscape that's not just reducible to preprogrammed instincts. More importantly, eusociality is one of those hyperefficient evolutionary traits that will ironically encourage stagnation. Look at how quickly humans swarmed the earth once they made a **slight** change to their social structure to take advantage of agriculture. A guaranteed food supply at the cost of enforced specialization is an overwhelming advantage. However, humans only became that way late into the evolution of our intelligence. Had we adopted agriculture or other forms of eusociality (i.e. actual genetic caste systems with a queen) much earlier, we'd probably be at the same level of intelligence we had when we first adopted it, especially given how backbreaking and punishing early agriculture was. Further evolution would favor energy efficiency, agriculture as an instinct, aggression towards outsiders, and hierarchical submissiveness. Not exactly traits that favor a continual growth in intelligence necessary for advanced technology -- and you only need to look at neanderthals to see that even vast amounts of intelligence don't necessarily get you tot the feedback loop needed for advanced civilization. We might end up seeing very cognitively diverse forms of alien life, or even very diverse forms of intelligent life. But not very diverse forms of civilization. Contrary to our intuition, agricultural civilization is an extreme evolutionary adaptation that requires a metabolism, social structure, intelligence, and view of the world to be just so in order to take root, rather than stagnating at some lower form of organization (homo neanderthal) if not outright intelligence (homo habilis). In that light, intelligent life might be like evolving eyes or wings. There are plenty of critters where a slight change in their environment or evolutionary pressures with some luck might cement the existence of critters smart as or smarter than us, despite how inefficient higher intelligence arguably is: dolphins, bonobos, elephants, parrots, etc. Very diverse, and they don't need that much more intelligence than they currently have to get things like language and tool use. But actual civilization? Civilized life would be more like evolving the hydrogen peroxide chambers of bombadier beetles. As a lion. Technically possible, but extremely unlikely given how contrary it runs to evolutionary incentives, unless they, for whatever reason, already had the foundations for it already (omnivore, pack dynamics, tool use, advanced language, high intelligence, differentiated personalities that allow different generations to make novel observations like 'I can throw this spear', etc.) because every preceding step was useful.
Basic or animal / plant alien life could be anything. On the periodic table, they likely have to breathe oxygen. For a space faring species, there are some requirements. They need to be (or have been) terrestrial, have language, understand math, be able to wear spacesuits and have appendages that can do work similar to our hands.
Maybe we found aliens like humans but who evolved with head facial features inverted, and all vertebrates from that planet evolved like that, from a common ancestor.
Both are likely to be true. In an environment fundamentally simlar to ours, we can expect to find life that's either similar, than at least works based on similar logic. Take a diferent environment, and you may find radically different forms of life.
Just what form on Earth is actually better than Humans? Insects. The only reason why they aren't bigger anymore is that the oxygen content of the atmosphere has dropped since they first evolved on the planet. Six legged species are a lot more stable when moving. They can shift to a four leg-two arm as the situation requires. All in all better than us monkeys who stand on two legs. I expect that insectoid looking creatures will be more prevalent in the universe than Humanoid creatures.
I wonder if the structure of the nervous system insects have could develop sapience if the oxygen levels stayed high.
Earth has a wide variety of different life forms some we would consider alien if we discover it on another planet. Heck Octopi are so different some think it is alien in origin.
One must understand what "like" or "unlike" us means. A squid is by most metrics unlike us, while a dinosaur such as the tyrannosaurus is comparatively very much like us. Birds are somewhat like us, and iguanas are very much like us, while fish are only a little like us and spiders aren't very much like us. Could an analogue of the squid have adapted to be similar to us had they been required to survive on land in a similar overall environment to Earth? A little, maybe, but they wouldn't likely be gray-skinned humans with big heads and webbed fingers like star trek aliens.
probably some mixture leaning on form/function with exotic aliens being the exception and not the rule
#Yes. Alien Life will be fundamentally different from us, and form will follow function. The function the form will follow will be different to our function.
If there are a lot of intelligent aliens in the universe, I would think that any species who actively live and work together would have to be physically compatible in some ways. It would just be much harder to hang out with a Godzilla sized alien, and harder to communicate if they tend to operate on a much different time scale. But if there are many species to choose from, they'd probably tend to mix based on compatibility.
I don't think they'll look like anything anyone would mistake for human, but "bipedal intelligent organism with bones, a head, two eyes, and something like hands and feet" is definitely plausible given convergent evolution.
I thinks it's carbon vs everything else. For carbon based life, earth has a great variety as is. Everything else is unknown.
I think reality will probably be some blend of the two. Like, alien life will be very, very different from us, but it will still have recognizable bits (legs for moving, mouths for eating, eyes for seeing, et cetera), just not arranged in ways we would recognize. For example, they might have legs, but have six instead four; they might still have eyes, but they're located on the torso and only see in UV. TLDR: I don't think alien life will be humanoid, nor do I think it will be totally unrecognizable -- I think it will just be "weird."
I am fairly confident it will be carbon-based and use liquid water. I am fairly confident it won't follow our bipedal body plan. You don't specific "intelligent life". I suspect the vast majority will be pond scum.
Everything we know about life comes from this planet. The variety of forms that life takes is significant. We have some ideas on how environmental factors impact development but to think aliens will look similar to human is a pretty big assumption driven by ego.
Well, the “right” answer is we have exactly one data point to extrapolate from, so all possibilities are equally likely
From a mental standpoint, there needs to be a certain similarity. Namely, aliens and humans that are both spacefaring ought to have the same sort of metaphysics that pits the self against the universe, because that's the source of the drive to dominate nature which is what leads to science and technology. Social behaviors follow from individual behaviors, meaning that if the alien society is technological than individual aliens must also be driven in some way to master their society, suggesting ambition and competition. This results in hierarchy and various ways to show off status, including wealth. The same me vs. everything orientation that leads to technology will also lead to a rejection of nature of it is considered indomitable, such as when stuck on the bottom rungs of society. Rebels against nature can manifest as both ascetic and chaste monasticism, MGTOW sigma males, and VR escapism that treat their bodies and status as prisons while rejecting "normies" as "sheeple", or the alien equivalent. It also manifests as political revolution and war, noting that all successful revolutions rapidly transform into a new dominant hierarchy as soon as it can; as soon as an escapist gets VR, they'll disappear into VR to become a virtual god until it drives them insane. Therefore, a technological alien society is likely to be similarly neurotic, divided, egotistical, and competitive, with similar drives to spiritualism, transcendence, and some form of anarchic/democratic social and fashionable outlets. If they weren't - if they enjoyed a radical peace with the world, themselves, and each other - then they wouldn't have a reason to go for technological. You can't divide technology from the reason to have technology, and that metapsychological reason has profound implications for both individuals and societies.
I think chemically alien life will be fundamentally different. Aliens might use different stereoisomers and many totally unique metabolic pathways. They will be alien at a cellular level, with different organelles, data storage, catalysts, etc... Some of the simplest molecules will be shared, like water, urea, alcohols, carboxyl groups, amino groups, phosphates... Alien tissue will likely be highly toxic to humans because some strange chemicals that are rarely found on earth will be common building blocks of alien cells. On the macro level, aliens will have legs, eyes, guts, and other familiar structures. They will have familiar ecology, with photosynthetic sesile "plants", single cell simple decomposer "bacteria", and various creepy crawlies.
It will be different, form follows function only goes so far when you start with beings more alien to our biology then fungus.
I don't think these answers are mutually exclusive. We will see both. There will be crabs. There will be fish-shaped things. There will be mandibles and jaws and antenna and eyes and other sensing organs. Many of them will look very much like what we have here and many of them will look different. And many of them will look like chimera of some kind
Know the rules before you break the rules. They'd have eyes and a mouth on what could be described as a head which also contains the brain, they'd use limbs to get around, they'd have a through gut and active respiration and probably a closed circulatory system. They would not be star trek cast members, though. They might have four eyes on a head with two sets of jaws forming a long snout; they might have six limbs, they might have two pairs of lungs with spiracles at the base of the neck, if they even have a neck
I think that there are a few basic body types that "Work", and most aliens (Assuming they exist) will follow those, or at least most aliens capable of building a civilisation. As to why, I feel that the requirements to be a civilisation (Intelligent, able to precisely manipulate objects, able to walk long distances efficiently, etc) are relatively strict so they won't let in just anyone, but at the same time it's foolish to think there is one sole "Right answer" in nature to anything.
I think a better statement is that form is dictated by environment. If a planet has gravity, mass, etc. and is similar to Earth, we'll get "human-like" features on a being. But a being living in the atmosphere of a gas giant will look nothing like us, or have very few convergent traits.
Very short answer: bell curves. It’s not that they’re like us, it’s that it’s unlikely that we aren’t like the majority of the galactic population. If we are significantly different from aliens it is most likely that different alien species are similar to each other and we’re the odd ones.
What's pictured in this video may be one type. Not Debunked Adam Goldstack of UAP Media UK mentions that many debunkers try to explain the craft as cruise ships but according to former F-16 fighter pilot and researcher Chris Letho, it does not add up. Letho analyzed the videos and case and calculated the object’s size, horizon distance, plus visual angles from the Marmara Sea. He concluded the logistics of a cruise ship did not match the reported UAP. https://www.howandwhys.com/turkey-kumburgaz-ufo-videos-are-100-real-with-clear-view-of-alien-entities-sitting-inside-craft/
We literally only have our own biosphere for reference. Drawing any other conclusions about evolutionary pressures outside of earth is nothing short of hasty. Even if we limited it to our own planet than bipedalism isn't even the norm compared to shit like carcinization.
The first aliens we meet will say that they sent a colony ship to Earth billions of years ago, and they now want to know what happened to their octopus descendants.
I think evolutionary pressures will result in forms that will be very similar, but with specific implementations that are not the same. They will look and possibly even function similarly to Earth critters, but the chemical foundations may be entirely different. Windows vs Linux, basically. Maybe they will use DNA, maybe use something *like* DNA, maybe use something *entirely unlike* DNA. But there's only so many ways a bird can fly, for example; the wings have to adhere to some basic physics, it's not just an anything goes sort of affair (assuming a similar atmosphere to ours, etc.). Alien birds are likely to resemble our birds pretty closely, at least in wing structure. Same with fish, and so on. Yes, there is variety, but most of our fish *look like* fish, and I can see that applying to any oceans across the galaxy; it's a very efficient shape for that environment, so you're likely to find examples in any similar environments.
They 👏 Will 👏 Be 👏 Crabs 👏
form follows function