Astronomy / Space Aliens!

[ethelred]

This discussion recently overran in the thread about Steam Keys with a discussion that somehow Thargoids are unrealistic.

Evolution was discussed, as was biomass.

So - here's a dedicated thread to discuss the important questions:-

1. Are humans or humanoid species the only ones capable of reaching Space Travel?
2. If not, what would Aliens look like?
3. <late edition> What is needed for a species to develop space travel?

To get you started, I reckon that it's a big stretch that dinosaurs in over 100m years of existence didn't evolve some brains. I've no evidence, except that episode of ST:V.

Also someone else mentioned insectoid biomass not being as much as our. According to some rudimentary google-fu and Wikipedia it turns out that termites do. So there.

I'll be patrolling this thread with the Stick Of Logical Fallacies, the Grammar and Spelling Police have had their funding cut and therefore will not be present.

Sophistry is right out.

GO!

 

[Top Cat]

Have a read at "Evolving the Alien" and you'll soon realise that aliens will be, well, alien, and life is possible in many many more environments than is normally thought possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolving_the_Alien

 

[Raf von Thorn]

The thing is, that our minds are NOT capable of imagining something that is really alien to it. Thats why all and every concept of an "alien species" looks like combination of thing we know about...

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

copied from other thread

So long as a being has intelligence, as well as either opposable thumbs or some convergent equivalent I see no reason why an alien race should be anything like us. I believe completely in alien life, indeed, my view is it is actually the conservative view to believe in them. The "out there" view to me is to think we are some how super special and unique.

Whether in reality we will ever meet them is another thing entirely however...unless some new way to travel is invented which elite and the likes of star trek make up ever happen, the enery requirements as well as time to travel are astronomical... elite does a good job of really putting the sol system into perspective..

indeed when it comes to weird and wonderful aliens, hypothetically, the beings which created the ship need not be the ones flying it either. in theory the pilot of an alien ship could just be a brain attached to the controls via computers (or just a race of AIs).

the creatures which build the ships could just be some sort of worker with little intelligence but that has the ability to build "stuff".

I think it is crazy to assume that "we" are the pinnacle of evolution, that every blueprint is striving to reach. indeed, 20 million years from now I suspect what ever our distant cousins look like, it will NOT be like us!.

In short we are a fluke!.

Its true that evolution generally leads to survival of the fittest, but if anything "intelligence" screws that up (this may not be a politically correct thing to say, and I may be on thin ice, but civilised society weakens our genome not the other way around....... Take me... I am an over weight athsmatic with serious allergies and eczema..... modern medicine allows me to do ok, and marry as well as possibly have kids. My genes however are unlikely to strengthen the gene pool and in nature I would (should??) probably be weeded out) . it is also predicted that my generation can have a very good chance of living to 90 years old, but despite that I will probably stop being a positive influence on our race a good 20 years or more before then. (not that I am complaining... I have not given up the dream of early retirement at 60 and 30 years of lazy bliss )

this is actually a topic that I am really interested in. We are what we are due to a random asteroid causing huge climate chance. All it takes however is some freak thing to happen, an unfortunate mutation where say the HIV virus picks up some features from the flu virus and goes airbourne (or more likely some idiot presses the red button and starts a nuclear war) and then the whole pack will be shuffled again.

really cool stuff, and a bit scary when you think too much about it.

PS we are bipedal iirc because on average it is more efficient to have sex this way so after a few random mutations it stuck..... but on another planet with different gravity etc who is to say what would be best?.

There were thoughts that it was due to advantageous vision from a higher vantage point, but iirc this theory is largely debunked now. I could cheat and google to know I am right, but where is the fun in that.

 

[ethelred]

Its true that evolution generally leads to survival of the fittest, but if anything "intelligence" screws that up (this may not be a politically correct thing to say, and I may be on thin ice, but civilised society weakens our genome not the other way around....... Take me... I am an over weight athsmatic with serious allergies and eczema..... modern medicine allows me to do ok, and marry as well as possibly have kids. My genes however are unlikely to strengthen the gene pool and in nature I would (should??) probably be weeded out) . it is also predicted that my generation can have a very good chance of living to 90 years old, but despite that I will probably stop being a positive influence on our race a good 20 years or more before then. (not that I am complaining... I have not given up the dream of early retirement at 60 and 30 years of lazy bliss )

I'm glad you posted this here as this is one of the points I wanted to respond to. Evolution isn't merely "survival of the fittest" in a don't support the weak/ill individuals sense, rather the fact that non-Alphas (used purely in a healthy/fitness sense) are supported means that as a species as a whole we can pass our genes on.

Evolution is all about the big picture!

 

[Chevy66]

As well as having intelligence, opposable thumbs or equivalent way of manipulating tools, some kind of written language to record discoveries for future generations etc. They also need a lot of luck.

They'd need to be on a planet it was physically possible to leave using only resources they could find on the planet. Would we have ever reached space if Earths mass was twice as much? four times as much?

What if intelligent Aliens lived underwater? could they ever build something capable of both getting out of the water and then reaching orbit, and taking water with them?

What if they couldn't see the stars due to light pollution or atmosphere? would they ever even think to try going up?

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

I'm glad you posted this here as this is one of the points I wanted to respond to. Evolution isn't merely "survival of the fittest" in a don't support the weak/ill individuals sense, rather the fact that non-Alphas (used purely in a healthy/fitness sense) are supported means that as a species as a whole we can pass our genes on.

Evolution is all about the big picture!

true enough, and that would work if I was some super genius, like say Stephen Hawking........ but unlike him, I am not a genius either i do agree however that what I wrote was not really accurate, but, this is a videogame forum and i am *meant* to be working

 

[OBoile]

PS we are bipedal iirc because on average it is more efficient to have sex this way so after a few random mutations it stuck..... but on another planet with different gravity etc who is to say what would be best?.

I'm not really seeing this. Lots of non-bipedal species are able to mate just fine. The reason for it has to be something that provides a benefit for surviving from predators (like vision) or for acquiring food like the Endurance Running Hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis).

 

[Nikonthenet]

I would suggest the old adage is relevant here:

There are 'known unknowns' and 'unknown unknowns'...Alien life falls into the latter!

 

[ethelred]

I think it's one of Iain Banks' (or possibly Alistair Reynolds') books that has Water World Aliens in it, who view all species evolving on "dry" worlds as having it too easy and that they didn't deserve space travel because they hadn't earned it, which was a nice touch.

I'll mention the Drake Equation here as well - which is fine until you get to the last part where it becomes real guesswork (the fi, fl, fc and L parts). This I why I don't support SETI anymore - even now we barely use radio as a form of communication (in terms of long wave radio) ourselves so it makes the chance of detecting anything too high IMHO.

 

[Jay8ch]

I think you can assume that in order to build a sophisticated society capable of space travel you would need a large brain, the ability to manipulate objects and the ability to communicate complex ideas to one another. There's countless forms that could take.

 

[CarlosMaximus]

I'm a big fan of Iain M. Banks' books (mayherestinpeace), now THERE was a man for imagining aliens! Seriously, I don't know for sure how many alien species he came up with, but few, if any, were remotely similar to us. As a famous man once said: "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine" (I think, that last may be paraphrased, I can't even remember who said it! Too much Onionhead...)#

EDIT: Ethelred, it was one of Iain M. Banks' books, "The Algebraist" if I remember correctly. They called species such as ours Squanderers, since all their metal came from meteorites, whilst rocky planets have an abundance of natural resources, most of which we "squander", in their eyes.

 

[Yaffle]

I think you can assume that in order to build a sophisticated society capable of space travel you would need a large brain, the ability to manipulate objects and the ability to communicate complex ideas to one another. There's countless forms that could take.

I would also guess at some form of sight too (which may be outside the visible spectrum for us, of course).

 

[Vagabond]

Being bipedal freed our hands to use tools and gather food and bring it back to the nest (as opposed to having to eat it there and then like most species). This was very useful in allowing for protracted pregnancy which in turn allows for increasingly more complex offspring. Or so my studies have informed me.

Back on topic however, I like the idea of your traditional Star Trekie gas giant species, a race of something more nebulous than our own carbon forms which might feed from the stellar radiation rather than from their soil. Their perspectives and philosophies would be way more outward and cosmic in nature than our own earth centric ones. Groovy stuff.

 

[Sotapeikko]

Taking into account the possibility of advanced genetic manipulation their current form may be less constrained to what evolution shaped them into.

 

[digitalscream]

I'm not really seeing this. Lots of non-bipedal species are able to mate just fine. The reason for it has to be something that provides a benefit for surviving from predators (like vision) or for acquiring food like the Endurance Running Hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis).

I think a lot of it has to do with developing fine motor skills with our front legs (ie arms and hands). It's difficult to maintain such fine motor control over something that's hitting the ground every four steps - aside from anything, the skin sensitivity required to enable feedback disappears pretty quickly when the skin toughens to become pads.

Ignoring that for a second...the human body as it currently stands is an extraordinarily poor design. Just a few of the things that later techno-biological developments should fix:

- The pharynx being used for both ingestion and respiration. Mind-blowingly stupid.
- Organs essential to the male reproductive process being completely unprotected due to a different temperature requirement to the rest of the body (common to most land-based mammals).
- Inability to produce vitamin C, unlike just about the entire natural world
- Blind spot in the eye, because the retina is the wrong way round
- A bug in the firmware, which means that the reflex logic for breathing is backwards - it relies on the presence of carbon dioxide rather than the lack of oxygen (put a human being at high altitudes, and they don't automatically increase their breathing rate because the body can't tell that it's short of oxygen)
- Pointless vestigial bits which serve to do nothing but get in the way
- The only practical method of communication is several orders of magnitude slower than the ability to produce the thoughts you're trying to communicate

The thing is...you start to fix these issues, and you'll discover ways to not only fix the bugs but also improve the base function. It's entirely possible that a humanoid race might eventually develop - through artificial means - into an insectoid one. Extra limbs, more efficient eyes, true separation of function for biological processes, durability...the insectoid design is actually superior to the human body in just about every way. The problem is that they can't develop to that size naturally (as far as we know); artificially, however, there's really no limit.

 

[Hootmon]

I would also guess at some form of sight too (which may be outside the visible spectrum for us, of course).

At the very least, their vision would need to be able to 'see' at least some wavelengths that can penetrate their atmosphere. Otherwise there would be no 'out there' to be interested in exploring.

 

[Eros]

Environment is a big factor in driving early evolution, at least on Earth that is. Life elsewhere will follow this at least for its early evolution, and as pointed out, possibly stop/alter its progress once it achieves a certain level of intelligence.

There are a few neat documentaries out there which have made fairly nice attempts at saying "OK lets come up with something weird" and they in my opinion where pretty good at imagining how different Aliens could be.

One is a bit cheesy, https://youtu.be/zHzPEpHYtXQ
The other is older and comes up with some pretty crazy ideas, so old that after about 30minutes of searching I cant find anything but short clips set to music. Anyway it was called Extraterrestrial and had some interesting concepts of life living on a planet near a flare star. Adapting with a UV sensitive 'eye' on their body that always looked upwards in order to give them time to seek shelter from flares.

Was pretty interesting.

There is no reason why intelligent life should be bi-pedal nor that they have hands like ours. Certainly to develop space flight it would most certainly involve being experts at manipulating tools and structures. The ability to 'see' like us is likely a benefit though that goes without saying.

 

[Aldaris]

I think a lot of it has to do with developing fine motor skills with our front legs (ie arms and hands). It's difficult to maintain such fine motor control over something that's hitting the ground every four steps - aside from anything, the skin sensitivity required to enable feedback disappears pretty quickly when the skin toughens to become pads.

Ignoring that for a second...the human body as it currently stands is an extraordinarily poor design. Just a few of the things that later techno-biological developments should fix:

- The pharynx being used for both ingestion and respiration. Mind-blowingly stupid.
- Organs essential to the male reproductive process being completely unprotected due to a different temperature requirement to the rest of the body (common to most land-based mammals).
- Inability to produce vitamin C, unlike just about the entire natural world
- Blind spot in the eye, because the retina is the wrong way round
- A bug in the firmware, which means that the reflex logic for breathing is backwards - it relies on the presence of carbon dioxide rather than the lack of oxygen (put a human being at high altitudes, and they don't automatically increase their breathing rate because the body can't tell that it's short of oxygen)
- Pointless vestigial bits which serve to do nothing but get in the way
- The only practical method of communication is several orders of magnitude slower than the ability to produce the thoughts you're trying to communicate

The thing is...you start to fix these issues, and you'll discover ways to not only fix the bugs but also improve the base function. It's entirely possible that a humanoid race might eventually develop - through artificial means - into an insectoid one. Extra limbs, more efficient eyes, true separation of function for biological processes, durability...the insectoid design is actually superior to the human body in just about every way. The problem is that they can't develop to that size naturally (as far as we know); artificially, however, there's really no limit.

Most of those aren't poor design at all:
-Having one shared entrance of food/air is efficient, reduces water loss which is one of the chief stresses on our bodies so has a greater impact on the entire species than the very rare chance of choking. Land dwelling animals that aren't insects, arachnids etc use this system precisely because of its efficiency in preventing further water loss.
-Those organs are protected by instinct and again, across the species doesn't really matter. Damage to sexual organs to the point of preventing reproduction would be rare.
-Vitamin C, while on the surface may look silly in losing, humans are very good at recycling it and we have no shortage of external sources. Not only that but in order for the entire species to have lost it at some point along with other primates, it generally means either it has a negative impact on surviving to reproduce or a positive impact on another area of our biology by losing it.
-The blind spot doesn't matter as our brains fill in the blank just fine with information from both eyes and surrounding data from one eye.
-The breathing thing isn't backwards. CO2 is used because when it dissolves in water it produces an acid. This is detectable by chaemo recepters in the carotid and aortic arteries. O2 doesn't have the same effect.
-Only thing here that is slightly relevant, but as long as across the species those vestigial parts are not effecting our ability to reproduce they're irrelevant to our design.
-4 methods of communication. Visual clues, smell and sound and tactile. Sound is the most superior of the 4 in that it can travel faster and further at lower sensitivity of the relevant organ (you need exceptional eyes and noses to pick out communication from them. You don't with ears) and doesn't require being relatively close to the subject.

 

[Stigbob]

Robert A Heinlein had a qualifying test for intelligent species in the Star Beast (1950's searched shelves can't find it) which were the ability to use tools, the ability to communicate and the ability to keep records (if memory serves).

Ie make and use stuff, tell others how to make and use stuff, amass knowledge as a society on making and using stuff.

Everything else would be as random as life on Earth.