This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Tree: I'd like to make the suggestion that creatures which have more in similarities with humans than differences be removed from this, or at least placed somewhere in the middle. Things like creatures with are anthropomorphic versions of earth animals, or creatures with identical and compatible biology. It really upsets me that authors make their aliens so... un-alien, I think it's our duty to point out all the cases where they REALLY are different from anything on Earth.
Justin Cognito: Yeah, I noticed this:
Comic Books
- The Green Lantern series has frequently managed to avoid this trope. While the Corps has its share of Rubber-Forehead Aliens, they also have invertebrate Green Lantern, hyper-intelligent chipmunk Green Lanterns, sentient virus Green Lanterns, and, in the case of Mogo, a living planet Green Lantern.
- Let's not forget the Lantern that's a living mathematic equation.
Was posted here. It probably fits more for Rubber-Forehead Aliens, so I'm going to move it.
Nornagest: While I don't really disagree, how can we meaningfully count similarities and differences?
Cutting this anyway, though —
- * The Xenomorphs in Alien. They lack human psychology, a complete hive mind, not a Planet of Hats at all. They also have a completely different method of reproduction that involves taking on host DNA and bursting out of the chest. Plus their sensory organs would have to be different as they have no visible eyes.** The facehugger stage looks the most like a literal starfish alien. The adult forms seem to take on the morphology of their host, ie the chestburster that came out of the dog assumed a quadripedal form, while all the chestbursters from human victims metamorphosed into a bipedal semi-humanoid form.
They're roughly humanoid, quirks like eyelessness and acid blood aside, so — even though they fit the letter of "two or more" — I don't think they're phenotypically different enough to qualify. And as far as I remember there's no implication that they're any smarter than a dog or other large predator, so they're not people in the sense of having language, culture, or some version of abstract thought.
- On the other hand, I've seen a trend towards making aliens *really* alien, like the sentient virus and mathematical equations, or alternately energy beings, floating gasbags from gas giants, and such; I think they're just as bad as the Rubber-Forehead Aliens, because there's no believable way they could evolve intelligence. Remember, maintaining a large brain is expensive energetically, and unless toolmaking shows up pretty early (or even at proto-intelligence stage), Nature will generally select towards smaller brains and larger muscles, teeth and claws. If they don't have a physical form, or 99% of their environment is hydrogen gas, there's no way they'll create tools, so intelligence doesn't get to rise. And that just shunts them right back to the "soft" side of the Mohs Scale of SciFi Hardness...
The picture! where is it from? I must know!
Nornagest: I was wondering that myself a while back, and found it here: http://coolshowcase.org/picture/568
Unistrut: That link is broken at the moment, here's another: Link
◊
- Ah, so not from any particular comic or novel or etc ... still, pretty cool and funnier still in its uncropped form. Her poor crewmate... hehe. Also unveiling both an interesting artist and a whole new art site to me, so thanks!
current thought in xenobiology (the speculative science of alien lifeforms) puts starfish aliens on the soft end of the scale because of a phenomenon called "paralel evolution". basically the idea is that species fulfilling the same function will stick to the same design. good examples of these are hyenas. Hyenas are much more closely realted to the felidae (cat-like animals) branch then to canidae (dog/wolflike animals) branch. However, the circomstances in which they evolved and the diet they specialized in made them resemble the canidae branch so much that one of the species is called the aard-wolf. it is only after the canidae branch crossed the land bridge that hyenas started to become bonecrushing animals to avoid beiong outcompeted by the canidae. this effect can be seen all around the world. Different species that are divided by geographical situations (such as oceans, and we all know space is an ocean), but fullfill the same function will look and act alike. so slowly but surely the scale of inteligent life seems to shift in favor of the 'Rubber-Forehead Aliens'.
Nornagest: Not sure I buy that. The laws of aerodynamics tend to make water- and air-dwelling organisms look similar, but there's nothing particularly special about a four-limbed body plan, two eyes, breathing organs connected to the head, etc — and particularly nothing that'd tie it to intelligence, communication, or tool use.
Fast Eddie: Moved this discussion in:
- However, sentient aliens are also quite likely to be roughly humanoid, at least as far as land species go. You need at least two eyes to see "3D" and more eyes don't really give you any advantage. You need arms to be able to make tools and use them - which probably is prerequisite to sentiency (unless you can devise a completely different mechanism of "grasping" - and squids really don't work well outside of their water environment, you just need bones etc. on land)). Legs are quite cool for moving on land as well, being both relatively energy efficient, quick and flexible. For most of the exotic sentient aliens you have to ask - would they evolve in the first place? Some things are just minor inconveniences like having greater planetary temperature will make you taller and thinner (to disperse your own temperature faster) and having greater gravity will make you generally smaller (and maybe thicker) - bone-like structures have their limits and it is not efficient to be so big you'll need lots of energy to move around compared to what energy you can get from food. Evolution aims for the simplest organism which fulfils the task at hand - this is why plants don't move (except for their slowly growing roots reaching for nutritions in the soil). The reason something as complex as a sentient being evolved was the huge concurrency which makes us develop structures needed for us to thrive and even survive. Those are also conditions which humans themselves are likely to adapt to themselves (pretty much the same as differentiations between human races on Earth only maybe on greater scale). Major problems like different sun output, very different temperature etc. might bring life to very different species (different breathing gas, base composition etc.) but you need to understand just how convenient all those things like DNA are in our conditions - alien humanoids might be biochemically virtually identical to humans (which still doesn't mean virae are going to be dangerous to another species - even Earth born virae are hardly ever able to target more species. Bacteria may be dangerous though). Water based aliens might look like octopusii though - they have great sight, graspers, mobility and intelligence capacity.
... and banned the IP that thought it was necessary to call someone a dumbass.
VVK: Hyenas doesn't really work as an example. Even within the animal kingdom that we know, hyenas, felines and canines are practically identical. Compare them to spiders, say. Hyenas may have evolved in the same direction as canines in the same way, but they also started from nearly the same place in the first place. When we're talking about aliens, we should remember they probably have started from a completely different place than we did, and even insofar as they needed to get the same things done in their alien world as we do, there's no reason to assume they'd use the same kind of means. So, what Nornagest said.
