Aliens...

[Euryalus]

No, you don't get a Tsoukalos picture.

So anyway, a wandering mind at work made me realise something that's always kind of bothered me about aliens in fiction, well some of them anyway, they're never very... alien.

Can anyone honestly look at me and say the turians weren't just bony Romans, or that combine weren't mysterious facists?

I've seen plenty of great alien aliens, like the Hunters from Halo (lore wise), the flood from halo (again, lore wise), and the rachni kind of.

Most of the time they seem to be more caricatured, and probably some symbolic stance on how we're all not really that different.

But really, if you even look at ants here on earth, in many ways, the biology, communication methods, and rudimentary "cultures" possessed by them are insanely different, and interesting.

Obviously it'd be a reach to say we could create a fictional race that thinks the way they do while being sentient, the way we write is biased towards the way we think obviously, but we could certainly get more interested cultures if we brainstormed what an ant or an octopus would think like knowing what we limited amounts of information we do based on their biology and psychology.

I'd like to see more alien aliens is what I'm saying. Essentially. I certainly know of good examples, I just think they're too few.

 

[Eclipse Dragon]

I once watched two ant armies converge in my driveway. It was the smaller sugar ants vs the larger carpenter ants. They rushed each other and the sugar ants absolutely slaughtered the carpenter ants, then they raided the carpenter ant nest, carried off all the children, while a few sugar ants hung back and scouted the battlefield for any carpenter ant survivors... they were brutal.

In regard to having more alien aliens, I think it requires a bit of a stretch of the imagination to think up a creature that acts, thinks, moves, lives, looks so differently than how we see each other, so it tends to get simplified as mostly kind of sort of human, but has green skin and pointy ears.

I've also heard the idea that having a creature so... alien would make them completely unrelatable. I don't personally think that's true however. Both humans and elephants for example, recognize their dead.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Forget "thinks like", most aliens share our senses, and that's not even true of all mammals.

In my life, I have seen one (1) alien race with different colour vision...and one (1) sentient wolf with this issue. If the aliens can't distinguish between red and green, for example, like many real species and some humans cannot, then you don't need to wear green camouflage, you can wear bright colours so your troops can see each other, but remain camouflaged to the enemy. Hunters wear bright orange for this reason. All writing would be red on green (or vice versa), bright red land mines etc.

Or, perhaps the aliens don't see colours at all, in which case humans can wear bright colours like Napoleonic era troops.

If the aliens have a good sense of smell, then no smoking, and use the right shampoo.

There's a wealth of stuff that could be plot points, but unfortunately sci-fi today seems to have stagnated badly. Many, many people want to see new and original stuff, but only if it is exactly the same as what was new and original 50 years ago, and get confused and frightened when it's not the case.

Now, not saying there's anything wrong with, say, being obviously inspired by the original series of Star Trek, say, only with getting rid of all the interesting ideas and social progressiveness, but such stories tend to overshadow everything else.

 

[Eclipse Dragon]

There's a wealth of stuff that could be plot points, but unfortunately sci-fi today seems to have stagnated badly. Many, many people want to see new and original stuff, but only if it is exactly the same as what was new and original 50 years ago, and get confused and frightened when it's not the case.

Now, not saying there's anything wrong with, say, being obviously inspired by the original series of Star Trek, say, only with getting rid of all the interesting ideas and social progressiveness, but such stories tend to overshadow everything else.

Kind of like how so much fantasy is based so heavily on LOTR?

 

[Thaluikhain]

There's a wealth of stuff that could be plot points, but unfortunately sci-fi today seems to have stagnated badly. Many, many people want to see new and original stuff, but only if it is exactly the same as what was new and original 50 years ago, and get confused and frightened when it's not the case.

Now, not saying there's anything wrong with, say, being obviously inspired by the original series of Star Trek, say, only with getting rid of all the interesting ideas and social progressiveness, but such stories tend to overshadow everything else.

Kind of like how so much fantasy is based so heavily on LOTR?

Yup...or people trying to be "the anti-Tolkien", by grimdarking it to death.

Apparently Rowling didn't realise Harry Potter was fantasy for quite some time, I suspect this is partly why.

Annoyingly, this seems to be a more modern attitude. I think Star Wars is in large part responsible for this, sci-fi became "stuff that has the sort of stuff that was in Star Wars", rather than fiction about science.

Before that, fantasy and sci-fi were more intermingled. Old D&D had elves being able to see in the dark due to passive IR, and certain monsters had active IR and could be seen by passive IR creatures. Open flames would muck this up by swamping out the signal. Nowdays it's just magic seeing in the dark.

There's a Conan the Barbarian story where a creature is from a species that evolved way before humans, but their water source got polluted and they devolved into monsters (he was a correspondent of Lovecraft). Which makes perfect sense. Generally most fantasy stories have gravity in them, much of the same biology and geology and physics (though often writen by people with limited understanding of those, of course), but sticking sciency science into it would annoy lots of people.

 

[EvilRoy]

So anyway, a wandering mind at work made me realise something that's always kind of bothered me about aliens in fiction, well some of them anyway, they're never very... alien.

Well, among philosophers, stoners, and inquisitive scientists, one of the major reasons to pursue alien life in the real world has less to do with technology and more to do with the concept of a truly novel, new opinion. The idea is that since all humans experience life through the lens of human existence we are necessarily limited to a subset of opinions and ideas that are based on this human experience. Other species on Earth have a different basis of experience and therefore could produce truly new opinions and outlooks as well, but they can't talk to tell us them.

So, when we try to write aliens the issue is that the aliens have to be based on things within human experience because we lack the outside perspective to produce something completely beyond our experience that we can also interact with. Consider the jellyfish aliens from Mass Effect. By virtue of the fact that you probably know what I meant when I said that tells us immediately that they are based on a common shared human idea. More than that, however, is the fact that despite being very alien and very cool they aren't really interacted with in game. Why then? My honest opinion is that the writers were just unable to produce a meaningful interaction for the player human to have with the jellyfish - with nothing in common (even physical form) what do you do with them? Talk about stocks and videogames I suppose, but then they aren't an alien, they're just a weird looking nerd.

I guess "its hard" is what I' saying. I want more too, but I definitely see the intrinsic problem of having something truly alien AND interacting with it in a way that isn't just "run away" or "kill".

 

[Foolery]

Can anyone honestly look at me and say the turians weren't just bony Romans, or that combine weren't mysterious facists?

Huh. So that's why I had this impulse to name all my Mass Effect 3 multiplayer Turians after emperors.

 

[Mikeybb]

*snipped*

I'd like to see more alien aliens is what I'm saying. Essentially. I certainly know of good examples, I just think they're too few.

Drawing on Mass Effect, the Hanar were physiologically odd, with cultural differences that made them stand out.
I'd have to say though, the Elcor with their oddness displayed mainly in their interactions with other races.
Amusing as the prefacing of spoken word was with the deadpan tone, it also tied in to a truly alien world and culture.

My personal pick would have to be the Ancients (how many games have ancients who just go by that name?) of StarFlight on the good old megadrive/genesis.

I'll explain why in spoilers.

Spoiler

The plot involved your efforts to discover why your sun was about to emit a flare that would wipe out all biological life, much as it had done on many other worlds including the mysterious and fabled earth.
It eventually transpired that it was due to the efforts of the Ancients, a race that had for unknown reasons begun a long time ago the process of wiping out all biological life systematically from the galaxy. You discover eventually their home world is a crystal planet and, after many efforts find a way to destroy it so there you head. On landing you discover something that explains everything in one simple revelation. The Ancients are a crystalline life form.
So far, so mundane right?
well, they live at a different speed to that of the biological species. Biologicals they view as little more than viruses.
Why? because when those speedy little creatures found the first of these crystals they mined them, processed them and utilized them as a powerful energy source to facilitate interstellar travel.
That's right.
You spend the entire game searching for the Ancients, and you've been burning them alive in your reactor core, refuelling with them at every station from the very beginning.
That's why they were desperately trying to wipe out the biological menace that sprang up on their worlds shortly before everyone disappeared without a word.
We were the monsters in the dark, wiping out their spacefaring species for mysterious and unknowable reasons.
We were the Reapers in that galaxy and we didn't even know it.
That's why you had no choice but to detonate the bomb at the end, because by the time you received an answer from creatures operating on a different timescale, your home and others, billions of innocents, would be gone.
An excellent moment of gaming and a story all built around the idea of a race that to us moved so slowly we couldn't even recognize them as alive until it was far too late.

 

[Silvanus]

I'd like to see more alien aliens is what I'm saying. Essentially. I certainly know of good examples, I just think they're too few.

I heavily recommend you read "Slaughterhouse Five". I heavily recommend anybody read it, but you particularly, as you've said that.

"2010" by Arthur C. Clarke, too, which provides a little more insight into the species behind David Bowman's strange experience/ apparent abduction at the end of "2001".

Apparently Rowling didn't realise Harry Potter was fantasy for quite some time, I suspect this is partly why.

Right in a sense, but I'd also say it's not the most useful descriptor for HP. This is one reason the term "magical realism" was coined, to describe output like that of Joanna Harris, too grounded to be helpfully described as "Fantasy" but still featuring semi-transcendent elements. I'd call HP halfway between Fantasy and magical realism, or maybe apply some more pretentious terminology.

 

[Zontar]

I remember hearing somewhere that one of the reasons man is the superior species is because we are built "right", the correct weight to size ratio, correct brain function, correct number of hands etc.

So if there are aliens that are in our level they'll most likely be smiliar in a lot of ways to humans, for example they'll have to use tools (otherwise have no need to improve), have to be violent (otherwise remain stagnant) and walking upright, otherwise can't really built anything.

Pretty much this.

For an alien to develop to the level of space faring, there are things it needs, such as digits which have great dexterity, a predatory nature, the ability for complex non-verbal communication (critical in the development of language) and many other things.

There are also things an alien must NOT have to develop to a space faring civilization, such as not begin aquatic and not being hive minded.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

I remember hearing somewhere that one of the reasons man is the superior species is because we are built "right", the correct weight to size ratio, correct brain function, correct number of hands etc.

So if there are aliens that are in our level they'll most likely be smiliar in a lot of ways to humans, for example they'll have to use tools (otherwise have no need to improve), have to be violent (otherwise remain stagnant) and walking upright, otherwise can't really built anything.

Pretty much this.

For an alien to develop to the level of space faring, there are things it needs, such as digits which have great dexterity, a predatory nature, the ability for complex non-verbal communication (critical in the development of language) and many other things.


There are also things an alien must NOT have to develop to a space faring civilization, such as not begin aquatic and not being hive minded.

Yep. Change just a little about the Human being(like say we take after the Orangutan and are mostly solitary creatures.) and then even being as smart as we are we would be stuck in the Stone Age.

It would be interesting to see a story where humanity discovers aliens as smart as us being held back from achieving civilisation by something like being aquatic or not having hands for tool use. Then seeing us uplift them and the consequences of going from Stone Age to advance technology.

 

[Casual Shinji]

The problem comes from the fact that something truly alien to us means it's outside of our thought process. And it's pretty much impossible to step outside of our human perspective, which makes writing/creating something truly alien a rather difficult undertaking.

 

[DrownedAmmet]

I remember hearing somewhere that one of the reasons man is the superior species is because we are built "right", the correct weight to size ratio, correct brain function, correct number of hands etc.

So if there are aliens that are in our level they'll most likely be smiliar in a lot of ways to humans, for example they'll have to use tools (otherwise have no need to improve), have to be violent (otherwise remain stagnant) and walking upright, otherwise can't really built anything.

Pretty much this.

For an alien to develop to the level of space faring, there are things it needs, such as digits which have great dexterity, a predatory nature, the ability for complex non-verbal communication (critical in the development of language) and many other things.

There are also things an alien must NOT have to develop to a space faring civilization, such as not begin aquatic and not being hive minded.

Plus, if life as we know it is the only way life can form (or the only life we find,) and it is found on a planet made of the same stuff as earth, with similar conditions, it is likely that we will share some similarities.
If we are both using the same dice they may roll a different number, but they aren't going to roll a banana or something

So it is possible that life is out there like us (though I doubt they would be as bone-able as they are in Mass Effect, for example)

 

[TakerFoxx]

Animorphs had some great ones. The iskoort were in particular were wonderfully weird but still sort of believable.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

One reason is that it's exceptionally difficult to believably write a truly alien character with consistent behaviors, actions, etc. while still keeping those things understandable to the (assumedly) human reader. Even the xenomorph of Alien was following basic, comprehensible instincts- feed, expand territory, procreate.

 

[MonsterCrit]

I once watched two ant armies converge in my driveway. It was the smaller sugar ants vs the larger carpenter ants. They rushed each other and the sugar ants absolutely slaughtered the carpenter ants, then they raided the carpenter ant nest, carried off all the children, while a few sugar ants hung back and scouted the battlefield for any carpenter ant survivors... they were brutal.

In regard to having more alien aliens, I think it requires a bit of a stretch of the imagination to think up a creature that acts, thinks, moves, lives, looks so differently than how we see each other, so it tends to get simplified as mostly kind of sort of human, but has green skin and pointy ears.

I've also heard the idea that having a creature so... alien would make them completely unrelatable. I don't personally think that's true however. Both humans and elephants for example, recognize their dead.

Simple.. if the alien is truly alien. then it becomes unrelateable. It'd be like you trying to understand the thought processes of a tree.. That's why Aliens are depicted with human like attributes in terms of physiology or psychology.

On the flip side... intelligence is driven by the competition for survival so it's not unthinkable that other living animals at our level would have many of the same psychological traits.

 

[Knight Captain Kerr]

Eclipse Phase is as setting with some extremely alien Aliens in the form of the Factors. They're like a Sapient Slime Mould which communicates through chemicals signals and people don't really know what motivates them.

Here's what real life slime moulds are like in case you don't already know.

 

[OneCatch]

There are also things an alien must NOT have to develop to a space faring civilization, such as not begin aquatic and not being hive minded.

Why? Hive organised animals have easily the most complex engineering and some of the most complex social organisation of any animal aside from humans.
And being aquatic is certainly going to make getting into orbit more difficult because of sheer mass, but not necessarily impossible. Getting bubbles of relatively uncompressed air to the bottom of oceanic trenches isn't exactly easy either, and we basically did that for the lols [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste].

I remember hearing somewhere that one of the reasons man is the superior species is because we are built "right", the correct weight to size ratio, correct brain function, correct number of hands etc.

So if there are aliens that are in our level they'll most likely be smiliar in a lot of ways to humans, for example they'll have to use tools (otherwise have no need to improve), have to be violent (otherwise remain stagnant) and walking upright, otherwise can't really built anything.

I can see the rationale which would suggest optimal characteristics, but that's far from universal, especially since we're talking about evolution on a different planet/moon/whatever. Our characteristics are optimal for technological development for us, on earth, at this particular time. That's a lot of caveats.

The tool use I'd pretty much agree with - because using a tool demonstrates the ability to imagine a desired outcome, plan a course of action to achieve it, and then make it happen.

But I don't see why predatory or violent behaviour is particularly necessary to avoid stagnation. It might well be that hunting tends to lead to greater brain size and cognition, but evolution is blind. It isn't sensible or logical, and doesn't have an end goal. Most whale species are highly intelligent, but they probably don't strictly need massive brains to fulfil their wandering oceanic role. It's probably not made them that much better at filling their niche (with certain exceptions [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whale]), but neither has it harmed their survival. So the massive brains and relatively high intelligence remains.

And walking upright seems a weird one to choose as well - to use a rather crude example, other primate species which don't walk upright are far more dextrous than we are. I'd posit that having a frame something like this would be way more useful than the ones us humans have, either on the ISS or a run-of-the-mill building site:

-----------------------

Anyway, other animals have developed traits that are at least on the lower end of the spectrum of 'human-like intelligence'. Some of which share [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_intelligence] few [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition] characteristics [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence] with us.

So even if we're mandating that space-tech requires 'human like' intelligence[footnote]Which is itself an assumption[/footnote], there's no reason that other species couldn't have filled the gap if we hadn't come along. Possibly, probably not as quickly or totally as us, but then we're talking about an alien world in a 13 billion year old universe, so maybe developmental speed isn't of the essence?

 

[Zontar]

There are also things an alien must NOT have to develop to a space faring civilization, such as not begin aquatic and not being hive minded.

Why? Hive organised animals have easily the most complex engineering and some of the most complex social organisation of any animal aside from humans.
And being aquatic is certainly going to make getting into orbit more difficult because of sheer mass, but not necessarily impossible. Getting bubbles of relatively uncompressed air to the bottom of oceanic trenches isn't exactly easy either, and we basically did that for the lols [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste].

In the case of aquatic intelligent animals, it's very, very unlikely they'd ever develop tools to begin with given their environment. As it stands there's nothing beyond a rock used for hitting things we've observed in nature, and that begs the question how would such a species develop electricity and get to space in the first place.

As for a hive minded race, any hive mind would need to find a way to bring an entire society into space right from the beginning of their travel due to the nature of how hive minding beings operate. I highly doubt they could have a drone be isolated long enough to do a mission and return, assuming their drones could develop to that level, and a queen being used is assured to be off the table because, well it's a queen they've role in the hive mind is critical at all times.

I hive minded or aquatic race may become the dominant form of life on a particular planet, but without the use of outside help it's not very likely in my mind that either would reach the capability of attaining space travel, let alone achieve it.

 

[Slenn]

I remember hearing somewhere that one of the reasons man is the superior species is because we are built "right", the correct weight to size ratio, correct brain function, correct number of hands etc.

So if there are aliens that are in our level they'll most likely be smiliar in a lot of ways to humans, for example they'll have to use tools (otherwise have no need to improve), have to be violent (otherwise remain stagnant) and walking upright, otherwise can't really built anything.

I'm also not sure violence is necessarily a step in becoming space faring, unless it's to incite growth and development. Growth and development could come from any number of sources, namely the sciences and engineers. The people who think. Considering the size of the milky way galaxy, the amount of time needed to cross the interstellar vacuum to meet another space faring alien would probably be enough to extinguish the need for violence. By the time a civilization has grown to the point of traversing thousands of light years in ships, more than likely they will have reached a point of non-violence. As Carl Sagan put it: It will not be us to venture into the stars, it will be our descendants with more of our strengths and less of our weaknesses.

Pretty much this.

For an alien to develop to the level of space faring, there are things it needs, such as digits which have great dexterity, a predatory nature, the ability for complex non-verbal communication (critical in the development of language) and many other things.

There are also things an alien must NOT have to develop to a space faring civilization, such as not begin aquatic and not being hive minded.

Well, it all depends on what creates their spaceships. Perhaps their computer consoles use electrochemical responses as opposed to pressure. I've been developing a fictional alien race that is essentially a colloid that protects a hard central mass. The colloid can extend out into appendages that can fold over a mass and produce electrical signals, as well as harden to become a protective skin.

Aquatic creatures, if they have been able to create a sea-faring civilization, they would try to reach the point of the surface. It would be just like us trying to climb the tallest mountains. Perhaps they would have surface stations that would eventually observe the sky. The seasons would effect ocean currents and temperatures, so they would already have a sense of time. If their civilization is not too deep, they would sense light levels enough to time how long their days are. Since there are always four seasons from a tilted planet, figuring how long a year will be is not hard.

Subterranean creatures could act the same way. Perhaps they used to venture out at night to forage for food, and they would crawl back in during the day. Or maybe they used to live in caves, but one brave subterranean decided to go beyond its natural habitat on night and view the stars. It would return with startling news saying "There are these bright lights on the top of the world beyond the roof of the cave!" And from then on they would develop calendars, a sense of night and day, and a time system.

And there's every reason to postulate about a race of aliens that aren't made of complex organic chemistry.