All very clever Molgrips.
But how do you explain Birkenhead?

BoardinBob – Member
rOcKeTdOg – Member
When we achieve warp drive we’ll know

I am not scientist however even if we do build a warp drive, surely there’s enough crap floating about in the universe that you’ll accidentally **** into a meteor or asteroid along the way

No, when we become a warp society the Vulcans will make contact & invite us to join the federation

The level of sci-fi geekery is sadly very low in this thread

if we’re talking about ‘intelligent’ aliens, then it’s reasonably safe to assume that they’ll have gone through an evolutionary stage of using hand tools, and building things, so they’ll have hands, so probably not insects

Well.. insects on our world have exoskeletons, but also no blood, having tubes instead – and it’s this that limits their development.

But you could have an exoskeleton and still have blood, couldn’t you? In which case you could develop all the other thigns you need to get clever and end up with the front two legs manipulating things. Especially if you came from a planet with low gravity – the weight of a large exoskeleton wouldn’t be a problem.

I suppose you could also have evolved from aquatic animals, and have your pectoral fins evolve into manipulators. So like a mermaid 🙂

But how do you explain Birkenhead?

This is explained at the very top of this page, in the first post

So imagine you are a cell, floating about in a primordial soup….

So I reckon aliens will either be insectoid or humanoid.

This is all well and good Molgrips and I wouldn’t disagree with it, but the point is intelligent upright beings isn’t a necessary consequence of evolution.

If the Chicxulub asteroid had been a near miss instead of a direct hit then its a near certainty that none of us would be here.

The Earth would have carried on as reptile heaven and we would have never descended from the trees (well in all likelyhood we would have never climbed into them in the first place)

BoardinBob – Member
I am not scientist however even if we do build a warp drive, surely there’s enough crap floating about in the universe that you’ll accidentally **** into a meteor or asteroid along the way

Warp is moving space-time rather than moving in space. Travelling without moving (a rather good album, oh and there’s that book / film of course 😉 ). So maybe wouldn’t necessarily fly into something along the way.

So maybe wouldn’t necessarily fly into something along the way.

Pfft! That’s what the navigational deflector is for!

but the point is intelligent upright beings isn’t a necessary consequence of evolution.

No, its not – but I’m saying that if you are an intelligent spacefaring being you will probably look quite like us.

I follow your logic moley but I disagree. Having half a dozen tentacles would be better than two hands and one of the things with this imagining of aliens is that we cannot possibly know even all the questions to ask.

I want to meet puppeteers. I am a big SF geek and they are my favourite aliens – from the niven stories or perhaps the dwellers from Ian M Bank – dirgible gas giant intelligences

but tentacles don’t really work out of water, and i’m prepared to bet £5 that any intelligent aliens we contact within my lifetime evolved from land animals.

(because i reckon use-of-fire will be an important developmental stage, and underwater fire is tricky at best)

Is it time for the aliens meme yet?

ahwhilkes – I am prepared to bet any intelligent aliens are so darstically diufferent we will find it hard to even recognise their intelligence.

Many folk would have some whales as the third most intelligent species on earth – after humans and chimps

TJ, what about a bowl of petunias?

About average intelligence for STW? So long as they don’t fall from height of course

TJ, what about a bowl of petunias?

Oh no, not again.

Dwellers
“Immature Dwellers are described as anorexic manta rays[2] and stay in this form for about a century. Adult Dwellers are described as consisting of two discs, similar to a yo-yo, with various appendages at edges and hubs including two long spindle arms. They are large in adulthood, with small examples being about five meters in diameter and larger examples ranging up to ten meters. They are neutrally buoyant in a gas giant’s atmosphere, and move by rotation of their disks, called “roting”.

Their long lifespan (individuals can live for billions of years,[3] the species has existed for ten billion) has made them anarchic and wise. They use the idea of kudos to define their sense of value within a society,[4] and will trade or bet kudos like money. They claim that they have existed since the “First Diaspora”, roughly two and a half billion years after the creation of the universe.[5]

Dwellers are male for 90% of the lifespan, turning briefly female in order to have children.[6] Dwellers do not care for their children after birth; the children are often taken into slavery or hunted down as game.[7] Aborted children are kept as pets.[8]”

from wiki.

I am prepared to bet any intelligent aliens are so darstically diufferent we will find it hard to even recognise their intelligence.

I bet they won’t be.

Whatever rocky planet you’re on, the need to move around on its surface, find food, and make tools will be the same. And I was going to concede the point about tentacles but ahwiles’s point is a very good one. Fire was essential to most of our technology, and still is really.

Very anthropocentric view. How about cooperating termite like creatures? colonies of bacteria that clump together and become intelligent. Low temp lifeforms with much slower metabolic rates ie thoughts take years. How about life based on alternate chemistry ie ammonia atmospheres where its easy to show the sort of chemical reactions we have in our bodies but using amonia and nitrates not carbon and ferrus compounds

Why a rocky planet – why not a gas giant or water world? Waqter worlds have better mediation for chemical reactions, gas giants contain lots of interesting organic chemicals and the right conditions for them to react.

Very anthropocentric view.

It is yes, but there’s a school of thought (I think) that says we are what we are BECAUSE of certain principles, which apply anywhere. Similar to my reasoning above which I also believes addresses your point about alternate chemistry.

Bear in mind I am talking about technologically advanced space travelling aliens here.

The alternate chemistry has been worked thru well by the geeks. I can’t remember all the detail but instead of using iron to in heamoglobin its cyanoglbin and the use of amonia instead of CO2. the energy side of the equation works very well and its plausible

TBH our gravity and conditions are what make it possible to be a squishy upright bipod mammal. Higher gravity would make verticality and blood pumping too hard, harsher environments make soft skins impractical, higher temps make cold blood an advantage, different o2 saturations alone would lead to different competitive advantages (we tend to think of this in terms of what it’d take to make a human work in these conditions- your tall, massive lunged, bird-boned martian human in a terraformed environment being a classic- but that’s just reengineering). High oxygen alone in earth G makes much larger insects viable, low gravity makes avian life efficient…

Course, it’s entirely possible that these conditions are just naturally well suited to creating intelligent tool-using sociable life, so other aliens might well evolve out of similar backgrounds. There’s an argument that conditions were pretty knife-edged for us- if things had been much more comfortable we’d have had less need to cooperate, create tools etc, these are all things you do to widen your niche.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry

I can’t remember all the detail but instead of using iron to in heamoglobin its cyanoglbin and the use of amonia instead of CO2. the energy side of the equation works very well and its plausible

Yeah for respiration, sure. But what about making proteins and DNA?

Very anthropocentric view. How about cooperating termite like creatures? colonies of bacteria that clump together and become intelligent. Low temp lifeforms with much slower metabolic rates ie thoughts take years.

How does intelligence form in any meaningful sense without embodiment that allows some sort of interaction with the environment? I reckon there’s a pretty good case for assuming that an intelligent being is going to be some solid physical thing that you could at least the map the concept of hand-eye coordination onto.

Whatever rocky planet you’re on, the need to move around on its surface, find food, and make tools will be the same.

We only need tools to make up for our own inadequacies though? If man had evolved into a race of Edward Scissorhands who could shoot fire out of their arses then we’d have demolished those poor apes banging rocks together.

I doubt that curry would have been as popular though.

Cougar, remember that our intelligence and tool usage has evolved as a survival strategy when faced with competition from other creatures. If we’d evolve to dominate the environment by simply being bigger and stronger, we wouldn’t have needed to evolve any further.

How about life based on alternate chemistry?

I read Dragons Egg the other year due to a recommendation on here. It’s a hard-sci-fi novel about a lifeform living & evolving on a neutron star, inspired by Frank Drake’s suggestion in 1973.

If we’d evolve to dominate the environment by simply being bigger and stronger, we wouldn’t have needed to evolve any further.

Something else may have though. Evolution could be expressed as the survival of the misfits in new environments, bearing in mind that environmental pressures are strong evolutionary triggers

Relativity, or something.

It’s time. Great, intergalactic civilisations may well have risen and fallen – or indeed may come to rise and fall – but the universe is SO mind bogglingly old that it’s likely to have happened so mind bogglingly long ago, or is likely to happen so so long into the future, that ‘we’ are statistically irrelevant in the grand scheme.

Also, when it comes to life forms – I cannot see past the inbuilt genome response to survive at all costs. Ie, defend and attack in order to preserve self. It’s built into DNA and is undeniable – so I simply can’t imagine a Star Trek type utopia (however nice an idea ultimate communism is) when we all just get along for sake of being nice. The aggressor will always suppress, and ultimately, win.

Frankly, I tend to lean more towards alternative theories of everything, including infinitesimal Universal creation and implosion/spaghetti theory/bubble theory – we have only just begun to scratch the surface of how our universe is – and I expect that the true reality is unfathomable to our puny human minds.

Therefore, im not expecting to meet Alf at any time soon.

Link to story on NASA scientist saying stuff about discovering life within a decade (8 years left…)

Space.com Link & this more recent one link 2

Filed under their search-for-life section

Either:

1. It’s intelligent enough not to want to get involved with a bunch of nasty little bald apes who mostly still think guns are really neat, or

2. Intelligent life only ever lasts a few millennia before it discovers really big explosions and reduces itself into a fine radioactive dust.

or

3. All intelligent life eventually realises virtual worlds are a far more fun way to spend eternity than a drafty old real one.

“It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.”

so I simply can’t imagine a Star Trek type utopia (however nice an idea ultimate communism is) when we all just get along for sake of being nice.

That’s what happens more or less in tribes. It’s just a question of where you draw the tribal boundaries, and how close you have to be to each other within it.