It’s highly unlikely that any intelligent species capable of traveling the vast distances to cross interstellar space to make contact with another species would not also be intelligent enough not to make knee-jerk assumptions about the language(s) of creatures who are so alien to them that they don’t share a biosphere and have no ancestral commonality whatsoever. Even if the English word “the” sounds similar to the alien word for “let’s fight,” or whatever, they’d obviously know that this is not actually what we mean.
This is even assuming that they communicate verbally or even audibly in the first place. Maybe they talk by emitting light or radio waves at each other or something, for all we know.
And if the aliens arrive here with the intent of conquering us or blowing us up, they probably won’t care what we have to say nor how we say it anyhow. If they were intent on making peaceful contact they would be sending their very best of their equivalents of linguists and anthropologists specifically because of this kind of thing. Not to do so would be incredibly stupid.
(Stupid species don’t achieve interstellar travel. See also: We have not achieved interstellar travel.)
I think aliens capable of interstellar flight will be humanoids. Not necessarily based on primates; they could be feline, canine, anteaters, lizards, Zuckerbergs, whatever.
We clearly have the best form for tool use. If some drastic difference in morphology made for more efficient tool use, we would have evolved that form. Tools are very much our jam, got us where we are today.
I also think they would be from a biosphere much like Earth. They evolved under the same physical and chemical laws. Sure, there would almost certainly be radical differences in biology, but I think we’d recognize the basic building blocks. After all, amino acids are floating around in space.
OTOH, maybe they’ve evolved so far beyond tool use as to be unrecognizable to us. Maybe they use bots for tools and artificially modified themselves.
As to your penultimate sentence, that’s a plot point in science fiction classic Footfall!
Your arguments aren’t based on anything, and are clearly biased toward your own image. Even just limiting ourselves to known earth-forms, from an objective standpoint the octopus form seems at least as well suited to tool use. 8 limbs that can work fully independently on 8 different tasks, AND can be used in synchrony to work on a single task, AND have been shown to do extremely fine manipulation of small objects, AND has suckers all along the length of each limb that can be controlled in precise segments, AND has full continuous deformablity in every direction rather than a very small number of joints that only operate in a single degree of motion. It’s really no contest, the octopus form is superior
I’ve actually had the octopus in mind! Read Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the hoops he had to jump through to imagine a space-faring race of octopi was ridiculous, took me out of it. And they required us space monkeys to jump start 'em in the first place!
Fire use aside, think that boneless arm could swing an axe? Think they could push hard? Well, I could go on forever, but I think you’re missing all the great points of having an endoskeleton. No skeleton only works underwater, and no underwater species is using fire and all the tech that blooms from that. Cetacea are smart as hell, but no bony and dexterous digits, no fire, no tech. We can utterly rule out aquatic space travelers.
Please, let your imagination run wild! But consider at every point, how would that work in real life? And keep evolution top of mind!
Would alien tentacle fingers work? Could those boneless arms turn a tough bolt with a wrench? Nah, might be crazy dexterous but you gotta drop the bones for that dexterity. Would odd numbers of limbs work? Nah, outside of underwater animals, we don’t see that, because it’s not practical.
Nature tried all the weird shit in the Cambrian. The basic forms have survived since then. There’s no reason aliens would have radically different forms assuming they come from an Earth-like planet. So why is Earth so special?
Gravity’s one thing. Too much and our hypothetical aliens would never reach escape velocity. Too little and they’d be too wimpy to survive the forces. Sure, there’s flex room, but not much. Think on things like that.
Chemistry is a thing. We can speculate on sulpher or silicone based life, but nothing forms stable organic molecules like carbon! As I said, we already see clouds of amino acids in space. Why reinvent the wheel? The parts are out there, only fit together in certain ways.
“Maybe they don’t need liquid water! Maybe they’re floating around gas giants!” Fine. They’re not escaping any gravity well without tech, and that includes, at the very least, metal working. There’s simply no other way to start.
People bag on me as if I have no imagination, or worse, I’m too ignorant to look past my own backyard. I challenge anyone to imagine an alien other than I roughly outlined in my original post. Been reading science fiction and thinking on this for 40 years. Bet I can shoot down your weird aliens. Go!
Octopus in the right circumstances could literally break your arm with the force they generate. And tentacles could easily swing an axe. And they could easily twist bolts, in fact there are videos of them doing that type of thing on youtube. And there are tons of land mammals that have prehensile limbs, like elephants, monkeys, etc. I’m not sure what information you’re using to mentally model what tentacles can do, but it’s quite inaccurate
I have no objections to aliens with prehensile limbs. Often wondered why humans are lacking. Must not have been so useful or we would have something more than a tailbone. But maybe another planet, another species, would have found limbs like that a bonus. Not ruling that out!
It’s highly unlikely that any intelligent species capable of traveling the vast distances to cross interstellar space to make contact with another species would not also be intelligent enough not to make knee-jerk assumptions about the language(s) of creatures who are so alien to them that they don’t share a biosphere and have no ancestral commonality whatsoever. Even if the English word “the” sounds similar to the alien word for “let’s fight,” or whatever, they’d obviously know that this is not actually what we mean.
This is even assuming that they communicate verbally or even audibly in the first place. Maybe they talk by emitting light or radio waves at each other or something, for all we know.
And if the aliens arrive here with the intent of conquering us or blowing us up, they probably won’t care what we have to say nor how we say it anyhow. If they were intent on making peaceful contact they would be sending their very best of their equivalents of linguists and anthropologists specifically because of this kind of thing. Not to do so would be incredibly stupid.
(Stupid species don’t achieve interstellar travel. See also: We have not achieved interstellar travel.)
We look for things…
I think aliens capable of interstellar flight will be humanoids. Not necessarily based on primates; they could be feline, canine, anteaters, lizards, Zuckerbergs, whatever.
We clearly have the best form for tool use. If some drastic difference in morphology made for more efficient tool use, we would have evolved that form. Tools are very much our jam, got us where we are today.
I also think they would be from a biosphere much like Earth. They evolved under the same physical and chemical laws. Sure, there would almost certainly be radical differences in biology, but I think we’d recognize the basic building blocks. After all, amino acids are floating around in space.
OTOH, maybe they’ve evolved so far beyond tool use as to be unrecognizable to us. Maybe they use bots for tools and artificially modified themselves.
As to your penultimate sentence, that’s a plot point in science fiction classic Footfall!
Your arguments aren’t based on anything, and are clearly biased toward your own image. Even just limiting ourselves to known earth-forms, from an objective standpoint the octopus form seems at least as well suited to tool use. 8 limbs that can work fully independently on 8 different tasks, AND can be used in synchrony to work on a single task, AND have been shown to do extremely fine manipulation of small objects, AND has suckers all along the length of each limb that can be controlled in precise segments, AND has full continuous deformablity in every direction rather than a very small number of joints that only operate in a single degree of motion. It’s really no contest, the octopus form is superior
I’ve actually had the octopus in mind! Read Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the hoops he had to jump through to imagine a space-faring race of octopi was ridiculous, took me out of it. And they required us space monkeys to jump start 'em in the first place!
Fire use aside, think that boneless arm could swing an axe? Think they could push hard? Well, I could go on forever, but I think you’re missing all the great points of having an endoskeleton. No skeleton only works underwater, and no underwater species is using fire and all the tech that blooms from that. Cetacea are smart as hell, but no bony and dexterous digits, no fire, no tech. We can utterly rule out aquatic space travelers.
Please, let your imagination run wild! But consider at every point, how would that work in real life? And keep evolution top of mind!
Would alien tentacle fingers work? Could those boneless arms turn a tough bolt with a wrench? Nah, might be crazy dexterous but you gotta drop the bones for that dexterity. Would odd numbers of limbs work? Nah, outside of underwater animals, we don’t see that, because it’s not practical.
Nature tried all the weird shit in the Cambrian. The basic forms have survived since then. There’s no reason aliens would have radically different forms assuming they come from an Earth-like planet. So why is Earth so special?
Gravity’s one thing. Too much and our hypothetical aliens would never reach escape velocity. Too little and they’d be too wimpy to survive the forces. Sure, there’s flex room, but not much. Think on things like that.
Chemistry is a thing. We can speculate on sulpher or silicone based life, but nothing forms stable organic molecules like carbon! As I said, we already see clouds of amino acids in space. Why reinvent the wheel? The parts are out there, only fit together in certain ways.
“Maybe they don’t need liquid water! Maybe they’re floating around gas giants!” Fine. They’re not escaping any gravity well without tech, and that includes, at the very least, metal working. There’s simply no other way to start.
People bag on me as if I have no imagination, or worse, I’m too ignorant to look past my own backyard. I challenge anyone to imagine an alien other than I roughly outlined in my original post. Been reading science fiction and thinking on this for 40 years. Bet I can shoot down your weird aliens. Go!
Octopus in the right circumstances could literally break your arm with the force they generate. And tentacles could easily swing an axe. And they could easily twist bolts, in fact there are videos of them doing that type of thing on youtube. And there are tons of land mammals that have prehensile limbs, like elephants, monkeys, etc. I’m not sure what information you’re using to mentally model what tentacles can do, but it’s quite inaccurate
Under water.
I have no objections to aliens with prehensile limbs. Often wondered why humans are lacking. Must not have been so useful or we would have something more than a tailbone. But maybe another planet, another species, would have found limbs like that a bonus. Not ruling that out!