I am just wondering what your ideas on there appearance would be. I thought about this and here is what I came up with. (If they were sentient) Wouldn't they look like humans? After all, They will have to have a planet like earth right? If the planet is similar to Earth, as in the temperature and lighting and all of that stuff, Wouldn't they have evolved the same way we did or at least close to us? So wouldn't they look similar to us?



DISCUSS

IF they were sentient, they would probably have hands or an equally capable body part to build tools and the like. Otherwise, they could look like almost anything.

And they don't have to have a planet like Earth. We adapted to Earth conditions, since Earth provided the necessary amount of water and nutrients needed for carbon-based life forms /totalreference. Their planet could be quite barren but they would still be able to live.

Being ordered to DISCUSS very much inclines some people NOT to DISCUSS.

For crying out loud, this isn't an assignment.

Okay, ashkelon, Your obviously not very bright. When someone says "Discuss" it is not an order. It is just saying that you are welcome to post now. So don't post anything if you don't know what your talking about. Also it is even relevant to this thread, the thread is about evolution and alien life forms not the word "Discuss". I am reporting that as spam.

Nobody calls ashkelon "not very bright" and gets away with it.

Well he had no right to post that. And you obviously aren't very bright either. And your over reacting. Your acting like I just threatened to kill him.

biollantefan54 wrote:Okay, ashkelon, Your obviously not very bright. When someone says "Discuss" it is not an order. It is just saying that you are welcome to post now. So don't post anything if you don't know what your talking about. Also it is even relevant to this thread, the thread is about evolution and alien life forms not the word "Discuss". I am reporting that as spam.

Since this is a "forum", ANYTHING you post is up for discussion. With an express ORDER or without.

LMAO

Why create a thread to discuss this when there are already at least three current threads on alien life forms.

And since the existence of other life (not counting the arsenic-based ones on earth) is totally conjecture, there is nothing to discuss. Anything posted here is wholly fantasy until we knowingly encounter life from an other planet.

This is not a question of science, but of flights of fancy.

No matter how you dress it up.

And report away if it makes you feel better. But this is a "discussion" more suited to the creator corner than science.

And Ashkelon is a she, by tha way.

An alien's appearence will depend on the status of their planet, which will fuel their evolution to whatever's best.

Say what you want, but 'DISCUSS' is more of a rally call for me; it's been posted in many a thread before, & will continue to do so. As long as Biollante doesn't act up over it, I'd take it or leave it.

Take it how you want; is he being too bossy by stating the obvious, or is he pretty much stating the obvious & thus shouldn't be minded too much as long as we recognise the discussive purpose of the thread (people can & have spectacularly failed to recognise the discussive purpose in past; that's sporum history for you...)?

I can't say it's much use posting Discuss in all caps, but people can & have done that.
Bit of an odd pretext, to say the least, even if there are really too many of these alien threads (I.e: just make a universal one, liky Slyth did with Chemistry. By Ysmir's beard, do there realyl neeed to be this much?).

Cool the flames folks.


An intelligent alien species will need a way to interact with its environment in a very controlled manner, requiring very dextrous hands or analogous structures.

They will also need a way to collect information about their environment, requiring sound, visual, contact, temperature, and chemical receptors. The thick nerve clusters these things require will usually mean that most of the complex receptors are placed fairly close to the brain and heavily protected since they cannot be regenerated easily if damaged. This will give the creature a recognizable "head" where the bulk of cognitive and sensory structures are located, although this won't necessarily be located at the "top" of the organism connected by a fairly vulnerable neck.

It will need to be large enough and strong enough to make predation unlikely. This makes it possible for the species to develop a long growth cycle that a complex brain requires.

Coloration, body dimensions, sensory range, and residual evolutionary appendages (tails, frills, horns, etc.) will vary depending on the specific environment. Very humid environments will require skin that is more resistant to constant contact with water, very dry environments will require skin less prone to losing moisture. A star with intense radiation or instability would produce creatures with skin designed to resist the effects of sporadic bursts of radiation (many red dwarfs occasionally blast their planets with streams of energetic particles, any species that live there would need adequate shielding).

Muscle structure and limb dimension will depend on surface gravity. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it is typically more difficult to move rapidly on a low gravity planet (walking and running are largely gravity powered forms of motion).

Our sun's spectrum has produced a human eye that is selectively sensitive to different wavelengths. It does not weigh all wavelengths equally. An alien from a star with a different spectrum will have eyes adapted differently and would not see colors in the same manner that we do.

biollantefan54 wrote:Well he had no right to post that. And you obviously aren't very bright either. And your over reacting. Your acting like I just threatened to kill him.

Says the guy who confuses "You're" with "Your."

Anyways, I don't think aliens would look like the Hollywood green aliens that only care about taking over earth, cause frankly that just jumps to conclusions.

Well, pretty much every alien out there will be a bit edgy around others, as historically, cultures have been a bit hostile to each other. But nonetheless, hostilities should deteriorate eventually, once we get over the fact that the alien life forms in question are quite different.
I'd say we count as some sort of alien, since anything of an alien nature to us, will find us alien.

To be honest, this kind of 'conjecture' needs some reasonably serious science behind it, & aliens are part of spore.
Science. Spore. Science & spore. S&S.
Not saying it isn't conjecture, but it has to be fuelled by fact for any viable hypotheses to form. The ones you get on SYFY are NOT what I'm talking about. I really mean viable.

Both the presence & lack of aliens are considered beliefs at this stage; all I'd like to say is that one of the two's a lot more probable.
We haven't even scanned all the planets in our galaxy for life, & there are several galaxies, & clouds, & superclouds.

As for the eyes, there might be some convergency if they have the same sort of star as we do, but then you do have a myriad of other factors in play. Whether we have any significance to the aliens depends on their agenda.
And how good they are at the sort of diplomacy that prevents the hardliners of Earth from going ballistic.

As they say, why are ET's eyes so big? Because he saw the amount of money people keep proposing to pour into the UK trident defence system.

It's all still pure guesswork based on the experience of what works for us as handed, bipedal mammals.

Would you need eyes if you lived someplace where you were always underground? Like C.J. Cherryh's Kiff perhaps? Or her Knnnnn? BTW, I talk with her via emails, and we've actually talked about Spore. She's been to the forum. It was sort of hilarious in a sad way.

Would you need hands if the entire habitable (for you) surface of you planet was liquid? And you had tentacles as delicate and precise as cephalopods?

Would one need to have a visible head? What if one reproduces like bedbugs? What if the "alien" is microbial? Mouse-sized?

I can come up with hundreds, if not thousands, of conjectures, but the truth is, we have very limited experience, and none of it with "actual" aliens.

There's no reason they should look like anything we'd recognize as living.

Definitely.

There are so many possible combinations: just don't expect certain designs to be viable; anyone remember when someone made the forum post about how Gliese 581C (or possibly G) would have red skies due to the red central star?
And how the star would give out much IR light, & any photosynthetic life was likely ot be black to harness this?
The article sparked my interest.

Alien life is a lot of conjecture, but it needs to involve some practical thinking. What-if situations can be insightful if you're being moderatley realistic. The hollywood stuff is way off, for the most part, for example.

For example, higher gravity would most likely lead to a lifeform less delicately built, & not too large, so that this lifeform can manuever in the high-gravity environment. The rest is up to conjecture, but don't expect any old alien that we may choose to conjecture to appear there. The more delicate ones, & the immense, will be in a bit of a pickle.
We know this form examining the heck of a hard time a whale has when washed up on a beach, or in a river. Remember the one that died in the river thames?

The situation is somewhat less conjecture-based, but pretty much with the same sort of guesswork involved, when we deal with dinosaurs & other fossil-based guesswork scenarios. We really just have their bones, imprints & other assets to go by (& the odd mummification).

But at least we know what they look like. With astrobiology, it involves a lot of guesswork & pondering, & many what-ifs, but many conjectures on alien life simply aren't convincing. Even astrobiology has standards.

In my opinion, S&S is where I can find people who are actually adept with science: a novice won't be helpful at all if I want to build a rational alien. Then again, the creator corner is the hub for all the creative ideas. Depends on what feedback you need.