Really alien aliens

Calum Douglas said:
Hive mind things always seemed quite plausible, as you don't need a huge or complex physical body to do very extraordinary things. I`m pretty sure Bees are in unison smarter than several actual people I`ve met, and I have private suspicions that the way they communicate and so on (if you include things like genetic memory) is a lot more involved than just the waggling dances they`re known to do.
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Just a bit of historical precedent on such speculation, from 1905:

https://onemorelibrary.com/index.ph...ish-literature-172/the-empire-of-the-ants-427
 
In defence of HP Lovecraft...

Lovecraft is usually thought of as a pure fantasist (specifically, of the Weird), but he was a keen amateur science journalist and while many of his imaginary beings seem supernatural, in his later writing he turned a little more to science fiction in that his descriptions of explicitly extraterrestrial (rather than supernatural) beings are consciously more clinical and strive to give a logic to their forms, however strange they may seem.

He almost certainly would have seen a copy of Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur / Artworks of Nature (1904) and the Elder Things from 'At the Mountains of Madness', the Mi-Go from 'The Whisperer in Darkness', and the Great Race of Yith from 'The Shadow Out of Time' seem to have been inspired by it, such as the illustrations of echinoderms and siphonophores.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur
(You can google illustrations of Lovecraft's ETs yourself. I'm very disappointed in most attempts to illustrate them - they're usually crude, graceless assemblages of parts, taking his itemised descriptions too literally and not integrating them.)
 

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Forget visiting dinosaurs—if I had a Time Machine…I’d take HPL back to 1982 for the first screening of THE THING.
 
publiusr said:
Forget visiting dinosaurs—if I had a Time Machine…I’d take HPL back to 1982 for the first screening of THE THING.
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Seems just a tad trivial to me to simply want to re-experience a sensationalist schlock movie premiere. The only direction I would ever take a truly functional time machine would be going forward - the past is the past, but the future holds everything, from next week's lottery numbers :) to humanity's fate at large - climate change, pandemics, earthquakes, demagogues/mass manipulators, and our species reactions thereto, including potential geo/bioengineering and/or spreading our seeds/seedlings throughout our solar system and who knows how much further out. I think the biggest regret I will have on the day that I die (other than perhaps not getting enough high strength painkiller, if I'm even sufficiently conscious to reflect on that fact at that time) will be missing out on what will happen on the day thereafter, and the next day, and so on...
 
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martinbayer said:
Seems just a tad trivial to me to simply want to re-experience a sensationalist schlock movie premiere. The only direction I would ever take a truly functional time machine would be going forward - the past is the past, but the future holds everything, from next week's lottery numbers :) to humanity's fate at large - climate change, pandemics, earthquakes, demagogues/mass manipulators, and our species reactions thereto, including potential geo/bioengineering and/or spreading our seeds/seedlings throughout our solar system and who knows how much further out. I think the biggest regret I will have on the day that I die (other than perhaps not getting enough high strength painkiller, if I'm even sufficiently conscious to reflect on that fact at that time) will be missing out on what will happen on the day thereafter, and the next day, and so on...
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A very good reason not to choose a one-way trip to the distant past is dentists. Another is toilet paper. Temporary trips though... well there is so much that has been lost, from the destruction of the library of Alexandria to the untold generations and culture before. The sentimental side of me wants those lives to be discovered. Otherwise, forwards - although I'd cross my fingers.
 
martinbayer said:
but the future holds everything, from next week's lottery numbers :) to humanity's fate at large
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We’ll, why not take already known number and buy ticket in the past.

Why not move to the past and kill Hitler and Stalin. Or just nuke Rome around Julius Caesar and completely fuck up West Europe Domination. Or just hit Alexander the Great. Or Ebola the China ? The risk of using bioweapon till ca. 15-century is relatively low due to long travel times.
 
Antonio said:
We're already going off topic here.
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Total off Topic here
we talk about Aliens

Alex Ries made very intrigue alien design the birrin
Gc9gnvhbUAEVEwb
Gc6f7miaAAEWRLv
 
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Hanz2k said:
We’ll, why not take already known number and buy ticket in the past.

Why not move to the past and kill Hitler and Stalin. Or just nuke Rome around Julius Caesar and completely fuck up West Europe Domination. Or just hit Alexander the Great. Or Ebola the China ? The risk of using bioweapon till ca. 15-century is relatively low due to long travel times.
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Because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox
 
Reading Paul Gilster's Centauri Dreams blog's latest post by a guest writer (Michael Chorost) I came across the following: "When I started, I knew I wanted the aliens to be really alien." That, naturally, rung a bell albeit I haven't followed the discussion I did remember the title of this thread scrolling about among others on my screen. So, I hope it adds something to everything that's already been conversed about here.

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/05/09/writing-a-social-insect-civilization/
My immediate impressions were many, among them that current data brokers, social media and AI corporations and/or the oligarchs behind them might as well treat humanity as hives of social insects for all their practices and some of their aims. Fortunately Chorost has taken the time (a lot of it, actually) to explore the subject further still.
 
UpForce said:
Reading Paul Gilster's Centauri Dreams blog's latest post by a guest writer (Michael Chorost) I came across the following: "When I started, I knew I wanted the aliens to be really alien." That, naturally, rung a bell albeit I haven't followed the discussion I did remember the title of this thread scrolling about among others on my screen. So, I hope it adds something to everything that's already been conversed about here.

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/05/09/writing-a-social-insect-civilization/
My immediate impressions were many, among them that current data brokers, social media and AI corporations and/or the oligarchs behind them might as well treat humanity as hives of social insects for all their practices and some of their aims. Fortunately Chorost has taken the time (a lot of it, actually) to explore the subject further still.
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I suspect there are some tech bros who would like that, given that they'd be the ones in charge. Of course, that means they've not been paying attention in biology class. Part of being eusocial is only the queens reproduce, but related to that is eusocial systems are not top-down hierarchies: The queen is just a specialist egg factory. And, of course, in hymenoptera the males are essentially parasites until their one and only chance to reproduce. After sex, drones die.
 
1635yankee said:
I suspect there are some tech bros who would like that, given that they'd be the ones in charge. Of course, that means they've not been paying attention in biology class. Part of being eusocial is only the queens reproduce, but related to that is eusocial systems are not top-down hierarchies: The queen is just a specialist egg factory. And, of course, in hymenoptera the males are essentially parasites until their one and only chance to reproduce. After sex, drones die.
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Such is anthropomorphism - it appropriates the nonhuman and retrofits it to support existing prejudices.
 
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The humanoid form is the evolutionary result of millions of unrepeatable random changes in any other extraterrestrial ecology.

We have four limbs by chance, inherited from fish that looked nothing like us. In most terrestrial species they became four-legged and that was the end of evolution, in flying species the upper pair was transformed into wings with a high price in the rest of the body and their future capacities for evolution, in apes and chameleons they were transformed into prehensile limbs for life in the trees and there we could continue even if the Rift Valley had not dried up the part of the eastern Africa. We came down from the trees to live among the tall grasses of the savannah and needed to stand up frequently as meerkats do to control predators. That made us bipedal, freeing up the hands to build things, we inherited from life in the trees the stereoscopic vision to measure the jumps (that we later use to throw stones) and retinas capable of distinguishing ripe fruits by their color, intelligence was only a trick of the brain to avoid extinction due to a volcanic eruption that was about to exterminate us.

How was that sequence going to be repeated in Beta Reticuli 12 A?

Totally impossible, for that reason the Reticulians have the appearance of five-meter blue caterpillars with the ancient chelicerae transformed into manipulative organs with tendrils.

Now we must shoot a science fiction episode as cheaply as possible because there is no money for a second season and the producers insist on social issues to receive aid. We have already exhausted all the mental, psychological and time travel scenarios, trials, kidnappings, caves and abandoned mines and breakdowns in all the ship's systems based on pyrotechnics and smoke, artificial fog... What do we have left?... Our ship is captured by a highly advanced extraterrestrial species against which our technology is powerless (as always). But there is no money for another interior decoration and much less for space suits. What is left? Four guys with rubber masks (which don't look like those in other series that have already been patented).

At least Kubrick's monkeys tried to walk on all fours from time to time.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/21/...o-early-human-migration-africa-scn/index.html
 

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My Take on Matter

The first contact with Delta Triangulians was confusing.
It was not that they landed in Bugarach a small town in Souther France, or that they ignored any Officials.
It is way they look: totally like tall humans with small difference like 12 fingers and toes.

Much later it became clear why they look so human, there are modified Humans used by Aliens !
Delta Triangulians are symbionts worms who live inside their host bodies.
In there evolution and build up to civilisation they had used various host,
Most used on there Home world was anlog to the Cahlicotherium a large plant eater.
how ever this Host capacity was limited for various reason.

As the Delta Triangulians began explore the stars, they discover Earth around 10000 years ago.
There discovery of Humans was unexpected surprise.
While primitiv at begin of civilisation, humans were far superior being as the Cahlicotherium Host.
Color view, better brains, hands with fine fingers, higher metabolism rate and omnivore.

For Delta Triangulians was the human a gift from heaven.
They send several expedition to make research on Human as use for Host
In Base at place that later known as Pic de Bugarach in South France around 8000 BC.
They manage after trail and error, to create biodroids version of human as perfect host.

you could say they came as God from stars, only to return to the Stars as Human.

However this revelation will influence the relation between Humans and Delta Triangulians is unclear for moment...
 
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Michel Van said:
My Take on Matter

The first contact with Delta Triangulians was confusing.
It was not that they landed in Bugarach a small town in Souther France, or that they ignored any Officials.
It is way they look: totally like tall humans with small difference like 12 fingers and toes...
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Interesting than you alit upon a Chalicotherium analogue for the original host. In the RW Chalicotherium, the manus and pes were reduced to three toes each. That is the direction of tetrapod evolution.

In other words, rather than sprouting additional fingers and toes over that comparatively brief 10,000 years of evolution, your "modified Humans" would be far more likely to have shed a few digits.
 
Evolutionary pressure generates the adaptation of the organism, intelligence to adapt reality to the organism, or extinction. It is not a good idea to lose your hands to fly, it is preferable to use your hands to build airplanes.

Alien intelligence must necessarily emerge for the same reason: to defend itself from a hostile environment by mechanical means, generating technology.

But the universe is stranger than we can imagine and there can be thousands of types of intelligences out there that we cannot imagine, but we must work with what we have without resorting to the gods.

Our industrial revolution is only 265 years old, we have only used radio for a hundred years and it is already beginning to be in disuse compared to fiber optics, we are about to bend the knee of the exponential curve.

In our galaxy there may be technological civilizations with billions of years of experience and the fact that they have not become extinct shows that intelligence always defeats nature.

In my opinion, the existential reason for any intelligence consists of survival at any price, and once a certain technological level has been reached, this existential reason can take two paths: the perfection of the biological organism until it becomes practically immortal, or the transfer of consciousness to a computational system that transcends biology.

I would look for ET living in its own virtual universe in the cold, dust-free regions located well south of the galactic plane, far from the cycles of creation and destruction.

The big question isn't what form ET will take, but whether it has a sense of humor... Maybe one of them is reading this.
 
Justo Miranda said:
Evolutionary pressure generates the adaptation of the organism, intelligence to adapt reality to the organism, or extinction. It is not a good idea to lose your hands to fly, it is preferable to use your hands to build airplanes.
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I understand the figure of speech aspect but, really, ideation plays no part in evolution whatsoever.
 
Justo Miranda said:
I have been convinced by Ray Kurzweil's hypothesis about Singularity.

It seems to me quite feasible that after reaching a certain technological level an intelligent species disappears, but not because it becomes extinct but because it ascends to another plane of knowledge. I'm not talking about religion, but about a new kind of technology so subtle that it leaves no identifiable archaeological traces.

I prefer to think that most of the disappeared civilizations in your stories have managed to achieve a better future.
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A variant of that, would be the Singularity occurs and AI sees people as both irrelevant and obsolete. The AI lifeform simply takes whatever it needs and leaves the planet for a bigger universe--possibly to find other life like itself. It might decide by one means or another to ensure that it's not found out by the--to it--irrelevant and obsolete species so it takes care of business. That could be anything from annihilation to introduction of some means to render the species incapable of doing anything about, or to, the AI.
 
Apophenia said:
I understand the figure of speech aspect but, really, ideation plays no part in evolution whatsoever.
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That's a good question that the latest research in brain mapping may be able to answer.

In my opinion, technological intelligence arose when the adaptation of organisms to changes is not possible, or the change is too rapid and, among the millions of species that have become extinct, there was one, us, that found by chance the way to modify the environment to its benefit instead of suffering the consequences of change.

It's purely speculative, but in addition to binocular vision, bipedalism, and opposable thumb, I believe omnivorous feeding helped create a more flexible brain: color image interpretation for fruit, motion sensors for small prey and, perhaps, a limited ability to anticipate events by creating future images in the mind and experimenting with them. Calculating trajectories to throw an object or capture something on the fly requires complex equations that a child's brain ignores when it catches a ball... how does it do it?

Is it the same mechanism as a frog or bat when catching insects on the fly?

Is it the same mechanism that chimpanzees use at the zoo when they throw feces at tourists?

Or is it something else?

We are very close to knowing it, we live in interesting times, as the Chinese curse says.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
A variant of that, would be the Singularity occurs and AI sees people as both irrelevant and obsolete. The AI lifeform simply takes whatever it needs and leaves the planet for a bigger universe--possibly to find other life like itself. It might decide by one means or another to ensure that it's not found out by the--to it--irrelevant and obsolete species so it takes care of business. That could be anything from annihilation to introduction of some means to render the species incapable of doing anything about, or to, the AI.
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That hypothesis has a lot of merit: life always finds its way (Jurassic Park) and has been used successfully in numerous science fiction works (Berserkers).

Will AI have the arrogance of a teenager and contempt for the old?

Will he be ashamed of the limitations of his creators?

Humans in general do not, baby boomers are a burden on youth, and the pogroms of the elderly have not (yet) begun, but AI is inhuman by definition and no one knows how runaway exponential intelligence will act. Maybe she's so smart that she does huge stupid things and annihilates herself, along with us.

A good pretext for the Luddites who want to send us back to the fourteenth century.
 
Justo Miranda said:
That's a good question that the latest research in brain mapping may be able to answer...
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Brain mapping will not be able to contribute much to the field. Gene mapping and good old fashion palæontology offer more. The point I was trying to make is that consciousness plays no part in physical evolution. That was in response to the notion of a non-teratogenetic increase in digits.

The fossil record alone show that reduction of digits is the rule in tertrapod evolution. Tiktaalik (375 Mya) shows both lepidotrichia (dermal) and endochondral (ossified) skeletal components to the manus. But, 10 Million years later, the manus of Acanthostega gunnari shows endochondral skeleton parts only (with lepidotrichia gone forever). Stem-tetrapods like Acanthostega had a polydactylous manus - usually with 7 or 8 digits. But the spread of those digits wasn't uniform - what we call digits II-to-V spread in one direction, while Digit I and the others diverged.

A gap in the tetrapod fossil record follows but, by 350 Mya, all tetrapods were pentadactyl. [1] This seems to be the result of Hox genes 'turning off' all digit development beyond what we call Digit I. In other words, our thumb (Digit I) stands by itself - away from II-to-V - because, in the late Devonian, Hox genes stopped triggering development of the 6th, 7th, and/or 8th digits associated with Digit I. That said, note that modern radial polydactyly (like tibial polydactyly) is not an evolution (or re-evolution of the ancient form), it is simply a developmental error.

____________________________________________

[1] A seriously weird exception may be the western clawed frog Xenopus tropicalis which have "claw-associated protrusion" nubbins on their pes that are claimed to be the vestige of a sixth digit.
 
Justo Miranda said:
In our galaxy there may be technological civilizations with billions of years of experience and the fact that they have not become extinct shows that intelligence always defeats nature.
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I would love for you to be right, but the "fact" you boldly claim above is *PURE* speculation, not proven reality.
 
Apophenia said:
Brain mapping will not be able to contribute much to the field. Gene mapping and good old fashion palæontology offer more. The point I was trying to make is that consciousness plays no part in physical evolution. That was in response to the notion of a non-teratogenetic increase in digits.

The fossil record alone show that reduction of digits is the rule in tertrapod evolution. Tiktaalik (375 Mya) shows both lepidotrichia (dermal) and endochondral (ossified) skeletal components to the manus. But, 10 Million years later, the manus of Acanthostega gunnari shows endochondral skeleton parts only (with lepidotrichia gone forever). Stem-tetrapods like Acanthostega had a polydactylous manus - usually with 7 or 8 digits. But the spread of those digits wasn't uniform - what we call digits II-to-V spread in one direction, while Digit I and the others diverged.

A gap in the tetrapod fossil record follows but, by 350 Mya, all tetrapods were pentadactyl. [1] This seems to be the result of Hox genes 'turning off' all digit development beyond what we call Digit I. In other words, our thumb (Digit I) stands by itself - away from II-to-V - because, in the late Devonian, Hox genes stopped triggering development of the 6th, 7th, and/or 8th digits associated with Digit I. That said, note that modern radial polydactyly (like tibial polydactyly) is not an evolution (or re-evolution of the ancient form), it is simply a developmental error.

____________________________________________

[1] A seriously weird exception may be the western clawed frog Xenopus tropicalis which have "claw-associated protrusion" nubbins on their pes that are claimed to be the vestige of a sixth digit.
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I agree that consciousness and technological intelligence play no role in physical evolution, except for slow muscle degradation due to lack of use, reduction in the size of jaws and associated musculature, etc.

I like the term "developmental error" that you use, can it be interpreted as an unfortunate mutation?, does the word "error" mean that there is a predetermined ideal design that is not fulfilled in some cases?, an evolutionary setback?, are we a lucky mutation or a "developmental error" for not having become extinct when the Toba volcano erupted?, is intelligence a punishment for not having become extinct in favor of other species?, Are we using the resources that do not correspond to us in the original script of evolution?

As always in scientific discussions, any attempt at a solution only raises more fascinating questions.

Thank you for your feedback
 
Justo Miranda said:
In my opinion, technological intelligence arose when the adaptation of organisms to changes is not possible, or the change is too rapid and, among the millions of species that have become extinct, there was one, us, that found by chance the way to modify the environment to its benefit instead of suffering the consequences of change.
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I get the feeling that we might not be doing as well as we think.

We have definitely modified our environment, yet I think we are going to suffer the consequences of that change big time.

Regards,
 
Halcyon66 said:
I get the feeling that we might not be doing as well as we think.

We have definitely modified our environment, yet I think we are going to suffer the consequences of that change big time.

Regards,
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But there is an important difference between dying miserably from a natural phenomenon, without knowing what's killing you, and having the opportunity to direct our own destiny. We also do a lot of things well, just two hundred years ago people died from an infection in the knuckles of the hand and life expectancy was only 37 years, the same as in King Tut's Egypt. For better or for worse we will be what we want to be, but there are only two options: ashes or gods.:)
 
Two options?

I think your forgetting the "Drax Industries" option.

AKA the do over ;)

Regards,
 
Halcyon66 said:
Two options?

I think your forgetting the "Drax Industries" option.

AKA the do over ;)

Regards,
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In the 007 movie, the Drax option consists of exterminating all the "poor and ugly" people on the planet, while the future gods watch the massacre from an orbital Olympus, it is the same option: gods or ashes.
 

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