What will real Aliens be like?
Alien Physiology
What will an alien look like? If you follow the viewpoint of most television sci-fi then all aliens will be men in rubber alien suits. The producers of Star Trek seem to think aliens are just like humans with little latex ridges on the noses or foreheads.
The reason for this anthropomorphism on TV is that it’s cheap. The alien in the Movie Alien was gross and ugly and we surly would never be able to discuss our new age feelings with such a creature. It cost the movie producers much more than a little latex on the bridge of an actors nose.
The truth is that we are much more likely to meet Sigourney Weavers’s alien than a Bajorran.
What kind of aliens will we meet in out wanderings in space? Will they be like us?
This can be answered in part by asking what kinds of animals have evolved intelligence here on earth?
The ratio of brain to body weight is a generalized way of looking at intelligence. It makes sense that a large brain will mean a higher intelligence. A large body needs a larger brain to control it so you have to allow that an elephant’s brain has more housekeeping to do than actual higher thought and might not be as smart as his large brain indicates.
Animals with the biggest brains are Whales, Elephants, Porpoises, Man, Chimpanzees, Baboons and Wolves. If you normalize the body weight, the order of size is Man, Baboon, Monkeys, Camels, Porpoises, Kangaroos and house cats. (I knew my cat was smart).
If you rank animals by human type intelligence tests, the large water mammals fall off the list and Horses, Pigs, Dogs, Ravens and Parrots move up the list. (Cats don’t sit still for tests.)
Some creatures have incredible memories. Surprising, the octopus has a large brain and in tests shows the ability to memorize things like the shapes and sizes of objects or the scent of another octopus. Octopus owners are amazed by the responsiveness of octopus.
Group creatures like swarms, flocks, schools and herds seem to have emergent properties which reflect communicated information that cause the group as a whole to display behavior which is smarter than any individual.
So what is the standard for earthly intelligence? Two legs don’t seem to be a requirement. Most smart animals walk on four legs. Birds and primates can walk upright. Birds do it because they have wings instead of arms. Man walks upright because he needs to carry things in his hands. Kangaroos hop upright because they are very strange creatures. Horses, pigs, wolves, dogs, camels and elephants walk on four legs because they need to be stable or need speed to survive.
The truth is that there is no body shape that easily connects to intelligence. On earth, multiple legs from 4 to 1000 was the standard until vertebrates started walking in the mud. After that, the four leg rule seems to have been cast in stone. We all descended from the first amphibious ancestors that learned to walk and inherited the 4 leg rule from them. This could have been six legs like insects or eight legs like spiders, or multiple legs like centipedes, but we started out with four legs and all our ancestors stuck with it. But insects and other polypod creatures are very successful. The two legged creatures are really four leggers with two of the legs adapted to other use.
Aliens will have just about any body configuration that we can conceive of if the earth is any guide. But what about physical attributes like eyes and noses and mouths and hands and thumbs?
An intelligent species will probably be able to manipulate the world with appendages. An intelligent species that can’t make tools won’t get to the stars. The hand is a good all purpose manipulator as is the octopus’s tentacles and the elephant’s trunk. Humans who lose the use of their hands get along fairly well with toes or lips. Who can forget the scene in the move “Freaks” where the armless and legless man rolls a cigarette and lights it using only his mouth? We can expect aliens to have hands or claws or tentacles or a trunk or a snaky body so that they can grasp things and make tools.
Will an alien have two eyes? Symmetry seems to be a standard of life on earth. Of all creatures that make our intelligence lists, only the octopus doesn’t display binary symmetry. He is symmetric, but has no obvious left and right sides. Octopus experts will probably correct me on this.
Binary symmetry – having a left and right side seems to be the right amount of redundancy. Lose the left hand and you still have a right hand. Loose the left eye and you still have the right eye. Two eyes also give us binary depth perception. More than two eyes would not be especially beneficial. Two hands let us grasp with one and manipulate with the other. Three hands would get in the way. The examples in nature that we have of more than 2 eyes are for creatures that have very simple eyes and need multiple receptors in order to make out changes in dark and light or nearby motion. Two seems like a probable number for most things like hands, ears, testes and nostrils.
Will aliens ever look like us? The answer is Probably not but there is a theory that there are only a few basic body types possible. The example that is always given is Dolphin, Shark and Ichthyosaurus. These are three animals with the same body types which are totally different kinds of creatures. One is a fish, the other a mammal and the last is a reptile. They look so much alike that a layman would not be able to tell them apart without years of watching the discovery channel under his belt.
Could it be that man is a basic type and that there would be a tendency for evolution to create intelligent beings with two arms and two legs and a head? Bipeds are rare on earth. Man walks upright because he probably had the need for speed while bringing food home to the family. He would pick up food in his arms and sprint on his hind legs to get home. A woman could pick up her infant child and run fast enough to save the both of them. This would also allow him to eventually use tools and would help in the development of useful hands. Thumbs would help him to climb trees and coincidentally to pick up large bones for use as clubs. Creatures that lived on plains on the edge of forests that previously lived in trees might develop as humans did.
It is much more likely that four legged animals with trunk like manipulators or extended lips or mouth parts would be the tool makers on any planet. Evolution wouldn’t make two legged creatures from scratch and they’d have to evolve from four leggers. It’s hard to think of that many scenarios where the four leggers would gain anything by going upright on two legs. The birds did it because they needed their wings. The Kangaroos did it for some unknown reason – but probably, like man, they needed speed while holding their young or food. It’s not impossible that we’ll meet bipeds, but not real likely.
How will aliens solve the problem of sex? Sex is a requirement for fast evolution. Traits are passed down from parent to child, but when there are two parents, the child can inherit from both of them. This spreads mutations around in a species far faster than can be done without sexual reproduction. It seems two sexes are sufficient and more would be redundant. Sex is a real requirement for the evolution of alien life. Whether there will be male-female type differentiation or another solution is up to your imagination.
One thing that I know will be different is alien sexuality. Humans have lips and breasts because they are mammals. The lips are used for sucking and the breasts are used to provide milk. This is a rather specific solution to the general problem of feeding young. The obvious solutions are for the parent to pre-chew food or even partially digest food and regurgitate it. Birds do this. Bees have complicate variations on this. The breast solution seems a little strange (although I personally like it).
Very few aliens will have breasts and lips and of those that do, the breasts might be located in armpits or in pouches on the stomach and they will not need large alien bras.
The male and female genitalia seem to be hard to explain away as being the obvious solution. All that is needed is a good way to get germinating material from here to there. On earth there are lots of complicated ways to do this. Pollen and bees springs to mind. Fish lay external eggs which are fertilized externally. There is often some kind of tool for placing sperm and some kind of receiving place for taking it in, but these are in no way similar to the human solution. The placement of our reproductive organs was set in stone for us millions of years ago and proved successful enough that there was little variation afterwards. An alien may have evolved differently and accidents of evolution could have placed the sexual organs at many interesting places.
Even if an alien walks erect and superficially looks like a humanoid, it will be very unlikely that your characters could have sex with such a creature.
The only time that you should use humanoid characters in your science fiction stories is if they are for TV or the movies. Sci-Fi (as opposed to SF which is the literature of Science Fiction) deals with unsophisticated audiences. The story line is usually a western or a war story with space or alien elements. The time it takes to develop explanations about alternative aliens is not available in the short format so it’s either evil beast-like alien or man-in-a-rubber-suit aliens. Sci-Fi likes female aliens with big breasts — by far the least likely alien we will ever meet – but at least it provides the men in the audience with something to watch when the space ships aren’t shooting at each other.
I dislike the reptile-as-alien bias, but, then again, therapods were bipedal too. If it weren’t for a cosmic collision 65mya, perhaps there’d still be non-avian dinosaurs, smaller versions, probably, that had plenty of time to develop intelligence.
So, assuming a similar course of evolution elsewhere, it doesn’t seem a stretch to me that there’d be a bipedal reptilian humanoid, probably with a prehensile tail (that third, in-the-way limb).
I’ve always figured that if man’s shape is basic (and I do, hey, I’m biased), so are the following:
* Light sensitive organs would be on top
* Olfactory/chemical sensory organs should be on top AND elsewhere (near the ground)
* Pressure/vibration sensory organs should be on top AND near the ground
* Nutrition intake should be on the upper half (let gravity do its magic)
* Excretory organs would be lower
* Communication organs would most likely be on the upper half
* I’ve always thought that the brain is in a weird spot. It’d make more sense to put it in an armored case in the middle of the body.
I figured a “body” with most of the digestive and nervous systems would make the core, supported by two limbs, and maybe a tail, with three appendages: “arms” and a “head” (or maybe combined into two limbs). The “head” would carry mostly sensory organs – two of them would be best! Reproductive organs on the limbs makes sense too, or maybe one or two more limbs for those.
The one problem with a trunk-like appendage leading to tool use and sapience is there would be, most likely, only one gripping appendage. This gives the advantage to a pair of arms with hands featuring opposable thumbs: two hands are better than one. Think of swinging a stick, a hammer, a sword, a baseball bat with one hand (or trunk) instead of two: major disadvantage. Now maybe an animal would evolve two trunk-like appendages to add stability to its tool use but that seems less likely to happen to me than a four legged animal rearing on its hind legs to free its forelimbs if only to reach for food high up in a tree like Sloths, Chalicotheres, Therizinosaurs, Giant Pandas, etc. have done; or a tree dwelling, four limbed animal returning to the ground with ready made hands built to explore the world that surrounds.
Good point. Two Trunks? I am on shaky ground here as far as saying the bipeds might not be common. As I think about it, two legs or four matters little. Two arms absolutely give an advantage as monkeys and apes have proved. I’ve seen raccoons do amazing things with their hands without thumbs and walking on four legs.
I would guess that aliens could easily have four legs. Thumbs would be helpful, but there are probably other gripping solutions that would work well. Trunks may or may not be a solution – not impossible, but probable?
I can hardly wait until the first alien shows up so we can see how right or wrong everyone is.
Though I enjoy coming up with funky aliens for my stories I am leaning towards convergent evolution for interstellar aliens in the real world, but as you said: ‘I can hardly wait until the first alien shows up so we can see how right or wrong everyone is.’ -So who knows. I could never have imagined a creature with the abilities of a pistol shrimp evolving, so maybe there is something really funky out there!
read Nivan’s Footfall for a wonderful description of a four legged two trunked alien, they had four digits each
No that such things would actually exist outside of Niven and Pournelle’s imagination. When I read it I felt that vegetarian herd animals would never evolve to the point where they would explore outer space, in the story, they did not. As far as I remember, they were engineered and did not create their own technology. Even Niven and Pournelle though these to be unlikely aliens, and they had to create a convoluted excuse for them.
I actually think that intelligent/sentient life will be humanoid/anthropoid.
I think these factors are important
Endo-Skeleton, which also indicates an upper size limitation – not too big, or the musculature will not support it. Can’t see an exo skelton working for a large life form.
Bipedal, with 2 (maybe 4) limbs adapted for manipulation – maybe a prehensile tail.
Lung-Type resperatory system needed for Oxygen/C02 interchange
Forward facing eyes, featuring stereoscopic vision – but maybe with other bat-senses, also
Diploid reproduction
Warm-blooded – definitely an advantage, but not necessary.
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I thought the book “Lucy” carried a very informative explanation on the way all these things work together.
You are probably correct, but this does not eliminate any alternatives.
Endo-Skeleton – correct for land animals, perhaps not for sea based life forms. Also “Mission of Gravity” type creatures, essentially lobsters, may require more complicated exoskeletons to operate in very high gravity and pressure.
Bipedal – Sea based fins, earth digger based? Airborne? Manipulaters should also include trunks as in elephants and tongues (think frog?). Insects have a variety of interesting claw and antenna configurations and lastly one might consider prehensile sex organs that do double duty as general manipulators (R. Crumb?).
Lung types – perhaps for earth type O2 based life, but water based need gills. Life on planets with higher partial pressure of oxygen would not require lungs, but could absorb through skin or gills. If life form gets energy from other than Krebs cycle, there might be need to gather sulfates, Nitrates or phosphates for energy, as in anaerobic bacteria. Think of Hal Clement’s Nitrogen Fix.
Forward facing eyes – probably unless bat like sonar is used, even then, binary sonar would be better. Underground creatures or ones on the bottom of the sea or in caves do not need to see at all.
Warm blooded would be an advantage in climates that vary in temperature, but may not be needed on planets where the axis was perpendicular to the sun and the orbits did not vary. Then there would be no seasons.
I think that humanoid will be very common, but there will be some odd cases out there. The exceptions might not be uncommon, depending on how common Earth type planets are.
Can’t believe how many typos I get in there.
It’s probably my humanoid thinking, but I struggle to believe that animals with exo-skeletons, or marine-based, or, to be honest those without “strong” dextrous manipulation skills would be able to develop.
Not sure about the Oxygen breathing. It just seems to me that the respiration equation, seems so fundamental and important to all this.
C6 H12 O6 + 6O2 = 6H2O + 6CO2
“Man walks upright because he needs to carry things in his hands”
Well, no, Man can carry things in his hands because he walks upright. Wrong end of telescope, I think
I suspect ETIs capable of technological civilisation will be essentially humanoid. You need a body plan which provides binocular vision, grasping & manipulating appendages and, crucially, with none of the advantages that other plans give – why bother evolving intelligence if you can simply outrun any predator or run down any prey? Intelligent creatures have evolved intelligence as an alternative to high speed, massive strength, etc., so they’re pretty likely to be slow, upright creatures.
Intelligence needs to manipulate tools, but also fire. Therefore, big shaggy creatures with lots of fat and fur in a cold climate are unlikely to evolve expensive intelligence because they don’t need it to survive. Skinny naked creatures, on the other hand, will need fire.
One thing to be careful about is that you response is very earth-centric. It is quite possible that life could develop on warm planets or very cold planets or planets where a flame will not be possible. Fire might not be a requirement. If there were life forms that developed on methane planets and used a different metabolism, then fire, as we know it, would not be an option. Smelting of metals might be accomplished in volcanoes or using solar mirrors. Not all planets, and perhaps few, with intelligent life, will be like our Earth. I expect that intelligent life might arise for many reasons on many different types of worlds.
“It is quite possible that life could develop on warm planets or very cold planets or planets where a flame will not be possible”
Indeed, but probably not intelligent life and certainly not technological intelligence.
“Fire might not be a requirement”
It is, at least for technology. Ore smelting, alloying, combustion etc., are essentials for that and all require manipulation of fire. You can’t get from jungle to spaceship without fire.
“Smelting of metals might be accomplished in volcanoes or using solar mirrors”
Only if you first know how to smelt, which means somehow you have to figure out that concentrated heat applied with control can smelt ores. Since solar mirrors don’t occur in nature and since volcanoes cannot be controlled by bronze age technology, you beg the question here – how can you get to building solar concentrators without first working out the effects of concentrated, controlled heat energy? You cannot.
“Not all planets, and perhaps few, with intelligent life, will be like our Earth”
Intelligent life is one thing. Intelligent, tool-using, technological life which can build, say, steam engines or spacecraft, is quite another.
The planet may not be entirely like ours, but I doubt if there is a feasible biochemistry for highly complex life other than the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen system, so the gross environment, IMO, is not going to be radically different. You can talk of silicon life, for example, but the environmental conditions which support that may prohibit the development of other precursors of technological civilisation.
Convergent evolution – the Tu144 didn’t look like Concorde because the Soviets stole the plans, but because that’s pretty much what a supersonic airliner needs to look like. Intelligent tool-using technological civilisations are likely, from what we know, to be made up of generally humanoid creatures because such a body plan forces the development of abstract thought, planning, cooperation, etc., simply because speed of flight or ferocity of might are not viable options. You will not get, for example, a race of intelligent technological creatures which are capable of flying unaided, because the ability to fly negates the need to develop technology. Basic tool use, yes, and we see that here, but not technology – simply no need.
Technological intelligence is more than the ability to hold a tool. It requires the NEED to hold and, crucially, develop tools because the unaided creature finds it hard to manage.
Rule of thumb: It it looks like an actor in a rubber suit, it is not a real alien.
Y’see the thing here is that we are all firstly assuming that tools and discoveries would be made based on the senses we ourselves and many lifeforms on earth posses.
But technology is as much a result of how we experience the world as it is a result of ‘solution to problem’
It is IMO entirely consistent with technological development for a species to perceive MORE than we do with different sense and still not even be aware they are living on a spheroid in a solar system with an actual star until they accidentally come across this information..
Consider the senses of a creature which evolves on the dark side of a tidally locked planet…. or the senses of one on the light side.
for sure they might have light reception as a sense… but are we sure they would see light… they might hear it? or small it? or perceive it totally differently using a sensory organ and mental model we simply don’t have. They might be able to feel how hard the ground id three feet in front of them without touching it because this is what their (eyes?) which really aren’t eyes tell them.
So their progression is absolutely not solely linked to their physiology, because regardless of how they see the world it will still be there acting on them… I accept that… but it is unlikely to be hindered by it…and their invention’ should they reach that stage will be solutions to ‘their’ problems. If they don’t see a star in the sky called a sun… or if they don’t have day and night, or winter summer etc. then they don’t have any of the accompanying problems to resolve.
their evolution might follow this pattern too… what use of arms in a world where manipulation of tools is a lot easier and not contained by the same gravity. What use of computers if one evolved to be able to network with other members of the same species. What us is there of hearing if the atmosphere is less dense….
I feel we are anthropomorphisizing the issues too… not just the physiology.
Heres a fast example… we are multi celled creatures… we derive intelligence by being essentially a super-swarm… a very well advanced super-swarm.
Now what if that swarm was less dense that communicated from cell to cell using light…or chemical messages…or sound… or electromagnetism… and individual who needs no appendages and can manipulate whatever they like with no arms or legs because they are essentially a ball of gas consisting of billions of celles which just happen to be further apart than ours will a looser infrastructure.