I read some blogpost, here: http://ufor.blogspot.com/2008/11/ufo...t-strange.html

It's about how alien aliens must be. Triangular forms etc are too earthly.

Not that I know that humdrum triangular UFOs with banal blinking lights are from other planets, I just want to dispute the idea that aliens must be alien.

Sure there should be lots of truly exotic stuff out there, but vehicles and vehicle-building beings from a probably rocky planet - I don't think they have to be that otherwordly at all. An intelligence like the one in the movie "Solaris" , yes that's alien, but "greys"...no, not very exotic.

I remember how the Moon was depicted before Apollo 11, for instance in "2001 - a Space Odyssey". That 2001-Moon was a lot more overtly exotic and strange and mysterious and alien than the real Moon turned out to be. Not just because of the monolith. I mean in the sense of general perception, the scenery and all that, I don't mean in any sense of unexpected scientific discoveries (which are to be made on earth too).

I think there are two ditches here, one implicating a projection of ourselves on aliens. A projection of Americans in may cases: Landing on the White House lawn and asking "Take us to your leader". The other ditch is about doing possible aliens so strange so that they do not even use triangular or round or any other earth-known shapes, or that our mathematics and logics doesn't apply to them at all.

If they make nuts-and-bolts ships I think they resemble us quite a bit, maybe even to the point of disappointment.

It seems very unlikely to me that an intelligent alien species will resemble us very much. Far too many possibilities exist in evolution and planetology for very similar species to evolve twice.

All that you need for an intelligent alien is a processing substrate, a set of sensors and a set of manipulators to be linked together somehow; this combination might emerge in a number of ways, and we can't expect that the specific combination that has emerged on our world is repeated elsewhere.

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The argument put forward in the book 'Evolving the Alien' by Stewart & Cohen is a very good one.

In all probablility there are two kinds of characteritics which any particular intelligent alien species might possess; the universal ones, or more probably the near-universal ones, such as brains, appendages, limbs, bilateral symmetry, remote sensing and so on, and ones, and parochial ones which have only evolved as a result of chance evolution on a particular world, such as the human jaw, the human skull, the human throat and the human hand. I would suggest that even upright bipedalism is relatively rare on other worlds, as it has only evolved twice on our own world (hominids and penguins).

The universal/parochial argument is given some space here on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrate...and_morphology

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"I would suggest that even upright bipedalism is relatively rare on other worlds, as it has only evolved twice on our own world (hominids and penguins)."

Yes, it might be rare, as technological civilizations ("") might be rare. But if a species is supposed to manipulate things (necessary for developing tools and tehnology) shouldn't they have fairly manipulation-specialised extremities then?

Absolutely.
But, it seems to me that the structure and disposition of those appendages might be almost infinitely varied, according to the evolutionary path that led to the emergence of that species.

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Ive always been fascinated by the idea of intelligence residing in some sort of plant/fungal species. Say you are an old, wise race, and you want to preserve your knowledge and spread it throughout the galaxy, to eventually encounter other planets/species. Best way to do this? Incorporate your knowledge into the genome of of say a fungal species. Spores have an organic shell that approaches an almost metallic density, could easily propagate to the edge of an atmosphere through Brownian motion, to be pushed away by the solar wind.

Someone once said to me, 'Its not about finding ET's, its about recognizing them'.

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Not to mention that fungi are known to survive in almost all environments on earth, including the recent discovery of fungi growing INSIDE the Chernobyl reactor housing. They think they were feeding off of the radiation.

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"In the end the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity."- Fritjof Capra

www.gonzoscience.com

Converting intelligence into fungus? That sounds similar to something Karl Schroeder wrote recently. He was wondering if digital computation and massive computers might be abandoned by advanced civilisations in favour of analogue computing and partial programs; biological systems can use non-digital methods to do remarkable calculations, so the most advanced computational systems might resemble ecosystems.
http://www.kschroeder.com/weblog/arc...-civilizations.

If we find a world covered in forests we should look carefully into the possibility that the forest is really a computational matrix of some sort.

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Even if you start with a quadruped and reappropriate the forelimbs for manipulation, there's no reason you'd end up with an upright biped. You'll note that most bipeds on earth hold their spines closer to horizontal.

This, incidentally, is one of the reasons the "dinosauroid" is silly; it's supposedly upright because of the need to place the big heavy brain above the feet, but other bipedal dinosaurs with big heavy heads (eg. T. rex) solve the balance issue simply by retaining a heavy tail.

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I'm very sceptical of intelligent fungi or plants. "Intelligent" in a kind of metaphysical way maybe - that everything might be conscious / part of a greater consciousness - but not in the usual sense.

Why should a plant need intelligence? Maybe if the plant had to move around to find whatever it needs, and furthermore if it's food was moving around too, so that the plant had to invent strategies, timing, think-ahead, imagining the future behavior of it's food so that it could at the right spot in the right time.

Such plants would be animals, even if they breathed O2 and emitted CO2.

If aliens exist i think they will look remarkably humanoid. I dont buy this idea about intelligent plants or other exotic ideas.

If we look at human ancestry through primates, the development from the first rat-like mamal to humans was relatively quick. The Dynosaurs which dominated the world for a much longer time never developed into a species with human-like intelligence. On the other hand humans and neanderthals both evolved in paralell from the same ancestry.

This may not be proof as such but i think it indicates that advanced intelligence as evolved in humans needs specific physical and enviromental parameters to be met.

I think this rules out the idea that advanced intelligence will come in all shapes and sizes.

Well, you may be right; but that means there will be almost no intelligent aliens anywhere (which would explain the Fermi Paradox for sure).

Consider- there are no primates anywhere else in the universe. If by some strange chance a class of organisms has evolved that resembles primates anywhere else in the universe they will be subtly different, since they evolved from mammal-like creatures on a different world.

There are no mammals anywhere else in the universe. If by some strange chance a class of organisms has evolved that resembles mammals anywhere else in the universe they will be subtly different, since they evolved from creatures that resembled tetrapod vertebrates on a different world.

There are no tetrapod vertebrates anywhere else in the universe. If by some strange chance a class of organisms has evolved that resembles tetrapod vertebrates anywhere else in the universe they will be subtly different, since they evolved from bony-fish-like creatures on a different world.

There are no bony fish anywhere else in the universe. If by some strange chance a class of organisms has evolved that resembles bony fish anywhere else in the universe they will be subtly different, since they evolved from chordate-like creatures on a different world.

And so on. If intelligence can only emerge in creatures that resemble humans it will be very, very, very rare indeed.

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Remember, toothdust is talking about deliberately bioengineered "intelligent plants", not naturally evolved ones.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Yes, you are basically right. Again, say you are an very old, very wise intelligent race, and for whatever reasons you decide that you want to preserve the knowledge you have attained for as long as possible, maybe even forever. Building a monolith or some other kind of structure would be hopelessly inefficient, not to mention very few other intelligent species would ever encounter it.

Now by coding your knowledge into a fungus (lets assume here that fungus like life is common) this would have many advantages:

1) You can pack A LOT of information into DNA. Every cell in our bodies has the bio-information going back billions of years.

2) It would be impossible to erase this knowledge once it was loose in the galaxy. Say these spores are in fact able to percolate throughout the stars, and inhabit other worlds. An entire planet would have to be destroyed for this knowledge to be erased, but only erased locally. Chances are it would encounter many, many worlds.

3) As I said in a previous post, fungi are extremely adaptable, so would be good candidate for this type of mission.

Teabinge: I'm very sceptical of intelligent fungi or plants. "Intelligent" in a kind of metaphysical way maybe - that everything might be conscious / part of a greater consciousness - but not in the usual sense.

As we rightly should be skeptical. But it is also fatally anthropocentric to think that all other intelligence out there will be recognizable. Given the strange nature of reality and th universe in general, coupled with the fact that we are but a fledgling intelligent species, that we should not rule out any possibility, while keeping around a hefty level of skepticism.

I do agree with you, though, that nature is inherently intelligent.

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"In the end the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity."- Fritjof Capra

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Good article. I agree that truly advanced species would tend to live in a harmonious way with their own natural environment. We ourselves are even beginning to go down that same path. The green revolution is just the tip of the iceberg.

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"In the end the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity."- Fritjof Capra

www.gonzoscience.com

I'm not so sure another biped isn't evolving as we speak...see:http://images.google.com/imgres?imgu...%3Den%26sa%3DN

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They are 'facultative bipeds'...

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I do not know the scientific word for it (convergence?) but, for instance, a fish, an ichtyosaurus and a dolphin resembles each other quite a lot, although also differing in some respects. The environment and the functions needed to survive in the environment plus certain aspects of "biofunctional economy" and logic makes these creatures from very different branches of "the tree of life" to look and to function similar to each other.

Of course, these creatures are all earth-creatures and probably they have a common origin, but my idea is that aliens coming with nut-and-bolts ships have a lot in common with us.

That is not to say they look "human". But not unimaginably exotic either.

Of course, invented /artificial intelligent life could be another matter. It could be a giant cloud of interacting bio-nano-quantum-computers in multiple Hilbert spaces.

If a nuts and bolts ship were to show up, I would guess that the creatures who built it at least have opposable digits. Could be a mammal of sorts, or an insectoid.

It could be a giant cloud of interacting bio-nano-quantum-computers in multiple Hilbert spaces.

Reminds me of the intelligent cloud from the movie "Virus". Scary.

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"In the end the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity."- Fritjof Capra

www.gonzoscience.com

An example would be a life form that has evolved with a filtration system, not dissimilar to gills or perhaps even a full body gas diffusion system, and to have evolved without support of a planetary body. Its ecosystem being interstellar medium, taking in their necessary living requirements/nutrition directly. It certainly wouldn't look or act human. And within such a thought experiment, it's hard to not imagine that perhaps such a thing would be a candidate for evolution in other environments as well while gravity of celestial bodies slowly depleted needed resources for survival.

Our minds like to put human qualities on anything we encounter, to try to recognize a union, to attempt to understand it's existence, and to make ourselves feel better and less alone. Alien life doesn't have to be completely alien, but unless they originated from Earth or the same microbes that travelled to Earth to plant the seed, it's certainly more likely than not [that alien life, has to be alien].

Some very valid points.

If we take a nuts 'n' bolts intelligent race that has the capacity to fly between stars (as suggested in the OP) as our "starting point", there are going to be some "givens" and some "distinctly optionals".

They would have some means of manipulating their environment, making/using tools (of considerable intricacy) which probably is going to involve slender, flexible opposable digits of some sort - though the number they have is open to a lot of latitude, say 3 as a bare minimum up to however many they can fit at the end of their manipulative appendages without them getting in the way of one another.

Number of limbs is optional - no reason they couldn't have 6, 8 or 12 limbs with anything from 2 to 8 manipulative appendages. I'd assume a minimum of 2 of said manipulators in order to handle the larger jobs.

They would consume some kind of food which, assuming carbon-based life and a decent-sized creature (anything larger than a mouse) is going to involve ingesting organic compounds and oxidising them - some means of "breathing" and some means of ingesting food. There is latitude aplenty even with those constraints - for a start, our shared air/food pipes may not be present in an alien race.

They would be able to communicate complex ideas - in order to collaborate and build the sort of society capable of eventually building a ship capable of crossing interstellar distances. Though they may use a variety of mechanisms to do so including "vocal chords" on their breathing tubes, sign language with their speaking limbs or some variant of morse code from the moving plates on their sides etc.

They would be able to see at least part of the electromagnetic spectrum in order to locate things - though the spectral range may not be the same as our own and their "sight" receptors may not look like ours.

I presume they would be able to hear as well - it being an invaluable evolutionary survival trait (good sharp ears to listen out for things that are likely to eat you).

In fact, I don't see any of our 5 senses as "optional" for an intelligent tool-building species - all of them are essential to situational awareness and survival during evolution and all assist the tool-builder in developing the advanced science they would require.

If an alien space ship landed tomorrow, I would not expect its occupants to look a lot like us but I would expect that they would have no difficulty in perceiving us and our world; they would be recognisably intelligent, they would have a language that we could at least learn to comprehend (even if we can't "speak" it due to our lack of the appropriate body-parts), they would be able to see and manipulate objects (even if they're looking at the object's heat signature and picking it up with 3 fingers).

And if we get into non-intelligent life elsewhere, well, the possibilities are limitless...

But why would such a being develop intelligence in the usual problem & solution-grasping way? It does not need to do so! It can just float there like a giant oblivious gaseous jellyfish.

Unless it has enemies or prey or other problems it has to solve.

Convergent Evolution is the normal term for the effect you describe;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
some theorists, like Simon Conway Morris, think that convergent evolution will be strong enough to make alien species at least vaguely familiar. However I don't agree, however much I admire Conway Morris' work.

Fish, Icthyosauri and dolphins are all quite closely related, in the big scheme of things; they are all vertebrates, so are all in the same subphylum, and icthyosauri and dolphins both evolved from fish. So a certain amount of convergence is to be expected. If you want to see true convergence, you should look outside the phylum Vertebrata; a fairly close analogy with a streamlined fish can be found in the squid, and they do resemble fish in basic outline- but they are radically different from fish in many other ways.

I would expect extraterrestrial 'fish analogues' to be as least different from bony fish on our world as squid are different from fish; probably more so, since fish and squid do share some genes in common.

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Stress would be among the most likely causes of the emergence of intelligence, since intelligence is useful in stressful situations. But stress is not confined to the plains of Africa where our anscestors evolved; some environments will be much more challenging.

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Talking about extraterrestial fish analogues has reminded me of this remarkable site;
http://home.casema.nl/gertvandijk/
especially this page
http://home.casema.nl/gertvandijk/water/membranes.htm
as you can see, this invented world follows Conway Morris' ideas about familiarity, while managing to be entirely non-terrestrial at the same time.

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That's quite a cool site. Thanks eburacum45.

Irrespective of what the aliens look like (12-limbed exoskeletoned creature or "almost identical to humans except for a couple of ridges on the nose"), I cannot say I agree with the blogger's assertion that alien crafts could/would not look "mundane".

For a start, our geometric shapes are not as arbitrarily based as (s)he suggests. There are practical uses for cylinders (rollers), discs (wheels), spheres etc - and our technology pretty much started with the inclined plane (essentially a triangle), cylindrical rollers, wheels...

They would have emerged from their own equivalent of the "stone age" with a budding technology and built on that to overcome their challenges. I do not see why they would not have developed basic shapes known to us. If an irregularly-shaped chunk of scoria or coral was of any practical use in moving heavy building materials around, our wheels would be shaped like that - but it isn't, so they aren't.

If a craft is designed for atmospheric use, it makes sense to streamline its shape - sure, an advanced technology might have the ability to allow an object shaped like a trio of squids engaging in group sex to slip unhindered through even the Jovian atmosphere, but if they did so they would be very alien indeed: given to finding the hardest possible way to do things. Essentially, it's a darn-sight easier to make the damned thing as aerodynamically streamlined as possible than to invent something that counteracts friction and air-resistance.

All their early (pre-spaceflight) aircraft would have been built on sound aerodynamic principles as they wouldn't have had any high-tech alternatives at the time. Let's leave the amorous-squid-trio for deep space vessels that never have to enter an atmosphere.

As to lights and noises, the blogger is actually guilty of assuming that any light emitted by an ET craft serves the same function as the running lights on our aircraft. It is conceivable that a craft may emit no light at all or emit light due to a side-effect of its composition, propulsion system or whatever. It might even be a phenomenon specific to our atmosphere (e.g. it doesn't emit light in any atmosphere that contains less than 50% Nitrogen) - who knows.

While I don't expect that an alien ship would have flashing running lights in a configuration and colours similar to our own aircraft, I would not discount an alien ship just because some quirk of its nature, coupled with my personal pattern-finding capacity, makes me think it looks like some sort of terrestrial aircraft.

Noise, too. We don't go out of our way to make jet engines make a distinctive roar or for high-voltage transformers to hum. Such things are an inherent side effect of the technology.

Without knowing what technology actually propels a craft, it's hard to say what sort of noise it would naturally make in our atmosphere. It's not impossible that the operation of the drive creates a vibration at a frequency that our pattern-sensing brains would instinctively associate with an "electrical" hum. Nor is it inconceivable that its motive power does not make sounds within our hearing range or that the noise it does make is too quiet to be heard over longer distances.

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Thank you! Interesting. I think some of this is about the definition of "alien". If one views the chapter about reaaly deep waters of the TV-series "The Blue Planet" there are some truly "alien" beings. And I do think most extraterrestrials would be "alien" too, but when it comes to (oh, so rare) beings buildning technological civilisations...?

One thing that is likely to force at least some form of convergent evolution, is that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. At least, that is what the Copernicus Principle states, and observations we have made so far bear it out. If true, no matter where you are in the universe, a sieve doesn't make a very good bucket for holding h20 in between 100 and 0 Celsius. There is a very large number of ways of solving the same problems, but the basic principles still apply. It will be unlikely to say the least that we will meet the rubber foreheads from the planet of hats anytime soon. But I do think certain solutions will repeat themselves, even if in a highly distorted form.

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Not so. Mammalia sensu stricto had been around for about 150 million years when the first humans evolved, which happens to be about equal to the length of the dinosaurs' reign.
You can't seriously be suggesting modern humans and neanderthals as an example of convergent evolution - they're very similar because neither has changed much from their common ancestor.
It shows that if you start with a human and apply a few minor changes you end up with a slightly different human. The example of the dinosaurs also shows that being around and successful for a long time doesn't guarantee the development of intelligence (but we knew this already - take a look at sponges, or, for that matter, any old and successful non-animal group of terrestrial organisms).


Now, I don't think intelligent aliens are likely to come in literally "all shapes and sizes"; for reasons Wolf1066 and others have explained, they're likely to have manipulative appendages, locomotory organs, eyes, etc, and the finite sizes of atoms and molecules presumably sets some lower limit to the size an intelligent being can be, while energy requirements will set an upper.

It would be nice, incidentally, if people stopped refering to extraterrestrials as "animals", "plants", etc. While it's usually clear what people mean (macroscopic motile organisms and photosynthetizers, respectively), it grates on a brain that's used to applying those terms in a phylogenetic sense, which would exclude extraterrestrials by definition. Also, it encourages people to assume things they probably shouldn't be assuming - there's no particular reason, for example, that an organism shouldn't be both motile and photosynthetizing (terrestrial examples are rare, but they do exist).

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