Magister is Clueless About Astrobiology

[Magister Militum]

For my new universe setting that I'm developing, I've decided to have plenty of alien lifeforms, but with the caveat that they be truly alien. In other words, unless they're a transhuman offshoot or designer life form, humanoid aliens won't exist. Unfortunately, my knowledge of xenobiology is limited, with what knowledge of biology I do have limited to a university-level course. I've read over Atomic Rockets' section on aliens, and it's given me many fun ideas, but I'm trying to look for links that provide more detail. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to tackle this?

[Dakarne]

First thing; treat science as a suggestion rather than a rule. This is kind of my first rule of science fiction, since I have a tendency to emphasise the latter word of the two to a greater degree. That you're including aliens as a plural would indicate that you're ignoring one of a couple of laws of physics (relativity or causality) in order for interaction to occur, at least...

Second thing; take a good long look at the ocean, and our own fossil record. There have been some well and truly bizarre creatures to have originated from our own planet, and it doesn't hurt to take a look at stuff that exists when extrapolating.

Third thing; make sure to take into account certain facts when adding them up to other facts. You can indeed have an amorphous, hyper-intelligent blob that acts as a macroscopic amoeba and communicates through light signals. You can't really have them use tools, however, since they genuinely lack the physical ability to manipulate or create them. Basically put, any decent spacefaring species would need things like hands, or tentacles (or, if you're going down that path, telekinesis), because otherwise they'd be unable to actually create their starships.

Those are my suggestions.

[speaker-to-trolls]

That you're including aliens as a plural would indicate that you're ignoring one of a couple of laws of physics (relativity or causality) in order for interaction to occur, at least...

That's an assumption which is not necessarily true, Dak, I mean this could be one of those weirdo nerdy hard science SF settings that don't include faster than light travel, you know?

As for the question, well, this page is NASA's page on astrobiology, so you could start there. And here is New Scientist's page on the subject, which is full of all sorts of articles about what kind of life could exist on other planets, based on the weird monsters we have living on Earth.

I'll try to look for some more specific links when I have a bit more time. Though I'll second Dak's suggestion of looking at things that lived during the Ordovician or Cambrian periods, back when all kinds of bizarre creatures roamed the oceans, and then remember that all vertebrate life evolved from an unremarkable little worm that happened to have all its nerves running in a line down its back. That is literally the basis of the body plan of everything from hagfish to ostriches.

[Dakarne]

That you're including aliens as a plural would indicate that you're ignoring one of a couple of laws of physics (relativity or causality) in order for interaction to occur, at least...

That's an assumption which is not necessarily true, Dak, I mean this could be one of those weirdo nerdy hard science SF settings that don't include faster than light travel, you know?

I'd argue against that one being able to count. I mean, how hard can science fiction be when it has glass canopies.

[Destructionator]

I caught an episode of Nova yesterday that was talking about Australian cuttlefish.

These animals have pigments in their skin on muscles, so they can change their skin texture and color at will!


There's two cool things they did: one is you can put them on just about any surface and they mimic it. Artificial or natural, it didn't matter. They'd mimic the whole design and texture - the scientist put one on a checkerboard, and sure enough, it's skin looked like a checkerboard.

The other thing they do is put on a kind of colorful show to mesmerize their prey. It was way cool, like stripes going down their body of multiple colors, all in motion.


Just super cool. One of the hosts of the show said these animals in the ocean are the aliens we can actually study... there's all kinds of crazy shit down there.

[Blackwing]

Keep in mind that there's nothing strictly wrong with humanoid aliens (operative part of that being humanoid as in 'sorta like humans' rather than just humans with added/changed bits).

This is due to a lovely little thing called convergent evolution.

That is to say: creatures that serve similar biological niches, environments and have similar roles tend to look alike.

The same way that Whales (including dolphins), penguins, larval amphibians and all manner of (separately evolved) fish all have the same basic shape useful for moving in the water and the same way that most 'types' of animal on earth have all independently evolved jointed legs for moving around on land (if you think that's not remarkable/significant, keep in mind that the inner workings of arthropod and amphibian legs are very, very different, yet the WAY they work is very similar.)

While I'm usually an opponent of the anthropo-centric view science fiction has on aliens (especially the idea that just because we evolved on Earth and not on, say, Venus or Mars, all life sustaining planets must therefore be like Earth.), humanoid aliens aren't any sillier than interstellar exploration. Nor are truly 'alien' aliens more realistic just because they're more unusual.

Also, once again Atomic Rockets rears it's ugly, ugly head. Ignore the whole Prisoner Dilemma section. It basically assumes that one needs to fear aliens, which ignores the idea that if you encounter aliens remotely able and willing to communicate, you probably needn't fear mutual destruction and if you encounter aliens too dissimilar to be able to communicate you needn't fear mutual destruction AT ALL, because with nothing to offer each other, you have nothing to TAKE from each other.

On the whole, Humanoid Aliens are nowadays, far more Alien than 'alien' aliens or 'human' aliens. (Especially since almost all 'alien' aliens are actually Starfish aliens based on some tentacly deep sea critter or another.)