Is there any way to justify human-ish aliens besides "someone engineered multiple planets to have sentient life that...

>and they all speak english
fuck you

but user, that's how aliens DO look

otherwise how would they blend in among goverment officals so easily?

DELETE THIS

The best explanation I've heard is that the humanoid form is the best one suited for higher levels of thought/intelligence, along with the proper limbs/digits to use tools (ie., opposable thumbs).

Most everything else will be situational stuff based upon how they evolved on their planet (in theory humans came from primates. Maybe on some random planet they evolved from reptiles or birds).

Literally this.

Shit cop-out answer.

Humanoid alien races will be a thing after a couple generations of humans living in different gravity/conditions.

Have them be humans. Set your story during the second or third wave of human space exploration, and say the first wave did a lot of genetic screwin' around. So now there are higrav humans and hivemind humans and cyborg implant-dependent humans and long-lived humans and blue humans and all that stuff you want.

If you include actual aliens, be a little creative and make them actually alien. If your "aliens" look more like humans than chimpanzees do, try again.

Counterpoint, niche diversification and random speciation

Not the best answer, but I'd rather see a straight forward accepted explanation than the OP try to offer a factually wrong conclusion based on pseudo science.

It's like the FTL problem. We know it's impossible. But I'd rather see the GM present it as just warp drives or some shit than extrapolate on how he "solved" faster than light using incorrect science.

No it won't, because we won't let the inadapted babies die.
Humanity is stopping evolving during these centuries.

The question is how they ended up like they did, not what mechanisms could have made them end up differently.

This. I always imagine that the aliens in sci fi actually look wildly different but it's just easier for actors to portray them with a rubber forehead on. Maybe Klingons are actually chitinous lobster-creatures but it's easier to identify with them and write stories about them when you can see their facial expressions, etc.

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>and the one Star Trek eventually settled on after having left it a hanging mystery for so long.

This shit was explained in TOS, look up the Preservers in "The Paradise Syndrome".

Low costume\cgi budget

Selection doesn't need to kill babies for evolution to work, it merely needs to make different people have different number of offspring. A kid that isn't concieved in the first place won't pass on your genes any more than one that died.

>how they ended up like they did
Random assortment and weeding out due to selective pressures. Evolution is not some complicated plan with numerous preset limitations as to what phylogenic branches can arise, its mostly a multi generational practice in throw genes at the wall and seeing what sticks. Meaning we can't really put the carriage before the horse in these instances as people usually are want to do when discussing evolution

Evolution does not equal natural selection and the entailed pressures, it is only one of the many methods for speciation, niche fulfillment, and genetic isolation to occur.

So stop being a retard edgelord

Translator microbes that colonize the stem of your brain

That sounds fucking horrifying.

no it wasn't the Preservers SEEDED small groups of existing and endangered slow-changing cultures of already evolved species on isolated worlds

the preponderance of Humanoid life is a result of the First Humanoids seeding their dna into the primordial soup of most of the Galaxy

Fucking Farscape, man. It can be pretty gross

Think about this for a second. We humans perceive the world mainly through our eyes which is at 150 to 1000 fps of the 390 to 700 nm spectrum of light. Aliens evolving under a different star might have for example slower fps, essentially making us invisible unless we are standing still. Or they see in IR or UV or don't see at all. This is only eyesight. We haven't even gone into the problem of communication or even the definition of sentience. So, if you want to write a hard sci fi novel, go ahead. But if you want to play a game, then forehead of the week aliens will have to do.

Bilateral symmetry practically guarantees anything we run into will have two legs, two manipulators, and two eyes.

They wear human forms to explore the earth, interact with humans, speak, breathe the atmosphere, etc., etc.

What is the setting with the aliens that look like humanoid lions and are constantly getting pissed off at humans because humans can't help seeing them as "those cat-people"?

No. This is unwarranted conclusion. We see similar forms in Earth organisms because we (Archaea, Eukarya, Prokarya) all share one universal unicellular ancestor. We radiated from the same root. At the DNA level (where it matters), we are not too much different from bacteria, let alone animals. DNA is stable under Earth conditions but most likely not under say, Venus or Titan environs. The answer is we don't know what realistic aliens will look like until we find them. Even then, we might not recognize them as being alive, let alone sentient because we literally could not comprehend it.

Again, bilateral symmetry arose when our universal unicellular ancestor used binary fission to replicate. If for example, aliens own ancestor replicate unevenly, then you won't have mirror image body forms.

What is live? When does something stop being alive and begin to be dead? Are the different parts of a cell alive? Is the DNA molecule live? Or are we just dead matter, good at transferring old data and decreasing our own entropy in exchange of increasing entropy around us?

Okay, you try explaining why binary fission is not the simplest and least-energy form of cellular reproduction.

As my EMT instructor once said:

"He ain't dead until he's warm and dead."

What are the chances of alien tits? Is the development of mammal glands a quirk of our evolution or could it happen somewhere else?

Thin mint pls go

What's more efficient than binary fission? Seems like anything that reproduced in a less-efficient way would quickly get weeded out of the pool.

How are we defining "human-ish"? If you're talking like, very close facial features, rubber forehead aliens, then yeah that's kinda silly.

If it's just "humanoid", though... upright, two manipulator appendages, two motion appendages, built around a central tube digestive system, sense organs at the top... well, that's just a pretty straightforward efficient design. Shouldn't be surprised to see that around, among intelligent tool-using species.

Would an alien think like us? Would it have the same set of emotions? What if he has emotions and thought patterns incomprensible to us?

Give it another 50 -70 years and we'll be tailoring people properly.

I'm all for it.

A long time ago humans spread out to colonize the universe, and lots lost contact and went sort of crazy with genetic engineering. These are the aliens you're encountering.

Humanoid aliens are actually humans who were abducted and uplifted by aliens 200,000 years ago. They have followed a different evolutionary path + genetic engineering from their benefactors.

Anything that has happened once is not impossible and therefore, in a vast universe, can conceivably happen again.

Also, an intelligent social species will generally tend to a longer period as an infant, as (barring some "they're just better" biology) the initial development of speech and tool use skills takes a long time. Some built-in arrangement for providing easily-digested food to the initial stage of development will be very effective, and since the baby will need to be carried around as well, the food provision organs will likely be around the height where the child is carried.

Assuming a humanoid frame, something vaguely akin to tits is not really too unfeasible.

It's a lot more convenient for the GM to describe and the players to remember.

The evolution of tits is a side effect of the combination of our non-cyclical reproduction cycle and our becoming bipedal.

Males were attracted to wide hips and round asses as they indicated health and breeding suitability. When we became bipedal breasts evolved as a "front butt" of sorts to attract men. Large breasts do not create milk any faster than small ones but do allow very marginally larger storage.

>Convergent evolution.

First post. Best post.

Seriously, Convergent evolution isn't a bad reason: Nature is chaotic and produces anything it can and so forth, but there's a certain development curve based on what does and doesn't work.

We see it happen all the time even today.

Some aliens having a roughly humanoid configuration would make sense due to convergent evolution.

Being human enough that Kirk wants to bed their princess pretty much requires they are either related to us somehow, or have been artificially made similar.

Most life in the universe will likely take place on tidal-locked planets orbiting red dwarfs due statistical possibility. Some of these stars are older than our own galaxy and not a single one has died yet since the beginning of the universe. If these stars have planets, life could have been extinguished by random solar flares and raised again and again from the ashes on these planets.

I'm certain it's been done before but there was a precursor race to life in the galaxy that all disappeared so most spacefaring life is humanoid.
There was an ancient galactic war. It was fought using self replicating robots programmed to destroy anything that shared an arbitrary DNA percentage with the opposing side. Both sides had the same idea so only backwater inbred planets were left alive.
Remaining life in the galaxy is objectively dumber than the ancestors and unless they really get into perfecting genetic engineering they will never be able to reach that height again.
Unfortunately, the Evil Empire is really into genetic manipulation...
Unbeknownst to them, those self replication muderrobots are still active even after the uncountable passage of time since the war

>tfw you remember they have a worm that crawls around in your mouth to eat all the shit and leaves your mouth minty fresh.

Don't swallow it..

>Generic, The Lore.

As the question starts with the baseless assumption they would not I present you with a simple observation.

We don't have the slightest god damn clue what aliens would look like or how any facet of any organism could or would work outside of earth.

Maybe they are thousand foot long solar powered clams. Maybe they are ten inch high birds with millions of small fingers. Maybe they are humans here after a hundred thousand years to pick up the survivors of that warp engine experiment left our ancestors stranded in another galaxy.

We don't have the slightest idea and until we meet and study a fair number of different species from different worlds debating the scientific merit of any of it is pointless speculation.

>What are the chances of alien tits?
Slim, but not impossible. A creature that has some kind of arms that hold things such as infants at about chest-level might easily have some form of mammary-structures there. The fact that we have 2 is partially a result of our bilateral symmetry, and the fact that we only have a small amount of young at a time. It might not be rare to see a creature with many radial "breasts" for nursing young, and it may not be attractive to humans, unless you're into that kind of thing.

>Convergent evolution.
First post best post.

Well asshole, how do you make sci fi not generic or pseudointellectual edgy wankfest?

"A Form you are comfortable with."

Traveller/Third Imperium?

You don't. Sci-fi is SUPPOSED to be a pseudointellectual egdy wankfest as it "examines the human condition". When it's not developed enough to be a wankfest, it's painfully generic and pointless.

This is one of the core reasons why sci-fi is honestly a pretty terrible genre, much like fantasy and cyberpunk.

I would think that a little similarity between most organic life is to be expected - the laws of physics/chemistry are the same wherever you go, and it makes sense that similar environments will give rise to only so many variations of 'life.'

Sure, some of them could get very different in overall structure, but at their cellular base, there are only so many ways that an organism could absorb energy, reproduce, move, sense and manipulate their surroundings, etc.

Wing Commander?

So far candidates for habitable planets are pretty big. Are you sure aliens would walk upright? A pair of manipulative "hands" sure, but you don't need to walk upright.

Even if they have mammary glands in their chests, that's no guarantee they'd have tits. Breasts are mostly fatty tissue, which doesn't actually have anything to do with feeding infants. The big round shape is a sexual display particular to humans.

That's mostly because big planets are easier to detect

Yeah. In fact, all genres of fiction are honestly pretty terrible. So are all genres of non-fiction. In fact, all works of any kind are terrible trash for shit taste having losers. I mean seriously, how pathetic do you have to be to like anything? Pretty pathetic.

Am I cool yet?

...

Write about humanity's first 300 years of warp travel.
And they can't find life anywhere, at least no complex life.
This rejuvenates long "dead" religions/theology/theism
And eventually fanaticism.
>Insert any stupid idea that could create conflict, cause humans aren't generally very rational.
Then, you could add generic sci-fi trophes like genetic manipulation or whatever.

I came up with this in 10 min.
Not very captivating yet.

I don't remember the Aslan particularly caring about that. It's the Vargr who get mad if you call them dog-people or wolf-people, and they're literally human-canine hybrids.

Common ancestors is the best one

Humans didn't Evolve on earth but migrated there in ancient times

Nice try Tsoukalos

God is an hack.

less efficient only goes extinct if a more efficient version happens to come along. Inefficient traits can often come paired with other beneficial ones during mutation and will end up both enduring as the good one is selected for and the inefficient one is merely that and not detrimental.

>Is there any way to justify copypasta-ish threads besides "someone engineered multiple threads to have the exact same question as this?"

I'd image that there's only one form of successful body structure a civilized species could have. You could have bug people for example, but they'd still walk on their hind legs, probably mate in more conventional means, and try to normalize and perfect tech for their strange eyesight.

Level 3 civilisations(galaxy controlling/exploiting) like to keep species that might be able to commingle close to one another as a way of placating less advanced species. This reduces their drive to explore for more exotic creatures and this keeps the aforementioned level 3 civilisations Unknown.

I like this.
Could add species that made themselves unknowingly like humans through genetic manipulation and shit.

it's a coincidence

Except the early universe was mostly helium and hydrogen not enough heavier elements to form rocky planets.

Fucking Stargate always pulling that.

Less fps makes something invisible. ... wut?

The Uplift universe has actually both of these. There are some species that end up being really close to humans through convergent evolution, especially the Tymbrini who are kinda like Psychic Marsupial Humans.

On the other hand give that all almost all of the species in the books (baring humans of course) are uplifted into sapience so they are engineered into two leg, two arms, and two forward facing eyes because it happens to be a pretty good body plan for sapience. But there are also some pretty weird species like the Traeki/Jophur who are made of up composite sapient plant rings, or the G'kek who have 4 eyes on stalks and are wheeled.

Given their budget, did they have another choice?

No there isn't.
At all.
TV shows went with putting putty on peoples faces or a carpet and a hula skirt over their heads, couple of ping pong balls for eyes. It's just cheaper and you shouldn't let it starve your imagination.
That ST episode where the shining fairy explained how they seeded the stars was part cool part cop-out.
Scientifically, there's no reason for life to be in any way similar when stars separate them. Still waiting to see convincing silicon based critters, or sympathetic characters that are jellies or something utterly 'alien'.

Because two grabbers two legs and a head with two eyes is just the best way to do things. Same reason most mammals and a good amount of lizards have the same basic structure.

I'm thinking of doing a Minbari race in Stellaris. Would you say they're more individualist, or collectivist? Warlike and spiritual are givens.

>Same reason most mammals and a good amount of lizards have the same basic structure
that's not because its the best way to do things and more because share common ancestor.

bilateral symmetry with 4 limbs is a good way to do it. but not the only good way. Cephalpods have a very different body structure and are well on their way too Intelligence in squid, octopi and cuttlefish.

You need to write things down to be a space traveler. You can't write underwater, so we will never see space squids.

yes you can, not with ink pens like ours. but pencils and crayons work underwater.

Their biggest obstacle will be difficulty with metallurgy and at the moment they have fairly short lifespans and don't actively raise their young.

I forget the name of it, but there's an evolutionary hypothosis that states that all or most sentient alien life would be humanoid, because the humanoid form is just the best for an intelligent, tool-using race to have from an evolutionary standpoint.

If you want evidence for this, just imagine if any other species on Earth were suddenly sentient and just as intelligent as we are. Most of them couldn't actually do anything with their newfound intellect because most animals only have the most basic manipulators for using tools, usually just their mouth. Hands or something similar are pretty much required for accomplishing the kind of shit humanity has. The only animals I can think of that could accomplish similar feats to us if they had our intelligence are octopi, squids, and maybe ants/termites.

I just came here to post this.

>Is there any way to justify human-ish aliens besides "someone engineered multiple planets to have sentient life that evolves like this?"

The aliens are all shapeshifters who want to get with the sexiest race in the galaxy and so shapeshift into big-titted alien bitches.

The aliens disguise themselves with holograms Galaxy Quest style; they might actually be hideous tentacle monsters but we see them as big-titted alien bitches.

The aliens can alter your perception of them Asari-style for the purposes of diplomacy; whatever they look like, you perceive them as big-titted alien bitches.

This. But...

>"someone engineered multiple planets to have sentient life that evolves like this?"

Technically, that's not seeding. So, seeding. That is, some precursor race came to Earth, grabbed a bunch of early humans, and seeded them throughout the Galaxy for reasons known only to themselves but which probably involved beer or whatever their equivalent was.

In the past million years, for example, you've got humans, neanderthals, denisovans, floresiensis, erectus, antecessor, heidelbergensis, and a bunch of other hominid species, each of which had a good shot at becoming as intelligent as humans over a few hundred thousand years while still potentially evolving in different ways to look basically human, but with a few slight differences.

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