Do you ever feel annoyed at the fact that all aliens in media (vidya, tv, comics, pnp) are just humans that follow human-like logic and rationality? They end up being humanoids and are culturally analogous to humans.
Have you ever come across or made any alien species that seemed truly different from what humanity is like?
What would first contact with a truly alien species be like?
How would they interact in a Hub type setting?
aeon.co
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>that pic
youtube.com
I agree entirely.
Because evolution is a bitch and it kinda works by the same rules and laws of nature. You could argue the our universe has gods and magic, but at this point we can just say "fuck it" and go along with it. But because fear not, OP, have a picture of this cute girl.
Not really. You're taking a mighty big swing by assuming all aliens are both humanoid and act like humans on the board where Tyranids are a thing.
Even Star Trek and Star Wars have weird hyperdimensional energy beings, living crystals, etc in them.
>What would first contact with a truly alien species be like?
Ever read a fuck yeah humanity thread?
>aliens
>implying we're not the universe' chosen race
Best aliens coming through!
Nope. I use other boards if I feel like masturbating.
It makes it easier if they look human.
Winged sea cucumber go back to sleep
It's like the Old Ones (or was it Atun? Maybe Anya?) from Orion said: Some body plans are more successful than others
>Tyranids are a thing
See, tyranids are basically locusts who's only drive is to consume, and follow a hive intelligence. There's nothing different or alien about that.
Those are weird. Aliens that have human like logic and emotions, but can't make out what a book or gun or sculpture is.
the best HFY stories are about humanity being one of the only evolved species that are on top of the food chains, and not out of it (for instance , a species that could only eat the alien equivalant of grass would have little to no interaction with the other animals, as far as food goes.)
The thing is any sort of alien is going to be applied a set of easy to parse characteristics by humans because that's what we've been doing for thousands of years.
Unless you start getting into bullshit like extra dimensions or mimetic thoughtforms you could pretty much describe any "alien" species into something that's no longer alien.
>Because evolution is a bitch and it kinda works by the same rules and laws of nature.
"Everythings works basically the same way. Sure, particulars can change according to available data or environment, but evolution's constant. We should know, we catalogued 8 whole galaxies' worth of living beings. then we met the sentient crystals and our geneticists went "welp, fuck""
It's possible that, like evolution independently producing similar body types several times due to the environment, it would also produce similar behavioral types.
>Do you ever feel annoyed at the fact that all aliens in media (vidya, tv, comics, pnp) are just humans that follow human-like logic and rationality?
Not really, no.
>They end up being humanoids and are culturally analogous to humans.
Well...yeah, that's the point. Aliens in fiction are always, without fail, allegories for something - the Xenomorphs are just sex and rape, for example. The Thing was cancer. Predator was supposed to be the next challenge for Rocky Balboa (I'm not even making that one up). And so on.
The most complex and interesting of these tend to be based on extant human races and cultures and ideas, because those are the most complex human constructs.
>What would first contact with a truly alien species be like?
There is literally no way to accurately answer this. A truly alien species would by definition think and reason in a way completely unlike humans and in a way humans physiologically cannot. Asking to imagine a truly alien mind is like asking someone to imagine a new color. It can't be done.
>Somebody read a HFY thread
Yep.
I've definitely felt this, what's the point of having aliens if you're just going to make them look and act like humans? Three Worlds Collide is a nice short story that addresses this (among other things).
>"""'true"""" aliens
>always some stupid shit that's couldn't hold up under the most lenient physics and relies on superpowers to exist
Case in point. Elder Things are fucking stupid. They always have been and always will be.
>ctrl+f "Blindsight"
>no result
Veeky Forums i'm disappoint
>"Oh look, it's another bad argument against the notion convergent evolution in fiction."
Honestly? I'm more annoyed at the more recent "deconstructions" that try to make "alien aliens", but do it badly.
More over we have great difficulty imagining something with a Truly alien mindset, as humans have problems imagining things that aren't in some way related to what they already know.
Which is one the easiest "alien aliens" is always a hive of bug-monsters.
Of course, the particulars change. The bodyforms of shark, dolphin, and penguin are similar, but the ways in which they live their lives if different. Though the internalized anatomy is somewhat different, the shark being the only one with gills and penguins working with down instead of blubber, but the functions towards the same ends are similar. Evolution and the variant forms converge into a shape that is the most energy efficient for travelling through water, something that is advantageous to animals that hunt and eat fish, and all bodyforms converged on that shape for efficiency. Insulation is a problem for those that need to keep their temperature up, so they insulate with fat or down.
The most overwhelming question one would have to ask when trying to conceive of an "alien" form is "why would it be shaped like that?" or "why would it do that?" There's myriad more efficient forms and they're generally simple shapes, ratios, and body construction that take less effort to evolve and change.
>Do you ever feel annoyed at the fact that all aliens in media (vidya, tv, comics, pnp) are just humans that follow human-like logic and rationality? They end up being humanoids and are culturally analogous to humans.
>Have you ever come across or made any alien species that seemed truly different from what humanity is like?
Not really Veeky Forums related (though I first learned of it here), but Star Control 2 had a pretty good mix of relatable and bizzare aliens. My favorite ones seemed cute and "quirky" on the surface but once you talk to them enough you start to realize they're actually some sort of Lovecraftian cosmic horror-terror, and you just invited them to Earth.
Has any of you read Embassytown? That is one example of a truly alien lifeform without going into meme territory
>Few people can speak the language of the Hosts (referred to only as "Language"), as it requires the orator to speak two words at once; those humans (Terre) who can are genetically-engineered linguist twins known as Ambassadors, bred solely for this purpose. The Ambassadors speak with two mouths and one mind and as such can be understood by the Ariekei (who do not recognise any other form of communication) allowing for trade in their valuable biotechnology. The Hosts' Language does not allow for lying or even speculation, the Language reflects both their state of mind and reality as they perceive it; they create literal similes by recruiting individuals to perform bizarre ordeals that can then become allusions in Language.
These are probobly what you are interested in as far as the psychology stuff goes.
>The thing's point of view over the course of the movie and beyond.
clarkesworldmagazine.com
A newborn Bioweapon achieves intelligence and adapts to it's surroundings to survive for the duration of it's short sad life.
twigserial.wordpress.com
These should certainly be interesting reads.
They're the exception that proves the rule.
Well thought-out aliens will always match up with human concepts pretty well. It's inevitable that, if they posses verisimilitude, they'll think and at in ways that can be pretty easily understood by human beings. It's kinda the result of being conceived of by humans.
>I've definitely felt this, what's the point of having aliens if you're just going to make them look and act like humans?
To exaggerate human qualities in order to explore them.
>Incomprehensible alien being creates humanoid avatars to communicate with humans.
I prefer this middle ground between "Blue alien space chick" and "Eldritch horror from beyond the stars." It's having your cake and eating it too.
I like science fiction that is a bit more crazy, but I still like ayylamos to be humanoid. That's the easiest way to allow them to interact with other humans, and besides the body plans are similar enough.
If you want some somewhat crazy but still totally plausible aliens, check out Stellaris's alien portraits. Every single one of them has at least one grasper of some kind, denoting their ability to use tools, but some of them look crazy while most are traditional bipedals.
Worm?
That's almost exactly what happens in worm.
Retarded. Absolute stupidity.
Any creature with human like intelligence or 'greater' would eventually figure out a way to lie. It's too useful of a skill for evolution and society not to figure out eventually.
I need an Orz-ified "what the fuck did you just say to me you little bitch!?..." copypasta in my life.
Never heard of that.
God I love Stellaris' alien portraits.They're just weird enough without being too much. A good mix between silly and kind of creepy.
It's a projection ability that is used by an all powerful alien space whale to interact with the local earth creatures without revealing itself.
>convergent evolution in fiction."
Convergent Evolution cannot produce Humans, but with blue skin. Especially when it supposedly 'happened' on Mars. Fuck off. You don't know the first thing about evolutionary biology.
The new movie "Arrival" is based on a book by Ted Chiang (pic related).
It has one of the best depictions of aliens I have ever seen.
darn if forgot pic
Doesn't have to be human, just has to be nominally humanoid in shape. Similarly, 's pic, convergent evolution resulted in creatures with similar bodyforms, but none of them is exactly the same as the other.
So, basically, it's a thread where everybody bitches that the world isn't smart or creative enough for their oh-so-delicate standards?
maybe that makes me a pleb, but humanoids are much easier to tell stories about. if something's too alien, it starts being hard to identify with.
Yes.
Give me blue alien space babes (who might be more than they appear) before hyper intelligent shades of blue any day. And twice on Saturdays.
I don't think you understand what this phrase means.
...
>Predator was supposed to be the next challenge for Rocky Balboa (I'm not even making that one up)
Do you have a sauce for this? I'm not calling you a liar, this just seems like something I'd really like to read about.
Thank your lucky stars for that.
But those animals were all already intimately related, they all have exoskeletons, spines, eyes, etc.
My philosophy on aliens is that if it doesn't look at least as weird as your average invertebrate, then it isn't weird enough.
So slightly off topic but I'm making a setting with an incredible diversity of aliens, essentially allowing the players to fill in what kind of being they are, but I don't want to spend years writing down racial rules for every single possible one.
What's a better way to do it?
*endoskeletons
Roll the dice.
Tell us some stuff about the setting you want to make and we'll toss some options at you.
Because the humanoid form is amazingly useful. Just the simple fact that we can walk upright means we can very easily carry objects with us as we travel. Which is very useful when you're doing things like hunting animals or harvesting food. I mean, if you really wanted to get into it, having more than four limbs is a bad design choice because that either requires a larger brain to control them all, which also increases resource consumption, or less precise control of the limbs. Like, octopuses, for example, have relatively large brains, yet they barely actually control their limbs, they're mostly autonomous. Also, opposable thumbs kick ass when you're making or handling things.
>My philosophy on aliens is that if it doesn't look at least as weird as your average invertebrate, then it isn't weird enough.
Invertebrates can't grow to that size on land. They've shown they can be intelligent enough, just look at squid and octopi, but they aren't at human-scale on land.
Describe what they are, their strong and weak sides, interesting features. Let players choose what they want to be. Stat only chosen races.
For NPCs you can just do shit without bothering with strict stats and point cost.
There are a billion different dimensions and the dimensional 'toilet' where all the lost beings and objects just end up here. It's a large city with a huge diversity of creatures from all over different universes or dimensions. Besides having a massive forest and some native wildlife pretty much everything else has been brought in by lost people.
Basically the city is full of very strange creatures and cultures. Besides banding together in small ghettos and communities of their own kinds, most creatures still have to interact with other city folk regardless. So I want creatures that could feasibly work inside a urban environment that could get along reasonably well with everyone, including humans.
>MFW someone spoiled the movie the night it cam out.
Sigil?
With something like that, GURPS actually has some tools for that.
However, I would suggest doing the opposite of what you want and give species some hindrance instead. Too big, too small, too frail, too frenetic.
Wtf is that from?
>Sigil?
Close enough.
>However, I would suggest doing the opposite of what you want and give species some hindrance instead. Too big, too small, too frail, too frenetic.
I like this idea, but what would you give humans? I want humans to be in this city too?
Well, I hope you're ready for some really bullshit time travel.
Like I'd go watch it now.
en.wikipedia.org
>For a few months, following the release of Rocky IV, a joke was making rounds in Hollywood. Since Rocky Balboa had run out of earthly opponents, he would have to fight an alien if a fifth installment of his boxing series were to be made. Screenwriters Jim and John Thomas took the inspiration from the joke and wrote a screenplay based on it.
The Elcor and the Hanar from Mass Effect may be relevant.
Also Aunt Beast from A Wrinkle In Time.
>The Thing was cancer
It...consumes you, looks like you, and tries to build a UFO to absorb all life on the planet?
Have you never read up on cancer, user?
Not him, but I think you're reading WAY too much into The Thing to think it's an allegory for cancer.
>The Thing was cancer
No, The Thing was want to be a living narrative device to explore the human concepts of paranoia and fear of loss of identity and self.
If anything, it was more of an allegory for the Red Scare
>I suspect the aliens will consider this one of their great historical works
of literature, like Hamlet or Fate/stay night
So fun fact about Beryl. If you poke around on the Outsider site you can find GURPS character sheets for Fireblade, Tempo, and Beryl. Beryl, notably, turns out to have the "xenophilia" disadvantage which I thought was a bit funny and maybe puts things in a different light.
Also new page literally never.
>To build spacecraft — or a technological civilization anywhere past the stone age — your aliens will need to be able to smelt metal.
I feel like this is a bit of a narrow assumption given you're trying to go for complete "blank slate" type alien design.
Read any of Cherryh's books. She does a great job at putting an extremely alien viewpoint into perspective.
Personally, I think the most alien aliens of all are the ones that look like us - but think at such cross angles that we've got no real starting point. See bravemule.com
Apologies, I'm not the user who was proposing the cancer allegory, but the sarcasm of the post was lost in the flat text. The intended implication was that I was implying cancer "consumes you, looks like you, and tries to build a UFO to absorb all life on the planet," and that anyone who had read up on cancer would know these things are common knowledge.
so an ocean planet of squid people could exist
It doesn't annoy me, all I care about is the execution of a writer's ideas
If ocean planets are possible.
Of course technology is going to be a bitch without fire.
It is within the realm of biological possibility, yes. Would they evolve any means of developing recognizable technology? Harder to say. It would depend on both the evolutionary pressure that led to their evolving sentience as a reaction to their environment and whether they had the means to collect resources of both sufficient abundance and versatility to actually produce technology in great enough amounts to be detectable. Remember, these are aliens who contacted us, not which we hypothetically contacted ourselves.
I think the big problem with sarcasm is that, when you get down to it, it's about saying something obviously stupid or unrealistic, but not really meaning it. Except when you don't know the speaker and can't pick up on any of the clues in expression or intonation, you have to rely on what you know about the person being sarcastic, and on an anonymous board, you don't know much, and might just assume that the speaker really is just that stupid.
How would they ever build anything? Squids and octopuses don't really have great control of their limbs. Their brains would have to be larger to make up for that. And then when you make the brain larger, everything else has to change to accommodate it. First, they'd probably need more oxygen, and guess what there isn't really all that much of underwater. Like, there's a reason artificial gills don't exist, because getting oxygen from water isn't very efficient.
How about an alien so alien that scientists spend a century studying and trying to communicate with it and in the end can't even decide if it's actually an alien or not?
That was really interesting concept and really shitty book
What the fuck are you talking about? Massive fish like whale sharks breathe water, and there would be nothing stopping them from surfacing for air anyway.
I was actually going to post about that book. Those things were about as alien as I've ever read.
Yes, massive fish that are very slow and don't use much energy, sure. Also, their brains aren't very big. For reference, our brains take up 20% of our total energy use.
Also, surface for air? You just described a mammal or perhaps an amphibian. Which is one huge step away from intelligent squids and towards humanoids.
Poor execution?
>Master of Fandom
The gender studies degree for Veeky Forums
Main character was fucking annoying and sometimes it was just plain boring. I only read to the end it because that ocean thingy was really interesting and very different from anything I ever read before.
Does anyone have that gigantic pdf of bizarre human transformations after they lost a space war against bioterraformers?
It was super long, with dozens and dozens of fully illustrated pictures of how human evolution diverged after they were forcibly modified by the alien conquerers.
It's really good at derailing threads.
>I only read it to the end
fix
I'm disappointed that Star Control 2 thread from a day or two ago has already archived. Was looking forward to posting in it.
All Tomorrows
All tomorrows?
>Star Control 2
Sometimes I look at old games and think they'd be really interesting to play. But then I just look at screenshots and wait for either a remake or fangame. Am I the only one like that? I mean, I'm sorry, but there's a reason why game design has changed.
Yup, that's the one! Thanks!
They do figure out lying. It has consequences.
I'd also argue that you're still anthropomorphizing. Imagine a species where speech is not entirely conscious. It's more akin to your eyes focusing on an object you want to look at. A species where vocalizations and language operate at a far "lower" level. You can argue that this is highly improbable, and yes, definitely it is. But if something is going to be truly alien, you can't expect its brain to be put together the same way as ours.
The scramblers from Peter Watt's otherwise pretty terrible "Blindsight" are another good example. Or the Ocean from Solaris.
The problem is it's hard to create something so alien it can really only be described in terms of an undergrad philosophy thought experiment, and still do interesting drama with it.
>111 pages
Fuck, are you joking? Can I get the TL;DR of this? From the first few pages, it just seems like someone vomited out all his sci-fi ideas one day.
posed what you were looking for, but I have two more books that you might like. Veeky Forums's spam filter keeps blocking the links to them, so I'd need advice on how to post them.
Read it, it's worth it.
Even crows lie to each other, in a way, they practice sleight of hand (er, wing?).
>Read it, it's worth it.
Give me a reason to. Besides "it's worth it."
