In general it is assumed that aliens look very ... alien. But what if we meet aliens and they look (mostly) like us...

>James
Who?

...

None of that shit. Wasn't funny the first time either.

But Mom! I want to be one of the cool memeing kids too!

>How would we react?

There are 7 billion of us, I'd imagine just about every reaction is feasible simultaneously.

Convergent selection pressures. Similar to how a lot of aircraft look similar despite being designed separately, there's only so many ways to solve the problem.

> just about every reaction is feasible simultaneously.
Despair, but also er-- I mean, despair.

I still don't get why they absolutely needed to wipe out life on earth, to the point that the last of their kind waking up from cryosleep absolutely HAD to pilot the first ship he could find back to earth.

"Muh realistic sci-fi" autismos would throw a collective bitch-fit. The resulting psychic outburst will tear a hole in reality and consume our planet, plunging us all into hellish dimension from which there is no escape.

Invite them to Earth and immediately begin forming Space Harems

>They're humans but from... THE FUTURE.
>They're humans but diverged/uplifted from... THE PAST.
>They're reptilian overlords but... DISGUISED AS PEOPLE

These kind of plots are stupid and depressingly common in softer scifi.

I'm usually really happy to find humanoids because everything else looks like some kind of penis mushroom or a cyclops bird or a weird lizard thing.

>realistic sci-fi

Alien aliens are not necessarily more realistic than human aliens. Both are just as likely.

>mfw its canon that he fucked EVERYONE. Even both Spaceships.

Panspermia.

>goddamn it gluktoblurdo... you said 7 billion years ago that you cleaned our hull and killed off all RNA molecules on the outer layers when we landed on the third planet from the sun
>dude, get off my back, I had a huge hangover from new years eve that day
>i don't care... look! look! the whole planet is swarming with RNA based life! you caused this. this entire planet is your responsibility now!
>i... i didn't know man! i'm still paying off my uni debts man. i can't be a biosphere controller at this point in my life!
>gluktoblurdo, you're gonna have to take responsibility...

Eh, "space dudes that are descendants of an ancient spacefaring human civilization" is popular hard-sf trope. There is a Homeworld thread on /tv/ right now.

The aliens themselves are actually too bizarre to have a successful contact with humans. Think huge hivemind amoebas that communicate through pheromones from EP. The guys we met are an engineered species capable of understanding both us and the aliens created to facilitate the contact.

In some thankfully not perused early variation on the script they were going to exterminate Earth for the death of Jesus who was one of them in disguise.

Holy shit that film never had a chance. It is, was and always shall be stupid all the way down.

Well, at least we know on what level of intelligence the script operates...

with the DLC there came some new humanoid portraits.

Cute Squidhumans ,Not-Vulkans/Eldar and NOT-Cardassians.

Even the original Alien script was better than the Movie. But that Movie was at least good in the version it got released.

Prometheus was a clusterfuck defying all internal logic. At that point i wouldn't be surprised for the Yautja to turn up in the next Movie.

Humanoid aliens are more realistic.The selective pressures that create intelligence also make humanoids.

>In general it is assumed that aliens look very ... alien
Most aliens are portrayed as humanoids.

Didn't Asimov have a whole theory on that for his Sci-Fi books?

On Earth, and only as far as our history is concerned.
>2017
>still falling for the HUMAN FORM IS DIVINE meme

>But what if we meet aliens and they look (mostly) like us?

One of two assumptions could be made:

1. We are all created by an intelligent force.
2. There's more to evolution than we think.

>How would we react?

Every idiot would be fine, but every scientist, philosopher, and rational human being would freak out, because it would completely oppose logic and reason.

>And would there be a scientific explanation for this?

Not for our current understanding, no.

See, many people here will point to shit like "convergent evolution" or "similar environments", but that's bullshit. There were many, many, many variables that all had to come together to make humans as we are. Those billions of years of evolution, winding through various cataclysms and freak events, creating the right pressures on our ancient ancestors to eventually end up with an intelligent hominid, are all basically impossible to repeat. It would be like having a million dice, rolling them all, then rolling them all again and getting the same numbers. The odds are just completely against it.

>what are dolphins, elephants, dogs, pigs, and crows

Intelligence does not require a humanoid form. We only got ours because of our vast historical evolution.

>There were many, many, many variables that all had to come together to make humans as we are.

True, but it's equally true that there were many, many variables that all had to come together to make birds the way they are, yet flight has independently evolved in a number of things other than birds - bats, insects, Hell, the pterosaurs are not actually related to birds at all.

I'm not certain what OP meant by (mostly) like us, but I'm assuming he means "head, torso, two arms, two legs", which still gives you a potentially pretty wide range of appearance. And evolution on Earth certainly seems to favor a few things - like, for example, no non-arthropod has more than four limbs, or five if you choose to count a tail. No non-arthropod has more than two eyes.

Truth, but you do need a few basic things to get advanced intelligent life, i.e., builders of complex tools. Namely, you're going to need manipulator appendages, i.e., something capable of fine manipulation like hands and fingers and opposable thumbs.

I could see a very basic shape - bipedal or at least upright walking, opposable digits on the upper limbs, sensory organs up top, 'eyes' facing forward - being common in the development of human life but everything else down to the very chemicals they're made of is couldbbe pretty much anything.

>yet flight has independently evolved in a number of things other than birds - bats, insects, Hell, the pterosaurs are not actually related to birds at all.

Two mistakes made here.

First is assuming that because convergent evolution occurs with creatures who already share an existing body plan, that this must mean aliens would. Birds, bats, and pterosaurs all started with the same ancestry, so the same body-plan.

Second, you've mentioned insect wings, but not noted how different they are to vertebrate wings. Even amongst insects, they all stem from the same ancestry, but they've adapted them to different purposes. Dragonflies kept their four separate wings, butterflies fused them into two, beetles turned one set into a hardened shell, and flies shrunk theirs down to counter-weights.

There are many occasions where life on our planet has come up with a similar solution, but they all share a biological ancestry, whereas aliens would not.

>I'm not certain what OP meant by (mostly) like us, but I'm assuming he means "head, torso, two arms, two legs", which still gives you a potentially pretty wide range of appearance.

Even on our planet, that setup isn't common. The vast majority of species are invertebrates, that don't have the vertebrate design. Just think what a species would've looked like if ammonites had been the basis for their entire phylum, instead of cynodonts for mammals/us.

But ignoring those, amongst vertebrates there's a wide array of alternate forms. Snakes, whales, elephants, giraffes, seals. To pick humanoid would be lazy.

>. And evolution on Earth certainly seems to favor a few things - like, for example, no non-arthropod has more than four limbs, or five if you choose to count a tail.

Well yes, prehensile tails would count. But you are also neglecting the elephant. Their trunk is effectively their most utilised limb.

>No non-arthropod has more than two eyes.

That's our shared ancestry. However, there are those without eyes.

>Truth, but you do need a few basic things to get advanced intelligent life, i.e., builders of complex tools.

Okay, let's assume that's required.

>Namely, you're going to need manipulator appendages, i.e., something capable of fine manipulation like hands and fingers and opposable thumbs.

Or trunks, tentacles, claws, or even beaks? Elephants are able to manipulate paintbrushes and communicate through their trunks. Octopus are infamous for their tactile use of tentacles. Many small crustaceans use claws to pick at parasites and algae. And there are birds who use cactus needles as tools to hunt. The opposable thumb is not a requirement, since many other structures could work in its place. It only happens to be for us because of our biological history. Plus, there are organisms who evolved opposable thumbs with no pressure on intelligence.

>And would there be a scientific explanation for this?
God does indeed exist and he is a human. Cheekiness points for the race of catgirls.

>That's our shared ancestry

That's evolution selecting for fewer eyes, actually, given that the arthropods we all ultimately came from had more than two eyes, yet as soon as one of them grew a (literal) backbone, the number of eyes was scaled back to just two.

The same happened once animals left the water: nature selected for increasingly fewer limbs.

Also, while birds, bats, and pterosaurs all started with the "same ancestry", I think you're neglecting how many tens of millions of years separate them. The first pterosaur evovlved 228 million years ago. Archaeopterix, the first bird, appeared 150 million years ago, and as part of a completely different evolutionary family. And the first bat didn't appear until around 52 million years ago, and was even further from the pterosaur or archaeopterix than either was from each other.

>Just think what a species would've looked like if ammonites had been the basis for their entire phylum, instead of cynodonts for mammals/us.

They wouldn't be intelligent, I can tell you that much. There are some pretty "smart" arthropods out there, but all of them pale next to any mammal or bird. An endothermic nature seems to be a minimum requirement for intelligence. Endotherms require a backbone, and something that universally occurs among any animal that develops a backbone is a reduction of limbs.

>amongst vertebrates there's a wide array of alternate forms.

But we're not discussing merely any alien life, we're discussing intelligent alien life, which for the purposes of this discussion I'm establishing as "complex tool using" (if not necessarily high-tech). So they need to be able to build and utilize things like, say, a butter churn.

For that you're going to need appendages capable of fine manipulation: hands and fingers. An elephant's trunk is pretty flexible, but it isn't nearly as good as hands. So it can be reasonably presumed that any intelligent species is going to have hands or something like it.

Incidently, before anyone brings up how "smart" some octopi or cuttlefish are...they aren't, really. Consider, for example, that while an octopus can be "taught" how to escape a box, it'll forget it by the very next day and have to be taught again. Mammals and birds, meanwhile, will often figure such things out for themselves, and almost never "forget" without weeks or months passing.

>Elephants are able to manipulate paintbrushes

That's kind of cool. Get back to me when they can turn a screw, or knit.

It's only logical to assume that all advanced sapient life would have the same basic shape as us, seeing as how we are objectively the most intelligient creatures on the planet.

is that star trek again?
James is just less recognisable than Kirk or daleks

> James is just less recognisable than Kirk
ten outta ten meme, not even mad

We'd fuck 'em.

>That's evolution selecting for fewer eyes, actually,

The only case of selecting for fewer eyes is when vertebrates lose them. Us having two wasn't a selection of evolution, it was just what we had.

>given that the arthropods we all ultimately came from had more than two eyes, yet as soon as one of them grew a (literal) backbone, the number of eyes was scaled back to just two.

No, we actually came from eyeless organisms which became early fish. The evolution of eyes came at separate times between many different kinds of organism.

>The same happened once animals left the water: nature selected for increasingly fewer limbs.

Again, no. It actually selected for more. Land vertebrates came from legless organisms, and four developed. Land invertebrates also retained multiple legs. The only cases of selecting for fewer limbs has been whales, dolphins, seals, and maybe ostriches and tyrannosaurs.

>Also, while birds, bats, and pterosaurs all started with the "same ancestry", I think you're neglecting how many tens of millions of years separate them.

That doesn't matter. There's more time between tyrannosaurs and stegosaurs than between us and stegosaurs. That aside, the fact invertebrates had 4 limbs is why "wings" evolved as they did. If we had no limbs, you'd end up with wings evolving from ribs (think of gliding tree snakes).

>They wouldn't be intelligent, I can tell you that much.

Well, no you can't tell me that much. You have no idea what would've happened.

>There are some pretty "smart" arthropods out there, but all of them pale next to any mammal or bird.

For us and our particular evolutionary history. But yes, there are cephalopods that can much many land animals. If anything, water-based organisms would be better suited to evolving larger brains, since it would weigh less for them.

>An endothermic nature seems to be a minimum requirement for intelligence.

Again, for us. But cephalopods also show intelligent can develop.

cont.

I mean as a name

>Endotherms require a backbone,

Nope. A backbone just surrounds a spinal chord, and a specific spinal chord isn't necessary for homeostasis.

>and something that universally occurs among any animal that develops a backbone is a reduction of limbs.

Again, no. The exact opposite was true. We gained limbs to walk on land AFTER we'd already developed backbones.

>But we're not discussing merely any alien life, we're discussing intelligent alien life, which for the purposes of this discussion I'm establishing as "complex tool using" (if not necessarily high-tech). So they need to be able to build and utilize things like, say, a butter churn.

That would also ignore intelligent alien life that doesn't use its own limbs to use tools. Parasitical or symbiotic organisms can exist. But sure, I'll grant your definition for the sake of discussion.

>For that you're going to need appendages capable of fine manipulation: hands and fingers.

You're limiting yourself to hands and fingers.

>An elephant's trunk is pretty flexible, but it isn't nearly as good as hands.

Yet.

>So it can be reasonably presumed that any intelligent species is going to have hands or something like it.

Or tentacles, or feet, or multi-pronged tongues. Just assuming hands like ours is a limit of imagination and knowledge of our own animal kingdom.

>That's kind of cool. Get back to me when they can turn a screw, or knit.

They can turn a screw. You're underestimating just how useful an elephant's trunk is.

*There's more time between tyrannosaurs and stegosaurs than between us and tyrannosaurs

How was Prometheus a clusterfuck defying all internal logic?

Looked like a fine At The Mountains of Madness with the Lovecraft nametags filed off.

Doesn't help that most people that hate Prometheus tend to be Aliens loving autists sucking the semen out of James Cameron's useless cock that fucking hate the idea of Xenomorphs not having a nice simple codified lifecycle, but are instead some kind of fluid shoggoth-like polymorphic shifter organism that can just become anything it wants.

>arthropods we all ultimately came from
WHAT
NO
We came from ringworms

How bout I put my worm inside your ring?

that depends
Tertullian or Augustin?