Why do science fiction fans have more problems with humanoid species than fantasy fans?

You can have space magic

Then it's just fantasy in space, not scifi.

Because science fiction fans consider themselves "the serious, intelligent and critical fanbase" to the point they decide not to suspend their disbelief for the purpose of fun or actually have a layer of interconnecting worldbuilding to justify something such as similar body structure.

>You can have space magic

Which isn't science fiction.

Not if you make the space magic just sufficiently advanced science.

Then it's not magic.

>Sci-fi doesn't.
Aliens

You need to elaborate a little more.

I've never seen anything to suggest that.

Y'know how Fantasy is starting to get stale because every other fantasy story being published is either a LotR ripoff, a D&D story, or isekai shit?

Sci-fi is the same, except you also have to adhere to the physics of space or else some autist with spam your inbox with lines of worthless mathematics explaining why the concept of a Mech shouldn't work.

>Then it's just fantasy in space, not scifi.
Autists like you are why Sci-Fi is shit that nobody bothers writing for nowadays.

No, he's right.
If it's sci-fi I expect some "science", not some retarded "it's magic bro, it doesn't need to make sense" bullshit.

Why does everything need to be fucking explained? It's called "Science-Fiction" not "Science-Reality."

When you try to explain how bullshit works, you end up with shit that not only makes no sense, but is actually MORE ridiculous than just saying "it's magic bro" like how Star Wars retcon'd itself so that the Force is the result of space germs.

Because it's boring and lacks creativity.

No one is saying to smother consumers with technobabble. That sucks for everyone.

However, creators should have enough know-how to be able to translate what they know into something palatable. And betting on non-humanoid aliens, or at least bipedal-aliens that don't look exactly like a man with some makeup, is a safe bet to hinge on.

Show, not tell. Hard and Mundane scifi doesn't want to be told; they want to see something that is much more plausible than the soft scifi of Trek or the Science Fantasy (which is what your science 'fiction' probably is) of Star Wars.

It is if you don't understand it.

Read and try to understand it.

In reality, technological or even intelligent life is likely to be super-rare or is beginning to appear just right now and we are among the first ones. We don't see evidence of intelligent life,most evident in the form of megastructure like Dyson swarms, even in other galaxies. Granted it is likely than less than 10% of the galaxies is habitable due cosmic burst rays and lack of heavy atoms. In the millions of years that a species takes to naturally evolve, another technological species should have already fully colonized and consumed the entire galaxy. We will never find our equals, only monkeys or angels. Any equal will be an uplifted species or descendents of our species.

That doesn't answer the question.

>another technological species should have already fully colonized and consumed the entire galaxy.
Unlikely. The galaxy is way to big, space travel at such lenght is basicaly fantasy.

They shouldn't. Bipedalism is efficient. There is every reason to expect that animals with a similar intelligence to humans would have a similar body plans to humans. Convergent evolution is a thing. If the creatures are on a similar planet and build civilizations analogous to those that humans do, then those creatures are probably humanoid.

Science fiction begins with a fictional conceit. "Convergent evolution resulted in the humanoid body plan being pretty ubiquitous among space-faring animals" isn't a huge leap.

Show, don't tell is a concept that's relevant to all written works and I don't think that's really relevant to this discussion.

Also, I'm not even talking about the technobabble, the technobabble is fine as long as it's in small doses. I'm talking about how people need the author to explain how basic conventions in the setting work, even when it either adds nothing substantial to the plot or reveals some crucial twist to the setting as a whole.

Like we don't need an explanation for how FTL works,it's there to allow the protagonist(s) to get to where they need to be. If we do need an explanation, it'll come up once it becomes relevant to the actual plot.

If anything, Hard and Mundane Scifi are the genres that get "told" the most, because once you establish that you're in a "realistic" space setting, you have to make sure to explain how this shit's possible and be sure to fact check your shit, lest the autists come out to explain how you're a hack.

>If the creatures are on a similar planet and build civilizations analogous to those that humans do, then those creatures are probably humanoid
But it's highly unlikely.

There's no reason to think that a alien shouldn't have 4 or 6 limbs. Octopods are a good example of how a non-humanoid species could be

There is. Controlling more appendages requires more bodily resources devoted to that control. Convergent evolution results in similar body plans for animals occupying similar ecological niches.

There is every reason to assume that a civilization-building species that behaves similar to humans would look similar to humans in their basic, bodily structure.

There is zero reason to think they'd have more limbs. There is literally all of evolutionary history offering us evidence that, instead, they'd be humanoids.

It isn't. It's just a matter of time as this is an exponential process. Exponential growth gets crazy fast on astronomical scales.

Octopods are a good example of something well adapted for living in water. Not a place where you expect complex technological civilizations to form despite nearly a century of sci-fi writings trying to come up with a good handwave for why that would work.

You sound like you know what you're talking about, but you don't.

Humans are:
1) Not a space-faring race
2) A single example of tool-using intelligences among several mammals and avians

The sample size is too small for your broad-ass claims. Sit down.

Most likely the grand majority of planets with life are unicellular slimeballs. Just see how long that phase lasted on Earth: billions of years. That's a significant chunk of the universe's existence.

You are wrong and not very bright.

Convergent evolution offers us a ridiculous variety of examples offering evidence that, when animals occupy similar niches, they have similar body plans.

>well but we only have one example occupying the niche I want to talk about!

So what? "Well that might apply to other animals, but the niche humans occupy is super-magically different! So we can't assume that the rules applying to all animals also apply to humans." That's pretty much what you're trying to claim. And you're completely wrong.

There shouldn't be intelligent aliens other than those trapped on planets with too much gravity, like those oceanic super-Earths, planets where something prevents the rise of technology (you won't discover fire in a super-moist planet), or the ones who got extinct. Otherwise, you wouldn't need a telescope to observe the evidence of aliens. They would be already there, and their presence would be all over the galaxy.

>There is every reason to assume that a civilization-building species that behaves similar to humans would look similar to humans in their basic, bodily structure.
As I said, it's unlikely. Why would a alien civilisation be similar to a human civilisation when even among humans, their civilisations are soo different?
>Controlling more appendages requires more bodily resources devoted to that control. Convergent evolution results in similar body plans for animals occupying similar ecological niches
That's the problem. Convergent evolution hardly matters when we're talking about aliens. They may not even be animals at all.

You can't just say things like that, user. You literally have no real world examples or numbers to point to.

Oh, and this part?
>Humans are:
>1) Not a space-faring race

Is moronic. Because in our hypothetical, we're pretending humans are space-faring. Don't be a retard.

You're ignoring the part where we're designing the sci-fi world. We get to make assumptions. We make the assumptions that: "humans are a space-faring civilization" and "there are other space faring civilizations" because we want to.

And once we make those assumptions, "aliens are humanoid" isn't a huge leap. It's a perfectly reasonable one.

I'm going to approach this from the other direction and say that one piece of evidence is not enough to prove causality or causation. It's purely circumstantial until a trend is defined.

And you cannot define a trend with a single example, no matter what you want to *believe*.

Even amongst bipeds, the majority on our planet don't have the leg structure and layout we do.

Honestly, our specific use of biped layout is not worth having convergent evolution towards, its just the logical end outcome of some small quadrupeds that became tree climbers, got big, and then evolved bipedalism and fucked back out of the trees within a relatively similar evolutionary timeframe.

You'd have to be making some pretty fuckin' deep assertions to claim that every ayy lmao we run into is likely to have spent time in their evolutionary history climbing trees.

Your belief that we have only one example is flatly wrong, is the problem. We have thousands of examples of animals occupying the niche displaying convergent evolution.

The only way your comment makes any sense is if you start from the assumption that the niche humans occupy is magically different, and that humans are somehow not animals in a way analogous to other animals.

>You literally have no real world examples or numbers to point to.
Not him but isn't this genre called "Science-Fiction?" As in "Science shit that isn't real?"

Why do we need to base fake shit off of real shit? Why can't we just make up whatever crazy shit we want and figure out the logistics if and when it suddenly becomes relevant to the plot?

>And once we make those assumptions, "aliens are humanoid" isn't a huge leap. It's a perfectly reasonable one.
That's because you're making assumptions based on things that don't have any logic behind.

>Why do science fiction fans have more problems with humanoid species than fantasy fans?
Because Fantasy fans are willing to suspend their disbelief to accept that humans, elves, halflings, and dorfs exist while Sci-fags require an in depth expose to explain how space-elves, space-dorfs, and space-halflings exist even though it doesn't really matter one fucking bit.

the past three or so generations of sci-fi fans were largely introduced to the genera via live action movies and television, both of which have a lot of this

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RubberForeheadAliens

Due to both budget constraints and it simply being easier to do

Many fantasy fans, meanwhile, got into the genera via books, which don't have any budget limitations at all, so they can depict whatever the fuck they want. Fantasy film and television also tend to downplay humanoid species that aren't the standard fare of elves and dwarves

Basically, film has left a bad taste in sci-fi fans' mouths

Because sci-fi specifically means that you're creating things that do not exist, but that you're creating things based on reality.

Fiction do not means "fantasy" or "things that don't make sense".

Didnt you see the "unique fantasy races" thread yesterday? It got shit to hell and back for DARING to imply anyone play anything but human

But we do. We have already done the math. We know how much energy would generate fusion. We know the energy that antimatter generates. It may take us 200 or 1000 years to reach the level of development necessary to develop interstellar ships and even then it would be nothing compared to astronomical scales or the scales that species need to evolve. I'm afraid, user, that we are the precursors.

You do not even have one single example of another intelligence on par with humans.

Your opinion is skewed by media - convergent evolution explains how similar traits evolve in species in similar niches, not broad painted strokes like you're claiming.

A few pivotal things were big for the introduction of human intelligence, like roaming herds and seasonal droughts. What says these even exist on other planets?

How do we know the body type is not generally anthropoidal (which is by far the most successful body type on this planet by variety and by time on this earth) or avian-reptilian? How do we know it's not a super intelligent sponge colony?

You're taking one very bad example in a purely hypothetical situation and trying to use real world science to back up a baseless claim.

We call that intellectually dishonest, mate, and that's why two legged, two-eyed shrimp-men couldn't save District 9 or why Predators, Tau and all your favorites are the worst depictions of aliens since Superman touched down in Middle America.

You don't need FTL for space opera. A solar system is big enough for truly crazy populations and even off-shots of humanity and gene experiments.

You're presuming that space travel is a question of time, while in fact we don't really know if that's even possible

Why exactly does it matter if it makes sense? As long as it's not a deus ex machina or whatever, I don't really see why everything needs an explanation? Can't people just accept things at face value and just sit back and enjoy the damn story without complaining about how the math doesn't make sense or some shit?

user please tell me you mean interstellar travel

>Why exactly does it matter if it makes sense
Because that's fantasy.
It's like saying "why can't horror stories be funny instead of scary"?

Yes.

We call that Science-Fantasy, like Maze Runner or Star Wars or Numanera.

It is not Science-Fiction.

One plays with the unknown in favor of the story, the other blatantly ignores the known in favor of the story. You figure out which is which.

>Because that's fantasy.
No it's not. It's fiction. Fake. Non-Realistic. As in "hey author, you're free to make creative fucking liberties so long as it doesn't fuck up the plot and shit, go wild."

It was meant to be realistic, it's be called "Science-Reality" or be categorized as "Non-Fiction."

>One plays with the unknown in favor of the story, the other blatantly ignores the known in favor of the story.
Nigga, every story does that shit to an extent. It's why in some stories, being thrown through a brick wall is merely an inconvenience rather than a death sentence or how a protagonist can be stabbed through the chest and still be capable of fighting for a few more chapters.

Is Science-Fiction dead because nobody is willing to have fun anymore?

Incorrect. You're still making this stupid misunderstanding
>You do not even have one single example of another intelligence on par with humans.

It relies on a lurking premise that: The niche humans occupy isn't magically exempt from analogy to other niches. Human evolution isn't magically exempt from analogy to the evolution of other animals.

Fantasy usually takes place on Earth, or an Earth-like plane. Creatures are based on humans, and animals on Earth. (Centaurs = Horses. Dragons = Lizards. And so on.) Whereas in Sci-Fi, creatures and aliens are from other worlds, many of which are nothing like Earth. So why would they be even vaguely like humans or any Earth creatures?

It is possible. It's just beyond our current tech and industry. See project Starshot. In a few decades, we will send our first small probe, a laser-sail to another star. We calculate that we will be able to launch it at 15% and 20% of C. At this speed, it will reach Proxima Centauri in 20/30 years.

A colony ships is another matter, it will likely take us many years before we can send massive ships, and the solar system has plenty of room to spare. With fusion, you can literally colonize everything in the solar system. Even if you never develop fusion reactors, there are other options.

>it will likely take us many years before we can send massive ships

By years, I mean centuries.

>No it's not. It's fiction. Fake. Non-Realistic. As in "hey author, you're free to make creative fucking liberties so long as it doesn't fuck up the plot and shit, go wild."
Thats why there's the sci of science there.
There's no sci-reality because that would be exactly the world were living at.

>Is Science-Fiction dead because nobody is willing to have fun anymore?
Have ever thought that perharps different humans have different concepts of "fun"?

>It's just beyond our current tech and industry
That's exactly the problem.

You're presuming that we'll have technology to do something that we don't know how to do

Science FICTION

It's supposed to be speculative

My biggest obstacle with your assertion is the presupposition that life works the same way on other planets. More likely than not, we're looking at dominant species working like communal organisms like ooze or man-o-wars.

Out of ALL of the tree-dwelling species that came down to plains, how many of them developed bipedalism as a primary means of transportation.

One.

And we don't even have a great spine for bipedalism, either. This is by no means the most "efficient" body form, as you have stated, nor does it offer anything other than mobility with tools in tow.

Now, that being said, *hundreds* of other species are capable of moving items around just fine. What makes the pressures that makes us smart, incapable of doing the same to different morphologies on a different planet IF those pressures exist?

Because a niche without a single pressure can be said to be an entirely different ecological role. So, what makes this primate pack hunter that just happens to have to legs and hands and arms any more likely in a real-world scenario than a pack hunting raptor or octopoid?

We have a dozen examples of gliding species from fish to squirrels to snakes, but none of them do it the exact same way. And we have a million different animals with poisons, but half of them don't even make it themselves.

What makes a bipedal stance the most likely body type for intelligent, space-faring races? Convergent evolution does not account for the climate, nor the genetic pool, nor the sheer luck of a species to not be wiped out by some universal backspace.

You have ONE example of a smart bipedalism, and it is a bad one.

Even if we never discover a way to make Fusion reactors (which would be a paradigm shift even bigger than the invention of the bow and arrow, agriculture, green revolution all rolled into one), we can still do it with lasers sails. 1 kg of the most abundant atom in the universe would will keep a person in luxurious lifestyle for a natural lifetime with room to spare.

I just wanna bang cute alien chicks

>Thats why there's the sci of science there.
The Sci is there to show how it's a story that takes place in a setting where space travel is possible. Anything more is just your own connotation.
>Have ever thought that perharps different humans have different concepts of "fun"?
Have you stopped to think about how trying to make every fucking sci-fi story the same will inherently make them boring?

Do you actually read contemporary SF? Hard SF, as written by people like Hal Clement or Robert Forward, has always been a smallish niche within science fiction as a whole. I’m pretty sure that’s still true today. SF likes non-human aliens because 1) they’re often more interesting than human-ish ones and 2) it really doesn’t seem that likely that aliens will resemble us.

“To what extent have convergence and parallelism affected the evolution of life on Earth?” is one of the deep, hard questions in evolutionary biology, and no, we really don’t have a general answer to it. I can give you some good recent examples of convergence: we’ve seen it in speciation in anole lizards and, strikingly, we’ve observed a molecular signature of convergence in echolocation between dolphins and bats. Other work has shown that trait evolution can “orbit” particular phenotypes— I’m thinking of a paper on canid teeth here.

But there are some good reasons to doubt the notion that convergence is pervasive in evolution. We know that multicellular eukaryotes often possess relatively low effective population sizes, suggesting that drift should be a significant factor in their evolution (thinking of Michael Lynch here). We also know that trait evolution looks like random walks in many cases— in fact, stasis and random walks are more frequent than gradualism (drawing on Gene Hunt).

There is precisely one person I know of in the world of evolutionary biology who was dumb enough to propose that convergent evolution would cause intelligent aliens to resemble us, and that’s Simon Conway Morris, in his book “Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe.” Frankly, this was not a good book. Morris is excellent at reconstructing the anatomy of fossil invertebrates, but he’s a terrible theorist.

Certainly indistinguishable from it

I like how in Revenger by Alastair Reynolds tells a classic space opera, but if you catch the clues you realise that everything is taking place inside one single system with a decayed Dyson Swarm. This isn't spoiler because it doesn't matter to the plot, but it shows you how big a solar system is and how you can do space opera without interstellar travel or FTL.

Science fiction must be completely realistic, or else there's no science, and it's just fiction. Fantasy doesn't have that limitation, which is why it's intended for children and not adults.

I'm going to need you to define "cute", "alien", and "chick"

People who say "X is for children" always strike me as the type who never grew out of middle school mentally.

Like take a look ITT and tell me that anyone here would be seen as an adult in any capacity.

What if the aliens are offshots of humanity? Given the time distances and alien worlds, it is certain that our species will diverge even within our own system.

There you go, senpai, now you're getting somewhere.

I've always liked that explanation. That way you got your humans, humanoid aliens, and then alien aliens.

Star Trek shoved in a shitty explaination for this that some humanoid precusor race seeded the galaxy and thats why everyone is a biped.

Of course they didn't say something like 'we made a biological code in DNA to do that' so it sort of fell flat and I think everyone outside of that season of TNG ignored that explanation.

Orion's Arm has this where nearly everything can trace itself back to Terra save for some weird and slow aliens.

Daily reminder that humans evolved on earth in humanoid shape.
Daily reminder that evolution should apply on other worlds.

You're assuming growth MUST happen. We're already at 7 billion and for what? For most of them to suffer and languish? We're also on the cusp of a automation revolution and the value of human labor is decreasing. Why would it be different for any alien species?

Why is it a seemingly given that any race - ours or theirs - would grow so much to have the need for megastructures and to take over the galaxy? Seems rather stupid, if anything. Sure, spreading around is logical just to keep your strain of DNA or equivalent viable, but that doesn't automatically mean quintrillions of people and megastructures.

>Star Trek shoved in a shitty explaination for this that some humanoid precusor race seeded the galaxy and thats why everyone is a biped.
Doctor Who also did that, with the Time Lords travelling throughout time to ensure the rise of life like them simply because they're just that narcissistic.

>suffer
>languish

When you have nuclear fusion as a power source, scarcity is no longer a excuse. You won't get food riots when the ship's fusion reactor can provide single-handedly power to an entire country.

I would also add that all it takes to keep galaxy-wide masses down is the constant struggle between races; because once you can zip around a system in weeks with say, Antimatter or Beamed power you're a threat to the next race. Then all it takes are a few relativistic weapons to speed through interstellar space and knock out a civilization - maybe not destroy it, but planets and mega-structures can be destroyed; species hide in tin-cans and mobile stations and growth becomes stunted thereof. Add a few layers of self-replicating robots running around that push rocks into planets to prevent sub-interstellar species from advancing or some other method of keeping them down and you have a galaxy devoid of huge civilizations and maybe, if efficient enough, planet-bound polities or even life.

Thus from that assumption the result is a diffused and mostly silent galaxy, lots of species hiding in interstellar space or one planets below levels that can be detected from afar and no megastructures or expansive growth; and if someone does balloon and start being all energetic - whamo.

Not all sci-fi as interstellar space travel though. Sci-fi just means there is technology in it that we don't have.

There's still a period between the first efficient and profitable fusion reactor that gives you one more MW than you put in and planet-wide systems and extremely efficient reactors. There's a period where, during diffusion and refinement, you could see die-offs and plateaus and ennui and filters and whatever.

I have heard that argument before and is not as smart as you think. If you you can do that, why don't you go a step ahead and sterilise life in the ENTIRE galaxy. Don't left the suckers even the possibility to evolve. Once everything is death, colonize the galaxy. You have nothing to fear. Plus, it is likely that you need megastructures anyway to make these relativistic projectiles and superweapons.

Because why not?
Sure, you could have a nice, comfy population of a billion living on a single world, living like olympian gods through automation.
Or, you could have that same, comfy population of a billion repeated a million times over on a million worlds.
Even if individuals aren't useful for resource extraction or mining or industry in any useful capacity, they're still good for two important things; science and culture (natural or synthetic)

At that level of tech, you're not worried about growth for the sake of survival, or growth for the sake of growth, you're interested in growth for the sake of existence.
More people is good because it adds more to the collective culture of your civilization and its history; it produces millions of savants and geniuses a generation to create great works of art and discover impossible things.
Existence is good, so you want to share it with as many people as possible, and that necessitates making more people

I doubt you need megastructures to churn out a few probes and accelerate a few relativistic kill vehicles towards the spot where a planet will be by the time they arrive decades later. We already as a race below the K1 scale can plausibly produce the plans for such things, if not churn them out right now by mashing together other concepts such as ISRU, relatively primitive AI or even just code, tracking exoplanets and doing something as simple as pushing oort cloud objects onto a intercept course.

The end result of a galaxy where planets and megastructures are easy, slow targets that can be destroyed far easier than they can be built is a galaxy where everyone is basically running around from each other in interstellar space or at the edge of systems with decades-old intel if not more from their probes and ships and communities hunting everyone else out of xenophobia.

And it's almost always far easier to destroy than it is to build.

This all relies on the assumption that science and culture is limitless, that existence IS good.

The Chinese eventually hit a self-imposed isolation because of their elevated self-worth, a technological plateau and a social one where they felt that they had long past their golden ages and they had all the answers. Millions of their geniuses and savants did nothing more than comment on works set down a thousand years before them and wrote the same answers in the same form on their official examinations that demanded nothing of substance from them but knowledge of their conservatism. Anything that strayed from their ways was heretical or foreign; the few individualists that did anything outside the norm were little more than outcasts in their day, and eventually it blew up in three civilization destroying revolutions: Taiping, Xinhai, Jiefàng.

Y'all niggas need some Endless Space/Legend in your lives

People often think relativistic projectiles are these invincible superweapons. It's just a failure of imagination. There are ways to defend yourself against such weapons, among other things because they too will collide against the interstellar dust and be disintegrated. Our area of space actually has less dust than average, so imagine planets in one of the big arms. Plus, you don't really need to hide your civilization, you need to hide your backup. I don't think you will ever aim for more than 86% of the light speed and would require the kind of radar systems that would glow like miniature suns, and massive supercomputers just track anything and disintegrate it with gamma lasers so you aren't annihilated by even a grain of sand. Also energy requirements and time dilation go asymptotically worse and worse as you get closer to lightspeed.

>This all relies on the assumption that science and culture is limitless
Science, not necesarily, but culture, certainly. Even if nothing is original, there's infinite ways to tell a story, infinite ways to make a game.
>that existence IS good.
Whatever "good" is, it requires you to exist for it to happen. So does evil, but that's a necessary cost to have good. Thankfully, evil can be mitigated in the pursuit of good, but you still need to exist.
In short; anything that is objectively required to do good must also be good in and of itself.

Good point on the Chinese, but a few things; the Chinese didn't have infinite room to expand, which a sufficiently advanced species does. If there's not enough room in the galaxy, just go to another one. If there's no nearby galaxies with untaken spaceclay, just start building in the intergalactic void.
Secondly, although I have zero knowledge of ancient China, I don't think that they were necessarily descended from an individualistic culture that celebrated scientific discovery and innovation.

Some cultures may stop banning technological development, but ALL of them?

>implying the best race isn't the one that isn't (distinctly) humanoid

>Existence is good, so you want to share it with as many people as possible, and that necessitates making more people

if that was your goal you could just churn out artificially intelligences living in simulated worlds much more efficiently than making real people in the real world