Aliens

[Dalton]

http://xkcd.com/638/

So I was drinking rum and thinking about how aliens must view us like that. Like little animals. Maybe they study us a bit, think "huh that's interesting" but why would they bother to lower themselves to our level and communicate with us as "equals"?

Then I started thinking about alien abductions. Seems like an immature thing to do, doesn't it?

Then it hit me. Teenage aliens.

Young aliens probably steal their parents' spaceships for a bit of joyriding (joywarping?), just like human kids do. After getting all screwed up on moon booze that their older brothers bought for them, maybe they think "Hey let's go kidnap some hicks from earth! Maybe we'll pull their legs off and watch them squirm! Maybe we'll drop them off somewhere else and see if they can find their way back!"

Then it hit me again.

Those alien kids are probably going through alien puberty. Get a little smashed on cheap moon liquor, get those raging hormones going, and... that's when 'anal probing' happens.

But is this really as big a deal as it might sound? Sure it's a shocking thought, but from their perspective it's not such a big deal. I mean look at it from their view point. It's no different than a couple of kids getting hammered, stealing their parents' car, and driving down to the old farm to fool around with McGuffin's sheep. The alien kids probably get away with it most of the time. Maybe they get caught, put in alien juvie for a bit, have to go to a counseling session or two, but after a slap on the wrist they just go home and get grounded for a few months then do it again.

Discuss.

[Furr]

You make a persuasive argument, Dalton.

Never really thought of it that way, mind. But hey, it does make sense.
We're just this little backwater civilization. Probably even just a line of experiments, or somesuch, gone out of hand. Idunno.

Maybe we'll find out one day. Maybe we won't.

[KamikazeDreamer]

You, sir, are retarded.

[KitDreamer]

Alien kidnap buttsex. Huh.

You could make a porn movie about that.

Hell they did it with guys in pterodactyl suits once.

[Xachariah]

And giant purple penguins.

[KitDreamer]

And giant purple penguins.

DOOD?

[Ball-o-Cheese]

1) Stop posting drunk.

2) You are like the 400th person to have this 'original' thought. I think I've read at least two short stories and a farside comic of the same premise.

3) It's always confusing to me that people somehow think that actual ALIENS are basically humans from a country they haven't heard of. Why would you assume they would be anything remotely like us, let alone similar enough to have unruly teenagers?

[Dalton]

1) Stop posting drunk.

2) You are like the 400th person to have this 'original' thought. I think I've read at least two short stories and a farside comic of the same premise.

3) It's always confusing to me that people somehow think that actual ALIENS are basically humans from a country they haven't heard of. Why would you assume they would be anything remotely like us, let alone similar enough to have unruly teenagers?

Internet: Serious business.

[Rook]

1) Stop posting drunk.

2) You are like the 400th person to have this 'original' thought. I think I've read at least two short stories and a farside comic of the same premise.

3) It's always confusing to me that people somehow think that actual ALIENS are basically humans from a country they haven't heard of. Why would you assume they would be anything remotely like us, let alone similar enough to have unruly teenagers?

Internet: Serious business.

Discuss.

Pick one.

B-o-C's 3rd point was quite valid.

[Dalton]

I think his first point held the most water, myself.

[Bane]

It makes sense that they'd be very unfamiliar in a way, being that everything we know is based on what we've seen and studied on one planet, but I think in general people sometimes get a little carried away. I'm going to assume people would call me a loon if I mentioned anything about reality working in accordance with belief and perception, so I can pretty much just state that more likely than not they obey the same physics we're subjected to. I think legs, wings and flippers would be common features in any species remotely advanced on an evolutionary level; there just aren't that many other plausible ways to get around, and this applies to other features as well. Some sensory organs would likely make use of at least some of the same things ours do; touch/hearing would be somewhat popular I'd think. Natural selection would include the environment, which strikes me as the most dynamic part of all what determines their nature, but it ultimately narrows down the possibilities as well.

I don't think we'll be too surprised unless something in the very foundation of it all is different, like being non-carbon based, evolving in/on a jovian planet or being some sort of energetic creature. Any of that could be, but it seems less likely.

[KitDreamer]

Anybody else remember Flashback?

and the device Conrad invented for detecting aliens?

[Dalton]

I played Flashback for a little while but ultimately grew bored and went back to more immediately gratifying games like Sparkster.

[SixStringSamurai]

I was disappointed by the lack of Xenomorphs in this thread.

[Inquisitor]

[Dalton]

I was disappointed by the lack of Xenomorphs in this thread.

[Ball-o-Cheese]

I think legs, wings and flippers would be common features in any species remotely advanced on an evolutionary level; there just aren't that many other plausible ways to get around, and this applies to other features as well. Some sensory organs would likely make use of at least some of the same things ours do; touch/hearing would be somewhat popular I'd think. Natural selection would include the environment, which strikes me as the most dynamic part of all what determines their nature, but it ultimately narrows down the possibilities as well.

I actually disagree with you about a lot of this anyway (why not gas-filled airbags instead of wings? Why not rolling or peristaltic motion on land?) but its not all that important - I am generally fine to concede that any creature coming to earth would originate from a roughly similar world, and therefore be basically similar to something on our own planet.

Dalton is talking about 'teenage' aliens, as if this is some sort of common thing. It's not. The entire concept he is using, of 'teenagers' as being somewhere between adults and children, relatively intelligent and functionally independent but also headstrong and poorly disciplined, is a completely social construct, and it's a derivative of a modern, luxurious lifestyle. In societies and cultures where children transition to being productive and contributing members of society much earlier in life, this period of 'teenage-ness' simply doesn't occur.

At this point it's also worth noting that our concept of 'childhood' is also basically a construction - in many times and places around the world, people begin working as soon as they are able to stand and follow instructions, and many of them participate in caretaking of younger siblings and relatives as early as six or seven.

What I'm saying is that Dalton is projecting basically an facet of our current social order onto creatures that are entirely outside it with no real basis at all. Saying 'Well maybe they are alien teenagers!' is pretty much the same as saying 'Maybe they are alien anarcho-capitalists!' or 'They're alien neo-liberals!'. These don't really mean anything beyond the society and cultural that create them as categories, and it makes no sense to try and extend them beyond that.

Now if someone wants to try and establish that 'teenager' is a social construction that inherently results from the physical/social situation that is itself necessary for space travel, that would give you some sort of grounding

[Ball-o-Cheese]

See that's what 'Internet: Serious Business' looks like, bitches.

[KamikazeDreamer]

Fathom II: Bane's Rising

[Bane]

I think legs, wings and flippers would be common features in any species remotely advanced on an evolutionary level; there just aren't that many other plausible ways to get around, and this applies to other features as well. Some sensory organs would likely make use of at least some of the same things ours do; touch/hearing would be somewhat popular I'd think. Natural selection would include the environment, which strikes me as the most dynamic part of all what determines their nature, but it ultimately narrows down the possibilities as well.

I actually disagree with you about a lot of this anyway (why not gas-filled airbags instead of wings? Why not rolling or peristaltic motion on land?) but its not all that important - I am generally fine to concede that any creature coming to earth would originate from a roughly similar world, and therefore be basically similar to something on our own planet.

What about how natural selection effects these things though?
Assuming evolution occurs due to random mutations--and I am, because that's always the way I've understood this to work--then there's the chance that a speific design (such as legs, airbags, etc) never comes up to be try-tested. However if you give a world enough time it's statistically probable that they'll arise eventually--and we're talking about who knows how many worlds for the purposes of extraterrestials. If one design worked better, it'd be more likely to prevail over all of them. If the features you suggested are present in any simple, older lifeforms here, it'd offer some input on how well they faired against other thin--well the butterfly effect kind of shits all over that actually. However the statement still works for determining an average for what a lifeform is like, even if that isn't the same as what's occurred on earth. The similarity between an extraterresrial and humankind then depends on the likelihood that earth is an odd planet out.
This should work regardless of environment as well, being such an average, and it's probably harder for life survive on some types of planets than others. They may not even allow things to reach that level of complexity altogether.

ftr I like any conversations I have with you and hope my parts aren't a flat waste of time. =v

Fathom II: Bane's Rising

I can't tell if you're teasing trolling or just dumb.

//Actually I forgot this was serious shit, so I'll go.
If I judge a man, taking an adamant step toward considering the existence of an actual hierarchy in life, it's by his philosophy. The beliefs someone holds will guide them in life and determine what their experiences are like. Therefore I think at least a decent amount of thought should be put into it all by any man.
Fathom's philosophy was likely inferior. While I don't remember its actual principles, I remember the document he once sent me was extremely long and wove a complex trail through the points it strived to make. This shows the approach and methodology employed in his efforts. I can print the entirety of mine in a few sentences; one if need be, and explain the reasoning/motie force behind everything I've been able to observe. This simplicity has been justified in its uses over and over again and was based on the most stable, definite claims able to be made about the universe. I believe he fell into the complexity and strayed from reality, delving into the purely theoretical.
Hypocritically that conclusion's fairly theoretical on its own, but from the evidence I have that's where I go, if I go anywhere. I can also just say that most people think Fathom was a right loon, but I've had enough people agree with me on key points. That leads into the whole chain of credibility thing, but some of them are people you--Fahd--have called well-grounded.

Your mother.

[KamikazeDreamer]

i so dum

[Pink]

http://xkcd.com/638/

So I was drinking cum

I need to be a good girl and not edit the text of others.

[Lugh]

See that's what 'Internet: Serious Business' looks like, bitches.

He's right,

[Pink]

See that's what 'Internet: Serious Business' looks like, bitches.

He's right,

GO TO BED.

[Ball-o-Cheese]

What about how natural selection effects these things though?

Natural selection is pretty complicated, and I guess fundamentally we don't really know how convergent it would be. I was intentionally trying to select things that we don't see on earth, so we don't really know how well gas-bag zeppelin birds would function or if the prairies would be dominated by the rolling tumble-wolf. We do see a number of different ways of getting around land and sea (worms, snakes, jellyfish, squid, octopus) that have all endured a good long time. What's additionally confusing is that we'll see developments get 'dropped' when they aren't particularly useful to a branch - I'm pretty sure that snakes are actually derived from legged lizards, for instance.

Another matter is that many changes do not get 'try-tested' fairly, so to speak. If a creature develops an evolutionary advantage but is just generally at a dead end, that trait can be wiped out and lost, but not because it was itself bad - it just developed on a terrible creature. As a far-out example, you have animals like the Giant Panda which are just sort of poorly equipped. They have to spend all their time eating terrible, low-quality food, they're lethargic, have trouble breeding, are restricted to shrinking habitats and ill-equipped to adapt to new areas. If tomorrow Pandas developed enormous gas-bags that let them drift across Asia, would that really help them at all? They would probably go extinct at the same rate they are now - possibly faster because they'd float out of their habitats. So the gas-bag evolution would fail and that trait would be lost, but not because it was particularly bad itself - it just occurred in a failing species.

What I'm getting to here is that we really have little idea as to what the 'optimal' or 'common' design features might be. What we have at the moment is basically a pile of 'what worked' crossed with 'what turned up at the right time'. There might be endless other, better, options that have never cropped up or had badly failed starts (when a mutation occurs, much of its success will depend on the survival of the first exhibitors - sucks to be the dinosaur who gained opposable thumbs and a fully-functioning brain, only  to be born at ground zero for a meteor). Now, the earth is a pretty diverse place, and I don't think its unreasonable that anything visiting us would be from something with a rough analogue to one of our regions - we have a lot of them, and I don't think we have any reason to assume that the earth is ridiculously unique. And there are things that are pretty consistent - legs, for instance, are really fucking boss, regardless as to whether you have a thousand of them, six, or just two.

To come back to alien visitors, though, there is something else to talk about here - we tend to think of space being a non-environment in many ways. When we talk about humanity exploring the stars, for instance, its usually manly-square-jawed football-playing sorts doing it. Which makes perfect sense culturally, socially, but it denies that space is an environment - like earth - that will shape us. Consider the distance and time involved for serious interstellar travel. It's immense, you are generally talking about thousands of years and generations to go from system to system. And even if we go ahead and give a faster-than-light option, why should we assume that a species that reaches the stars would come back down? Mightn't they just remain starborn, extracting whatever materials they need from asteroids and planets from the safety and comfort of their ship, like a butterfly with a thousand-mile probiscus?

So, even assuming that our alien friends came from a planet like ours that had similar creatures and features as ours - how similar will they be to us when they get here? How useful are legs  in space, really? What good are wings, or fins? They might try to preserve their form, as I expect we will, but evolutionary pressure takes a long time and is hard to notice. After a million years in space, what would we look like? And would be still remember what we had been like, or would that be buried somewhere in the depths of an immense Wikipedia project or cached under ten thousand reels of space porn?

I am not really sure where I am going with this anymore, but it was fun to think about.

ftr I like any conversations I have with you and hope my parts aren't a flat waste of time. =v

I wouldn't be typing all this if it wasn't any fun. We cool.