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> I sometimes wonder how 'humanoid' any potential intelligent alien species must be, if they exist. TV uses humanoid aliens because they're easy to cast :) Ju
by retrac 5y ago
> I sometimes wonder how 'humanoid' any potential intelligent alien species must be, if they exist.
TV uses humanoid aliens because they're easy to cast :)
Just look at the other intelligent life on Earth. Some birds, whales, elephants are near the top. If we hadn't nearly wiped elephants out maybe in another 10 million years they'd be making spaceships with their trunks (which have a fine manipulation ability approaching the human hand).
A little further away evolutionarily, jellyfish are remarkably intelligent and seem to even have individual personalities, and they don't have a brain.
- andrewl 5y agoAs retrac says, it’s easier to cast for humanoids. And decades ago the special effects technology was nowhere near what we have now, so there were fewer options for more unusual forms and they were expensive. Novelists had no such restrictions, so Larry Niven could create Pierson’s Puppeteers in 1966: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson%27s_Puppeteers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson%27s_Puppeteers
- Scarblac 5y agoAnd Douglas Adams could invent a hyper intelligent shade of the colour blue :)
- raverbashing 5y ago> Some birds, whales, elephants are near the top. They're different from humans, but much closer than we expect: mammals (apart from the birds, sure), with similar skeletal structure, similar overall "how it works" biology (brains, skeleton, digestive system, circulatory system, etc) The closest "intelligent alien" we know of is the octopus. That's really something else. But even then a lot of biology is shared. If you want to get creative don't think of humans mating neanderthals, think animals re-evolving from an earthworm or a jellyfish.