It strikes me, local skeptic that I am, as weird that in almost any report of
alien sightings, the aliens are surprisingly similar to terran life.  It seems
to me that this is Star Trek all over again--give 'em funny makeup and a bad
haircut, and call 'em aliens.  The most original alien reports--or fictional
aliens, for that matter--that I have seen have been ripping off other terran
life besides humans:  a nice start, but it still seems a little unlikely. 
What do you think--how improbably would it be for life to evolve in a nearly
identical way in two different places?  What would a 'real' alien look like?

37 responses total.

make that bad 'hair', not bad 'hai'...o well...

Doing something like giving aliens funny makeup and a bad hair cut is the only
real step we can take in imagining aliens with just making things up on the
fly. We only know what life on our earth is like so that is the only template
we have from which to imagine alien life. Makes sense to me...

Yes, but the likelyhood of the aliens ACTUALLY looking like that is what...
1,000,000,000,000(Imagine more zeros if you feel like it) to 1.... Life on
earth evolved this way for a reason... Life on another planet is almost
certainly not going to evolve the same way unless the planet was an EXACT
clone of earth, down to all the historical events.... one change in ANYTHING
and something will change.. maybe an extra arm her, one less leg there, etc...

Arms?  who says they'll have arms?  That sounds pretty damn terramorphic to
me!
Same goes for legs, heads, eyes, ears, noses, flippers, claws, beaks, necks,
tentackles, teeth, wings, and other various and sundry bodyparts.

Yes, but there are still basic things that they would have to have.  First
off, if they built spacecraft then they would have had to build it with 
something.. an appendage of some kind.  One could argue for telekinesis but
then why bother with a ship if  your mind powers are that great, just
make something that lets you survive space and go for it
Again casting aside the 'mind power' stuff, they would have to have something
to perceive the world around them with.. i.e. eyes, earrs, etc..
It would also seem that they might need to respirate somehow and maybe have
the need to eat and also release waste.  All these thing would require at
least for them to be more than worms or some other form of lower life.
The amount of legs (if any) might depend on the gravity  and terrain of
their planet, but surely they would have to get around somehow.  Useing
the physics that we have here on Earth (and one would assume that other
planets would have the same rules) there aren't really too many ways to do
all
these things and not resemble a Earth animal in some way, remember, there
are tons of different things here already.  Besides, the fact that they
choose to come to Earth would seem to suggest that there is
something similar to the world from which they came.  Maybe they look 
like something from Earth because they were looking for a place
like Earth to land.

Maybe I should have said manipulatory appendage(s).... 
As for percieving the world around us, who says they have to do it in the same
spectrums we do? And respiration is only vital on earth... who knows whether
E-Ts will respirate... 

Tackling the senses issue first:
We are accustomed to five senses - taste, hearing, smell, touch, and sight.
But even here on earth there exist creatures with 'extra' senses - moisture,
pressure, electricity, magnetic charge, and so forth.  Now consider all of
the artificial devices built to detect things normally undetectable - geiger
counters, electron microscopes, metal detectors, altimeters, spedometers,
etcetera.  
Consider a creature on an iron-rich planet with high concentrations of
radioactive minerals.  The planet's atmosphere is difficult to see through,
and does not conduct sound well.
So two of the major senses - vision and hearing - are relatively ineffective.
It does have a sense similar to vision, but acting in the very short
wavelength range, detecting X-rays and gamma rays so it can avoid the worst
of the radiation.  Because it is blind, it has a very highly developed
directions sense, using the north magnetic pole and radiation from nearby
stars as navigation beacons.  It also is very sensitive to air pressure, to
avoid running into things.
It's metabolism is dependent on iron, and so it uses the same sense which it
uses to find magnetic north to find deposits of ferrous minerals.  It has poor
senses of smell and taste, but a well developed sense of touch.
The trouble comes in assigning physical features to the critter.  Because we
are used to eyes as radiation-detectors, the nose as a scent-detector, the
inner ear as a judge of balance and direction, etcetera, it is hard to think
of alternatives.  Then there's things like locomotion, communication, eating
and eliminating, protection from the elements, and so forth.  This is where
it gets really tricky, because feasable alternatives are once again hard to
think of.  
And even if you could think of good physical features, what do you do about
things like technology and culture?  What does a blind and deaf creature
develop as a form of entertainment?  What does a creature with tentacles, or
fins, or hooks, or nothing, instead of limbs come up with as a sport?  What
kind of puns does a creature that communicates by scent, or touch, or morse
code think of?

And how or why would this creature could here.  I would assume that it
would not be able to survive on Earth without something like a 
space suit or whatever you'd liek to call it.  It would be much easier
to go somewhere that you could survive or at least use the bulk or your
senses in an effictive way.  What even enviroment the beings from elsewhere
had to begin with would have to be a big factor in deciding where to go.
The other thing to consider is that if something wanted to visit Earth
you would think that it would at least check it out first with maybe
some sort of probe or something.  Why bother making a big trip for
nothing?  It seems kind of strange that aliens wouldn't have sent a bunch
of unmanned (viking type stuff) probes that would just be stuck here after
they were done probing.  

> It would be much easier to go somewhere that you could survive
Tell me, y, has NASA staged any missions to Earthlike planets recently?  The
fact is, for pretty much any planet a 'planet just like home' is not too
likely to be nearby.

The odds of an earthlike planet orbiting another star are something like
5,000,000,000 to 1... at leasdt... Of course, there's the theory that the
asteroid belt used to be a huge Gaia world...

there aren't any earthlike plants around that we could go to.  if mars were
earthlike don't you think that we woulad have tried a lot harder to get
there faster?  When you don't have a choice you can't make one.

Technically, you always have a choice.

Don't get technical with me...

...you overweight glob of grease. (Is there anybody else out there that can
recognize this quote immediately?)

As we wait for an answer, I return to relevance...
y - exactly.  It's not worthwhile for us to try to find Earthlike planets,
so we just visit whatever's nearby.  Assuming most other types of planets are
similarly scarce, you could expect aliens to also visit whatever's nearby,
meaning they wouldn't necessarily be adapted to life there.  So, aliens that
landed on Earth wouldn't necessarily be earthlike creatures.

But the assumption is that they have the means to go more or less
where ever they want.  Might as well go to the interesting places
first.  Of course by that logic I have argued against myself since
life that is different than there own would be pretty interesting
and they would come here.

back to irrelevance, I believe it was Anthony Daniels. 

I belive you may be right, but we'd better wait for Tricia on that one...

Ah, the irrelevancy of Star Wars, don't you just love it? 

"She carries with her a radiant aura of irrelvancy wherever she goes." -Velcro
the Avenger (He's my hero! <Smile>)

<Dan bows deeply.  Deeply enough, in fact, that his forehead adheres to the
 floor>

<Snowth loses all respect for the avenger for giving away his secret identity
so easily. She instead returns it all back to the friendly neighborhood
abomination.>

<y hands orinoco a trophy for winning, lucky thing it is really a 
bottle of solvent. :)>

<orinoco unsticks himself from the floor, leaving star-trek-alien-style marks
 on his forehead, and returning us neatly back to the topic at hand>

I was thinking about this the other day.  Why is it that nobody (that I  know
of anyway) has claimed to have heard any sort of radio signals from a ufo?
Seems to me that they would have to talk to each other somehow, whatever they
are.
Are there alternatives that would not be able to be 'intercepted'?  I kinda
get the feeling that it doesn't really take much to surf around the
airwaves and hear all kinds of neat stuff.

Well, I'm not terribly technically minded, so I'm going to have to give more
questions than answers, but...
Is there anything about radio waves, as opposed to gamma-, x-, infrared,
ultraviolet, and so forth, that makes them ideal for communications?

Certainly there are people - SETI in particular - who are *trying* to hear
exactly that.  

My inner cynic says that now that _Contact_ is out, we're going to hear from
a lot more wackos claiming to have heard alien radio broadcasts.

Wait a minute. Check me on this one. I haven't read the book for a while, and
maybe I've just forgot, but wasn't it a TV broadcast the aliens sent them in
Contact? (I think it had something to do with Hitler... that's about all I
remember...) The movie had radio broadcasts??

Of course, I could just be imagining the whole thing. <Snowth goes off to find
her a copy of Contact, hoping she's right...>

I don't know, now that you mention it.

If I tune left past WCBN on my radio dial, I get television audio.  So TV and
radio seem to use very similar sorts of waves.  The movie did have TV
broadcasts, too...

From what I remember from my school days, the entire FM dial is located
between channels 6 & 7 on VHF.  

So 'radio waves' could be used for TV broadcasting?

Actually, now that I think of it, there is a reason radio waves are used for
communications.  Earth's atmosphere is fairly opaque, as I recall, to things
like x-rays, gamma rays, and so forth.  So if aliens had evolved in a place
with a different atmosphere, one that was transparent to, say, ultraviolet
light, they might use *that* for communications.  In the vacuum of space, of
course, any radiation would work, but certain rays would be eaten up by
Earth's atmosphere and hence not reach us.

So in other words, we're living in a kind of "sound vacuum"? Like, there's
all these discussions going on around us, but we can't hear any of them?
That's rather creepy. Like being in a soundproof box... you can see all these
people talking, but can't hear what they're saying. That's kerwacky,
whigamaleery.

Wait a minate! Isn't the ozone layer the only bit of the atmosphere that
blocks X-rays and gamma rays and whatnot? And if it is aren't x- and gama rays
harmful to humans? I would think that if these questions are true than
witnesses of UFO sightings and abductees would be absorbing large amounts of
radiation. What's more, aren't there devices for detecting x- and gamma rays?
If so, couldn't we spot UFOs using x- and gamma rays for communication using
said equipment?

welcome back, bob.
No, I was under the impression that the ozone blocks out Ultraviolet.  X-rays
and Gamma Rays are definitely not fun things for humans to play with in large
doses, but I don't know how strong they'd need to be to communicate - perhaps
no stronger than a medical x-ray.
Yes, X- and Gamma rays can be detected - they develop photographic film. 
That's why you can't put cameras through a baggage X-ray in an airport.

So then the UFOs would have to use radio waves if they wanted to 
communicate while in our athmosphere?  Or would other things that
we wouldn't as readily detect work too?

Well, I don't know about 'couldn't detect'.  We can detect more or less all
the rays and waves - or all the ones we know about.  Of course, that's kind
of obvious - if we couldn't detect them, we wouldn't know abou them...

I didn't say couldn't detect, just wouldn't detect.  What I am getting
at is that there are plenty of amatuers that use radio signals often
enough that it seems like one of them would have 'intercepted' an 
alien signal if they were useing radio waves.  What I am curios about
is if the alternatives to radio waves (or any other waves we might be
currently useing) would work well enough for communications.
If there are really UFOs with life inside them it make sense that 
they would need to talk to each other.

Even UFOs without life in them would be sending *something* back, wouldn't
they?

Well, that would depend on A. If they could just zip on back to whereever they
came from and B. Wether they're here to do anying in perticular or just to
confuse the humans ;)

I see what you're saying, y.  Yeah, it would make sense that non-radio
communications would be *harder* to stumble across, especially if you're
careful not to aim them at areas (such as medical or atomic-energy facilities)
where they'd be detected.

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