They sing The Indigos.
Do you think it is possible for a human to create original aliens?
- Thread starter Navaros
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They sing The Indigos.
Actually there have been arsenic-based aliens in SF in the past, including sentient microbes in Joan Slonczewski's Brain Plague (and Klingons, according to a Diane Duane ST novel).
http://io9.com/5706590/one-creatures-poison-is-another-ones-meat
Who says? That's pretty much the basis of Hal Clement's entire career. There's also Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg, about profoundly alien life forms evolving on the surface of a neutron star, and a whole range of other prose SF revolving around highly original aliens based on real science. There is certainly no incompatibility between hard science and entertaining fiction.
The funny thing about alternative biochemistries, is that, while they're great thought experiments, they're also virtually all, well, worse.
Hemocyanin respiratory pigment? Silicon oxide chain coding mechanism? Ammonia solvent? They have their prospective niches, but likely perform worse within those niches than their more familiar analogues do in their far broader ranges. And those prospective niches all have terrible challenges. Copper is less plentiful than iron, and iirc hemocyanin loses its reversibility more quickly; silicon oxide "DNA", if it works at all, is only going to be competitive in great heat; ammonia life would have to operate in great cold, furthermore would only be likely to evolve--perhaps even survive--in an anaerobic environment, and worst of all, ammonia contracts when it freezes, while water, obviously, does not, leading to our primordial ammonia oceans potentially freezing from the bottom up.
So, what about old lace-based life forms?
Hemocyanin respiratory pigment? Silicon oxide chain coding mechanism? Ammonia solvent? They have their prospective niches, but likely perform worse within those niches than their more familiar analogues do in their far broader ranges. And those prospective niches all have terrible challenges. Copper is less plentiful than iron, and iirc hemocyanin loses its reversibility more quickly; silicon oxide "DNA", if it works at all, is only going to be competitive in great heat; ammonia life would have to operate in great cold, furthermore would only be likely to evolve--perhaps even survive--in an anaerobic environment, and worst of all, ammonia contracts when it freezes, while water, obviously, does not, leading to our primordial ammonia oceans potentially freezing from the bottom up.
So, what about old lace-based life forms?
There's a "significant amount" of astrology that has "a predictive aspect to it" as well. Some writers "invent" things that eventually happen in one form or another? Well, there are many people right now who read various ancient religious texts or "prophecies" of guys like Nostradamus and are just as convinced that those writers absolutely nailed a lot of what's happened since.
Skiffy stuff is fiction, period. Part of the game is to make what you imagine sound plausible. Sometimes something like some skiffy gadget is invented later. So nu?
I predict that it will rain next month.
So? Most of the planets in the universe are very hot or very cold compared to Earth, and most are anaerobic. Ammonia-based life could thrive on Titan, for instance.
After all, life on Earth originally evolved in an anaerobic environment -- obviously, since oxygen is a product of biological activity. Indeed, anaerobic microbes thrived for billions of years before photosynthesis took off and filled the Earth's atmosphere with oxygen, making it toxic to anaerobic life.
They are relatable in terms of their desires: to eat and reproduce. Although I do admit that despite not being entirely original, they are one of the more original alien concepts that man has created.
You also raise another good point: does giving aliens intellectual depth require giving them human-like communication abilities? It would seem so, and that doesn't seem to bode well for man creating an original alien.
As far as what should aliens breathe: why must they breathe at all? Perhaps breathing is an earth-based concept to which aliens should not be bound.
Personally, I find it sad that man's mind is not powerful enough to create an original alien. As a kid I was fascinated by the concept of "to boldly go where no man has gone before." As an adult, now I realize that that concept is a facade. It seems that man has already been everywhere that he can go (at least in terms of discovering anything truly new). Ergo, there is no wonder left in the universe.
Why is that? Are you suggesting that when standards are/seem unattainable, they should be lowered and one should settle for what can be done?
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Well, life requires energy to survive. I don't care how alien you get; even the most bizarre aliens will require some form of energy. Now, whether that is by eating, breathing, photosynthesis, or something else, I don't know.
As for reproducing, life has to do that, too, otherwise it dies. I suppose it's possible that you could invent some immortal lifeform that never dies and therefore doesn't need to reproduce, but I very much doubt you would encounter an entire species like that. More likely it would be a freak of nature whose body, for whatever reason, doesn't age or decay.
What does that have to do with anything? Prediction by thought experiment is not exactly the same as prediction by magic rite.
Navaros said:
Not really. I'm suggesting that if the term "original" can be applied to nothing, or almost nothing, that it is a useless term. Do you want to have to invent a new term to describe works that seem fresh and provide a new combination of elements or even, on occasion, an entirely new element albeit mired with preexisting ones? I mean, I don't, but if you've got a word that fills the gaping void such a narrowly-tailored definition of "original" leaves in the language and in critical theory, I'm listening.
Christopher said:
Yeah, but interesting life did not evolve in an anaerobic environment. Further, while the oxygen catasrophe on the early Earth only slowly poisoned the primordial ocean with reactive O2 (till such time as aerobes took advantage of it and brought a balance), water photosynthesis on Ammonia World actively destroys the chemical makeup of the ammonia primordial sea, reacting NH3 primarily into H2O, turning said ammonial ocean into a giant vat of acid at the same time that it pretty much irreversibly destroys the ammonia the life depends on.
So there's the question of how a different kind photosynthesis would in a NH3 ocean in the first place, and I don't have the chemistry for that, but I'm pretty sure it would suck.
I dunno. I did some thinking on an ammonia biosphere once, and came to the conclusion that it would be really, really slow, dependent on decomposition of hydrocarbons, with replenishment likely undertaken by a non-biological agent, such as occurs in Titan's atmosphere. I personally feel that an anaerobic civilization is not a tremendous likelihood, though, sure, it's worth exploring. My point is that it would be at a severe disadvantage versus an intelligent aerobe, like us. We would likely be quantifiably "better," in the sense of being more robust, in terms of information processed, work performed, that sort of thing.
Careful with your quote tags, pal. I did not say that.
However, I believe the word "newfantastagorious" will be my suggestion to Websters.
My bad, dude. Misreading on my part. Lemme go edit that.
See, that word sounds stronger than original. Also it sounds unsavory, like the kind of word you would utter upon seeing Willy Wonka with his pants off.
See, that word sounds stronger than original. Also it sounds unsavory, like the kind of word you would utter upon seeing Willy Wonka with his pants off.
I don't accept that premise as true. For one thing, as stated, "original" is a very vaguely defined term. I agree with the statement above that it's nonsense to say that if something has any familiar elements at all, it must not be original. That's bull. Every work of creativity involves pre-existing elements. So the word "original" cannot be validly defined to mean "something that has absolutely no pre-existing elements of any kind." That's a useless, absurd definition. Originality is in how you put those elements together.
Oh, you can't be serious. We're constantly making new discoveries. In the past 20 years, we've made discoveries that have overturned many of our past expectations about the structure of our solar system, the nature of other planetary systems, the evolution of the universe, the workings of biology, etc. We've discovered or postulated whole new categories of planet (such as carbon planets and Leger-type ocean planets), new fundamental forces of the universe (such as dark energy), new applications of nanotechnology and materials science (such as metamaterials and their potential for invisibility), you name it. The universe is still full of wonder.
And who says something has to be totally unfamiliar to be wondrous? I lived with cats nearly every day for three decades of my life, and I never stopped being amazed by their grace, power, and athleticism. The beauty of the human female face and form is a constant source of wonder to me as well. And I felt a great sense of wonder ten days ago when I stood next to the Apollo 11 Columbia module in the National Air and Space Museum -- actually stood in the presence of a spacecraft that had taken human beings to another world.
I'd quibble that what science fiction does is not prediction so much as reasoned extrapolation. It's not trying to say "Things will happen this way." It's just saying "This is a plausible projection forward from what we know." It's speculating about what could be, not trying to predict what will be. The fact that its projections often do correlate closely with real advances is a result of the basis of its projections in real knowledge and intelligent extrapolation therefrom.
I'm sure there are those who would disagree, but I'll stipulate that we're discussing life forms that would be "interesting" to a reader of fiction. I'll counter that just because that didn't happen on Earth, that doesn't mean it absolutely couldn't happen anywhere else. It's less likely, true, since anaerobic biochemistry is less energetic. But we've learned many times in the past that it's unwise to rule something out altogether just because we haven't found evidence of it yet. Unlikely is not impossible.
And who's to say a good writer couldn't tell an interesting story about an ammonia-based life form that lived at a very slow pace compared to ours? Indeed, there have been a number of SF works dealing with life operating at a radically different pace from our own, from the hyperfast neutron-star life of Dragon's Egg to the slowed-down superconductive consciousness in Niven's "The Coldest Place."
So why assume they'd use water photosynthesis? That doesn't make any sense if we're talking about a world like Titan, where H2O is a mineral and sunlight is not a particularly abundant energy source.
like the kind of word you would utter upon seeing Willy Wonka with his pants off.
May we never see the day.
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