Every once in a while, I’m fascinated by the fact that no matter how hard we try, we seem incapable of designing truly alien beings. In most game, they either have generic Lovecraftian traits, animal-like features, or they’re just humanoid. And when they don’t look humanoid, you can’t really buy that they somehow developed a society as advanced, or more advanced, than ours. It’s like trying to imagine a new color.
>>729400390>le funny squid ayy lmao is actually.....>WAY BIGGer HUMANOID BUILD ALIEN!!! WOOOOWWWWWW
>>729400390unironically kill yourself
>>729400390I liked the alien from Nope.
>>729400390Its impossible to design something that the human mind has no frame of reference for. What you're asking for doesn't exist because ultimately people go with familiarity or repeated patterns in nature. All complex life in the universe is going to be carbon based.
>>729400390>It’s like trying to imagine a new color.
>>729400664>>729400758>the absolute state of /v/
>>729400758>>729400664>pajeetOP is stealing content from xitterGrime
>>729400664OPsisters… not like this… we… we just got raped anally… HARD. It MIGHT just be over for us..: fuck… I just…….. can’t………
>>729400390Humans are already extremely unique in their design, if anything, odds are any alien life would be much less interesting than we are.
The apex of any species across the universe lends to the humanoid form. No form of life can exist in conditions that are no earthlike and can form the the capability of sentience and prosuctivity that we are.They will ALWAYS be humanoid, simply because it is the universal apex.
>>729400919>a worm like structure encased in flesh and bone with only 4 appendages is the most extremely unique design aroundholy mental midget LMAO, this is what unchecked homocentrism looks like. Octopus alone are magnitudes of order more interesting than us in the biological spectrum, or animals like that clown shrimp that can see literal electromagnetism instead of our cuck shit vision mog us effortesly
Theres only so many ways you can design intelligent life such that A) It has the brainpower required to actually be intelligent, and B) Have the necessary biological traits to allow it to manipulate its environment and use that brainpower to do something. Theres only so many ways you can be dexterous enough to manipulate the world around you, usually via some sort of hand or tentacle.We have extremely alien designs we could always pull from, usually from the deep ocean. But you cant make aliens look like a sea cucumber, because not only would that look unimpressive, but also because sea cucumbers, no matter how smart, wouldn't be able to build things because they dont have hands. Whales are quite intelligent animals, but because they're flipper locked they can't do shit with it besides whalesongs. Superior intelligent lifeforms would have similarly very rigid design constrictions just based on the laws of physics.
>>729400664>>729400758Did anyone else think they'd live long enough to see proto-humans pay the algorithm and for other proto-humans to advertise themselves all over a I'm 12 and this is deep observation about aliens designs in fiction instead of like, a business or acting career at the very least. I want off
>>729400664>>729400758BTFO
>>729401384You can make up some horse shit that a race with weird or a complete lack of limbs has telekinetic abilities and they built their civilization that way. I mean hell, the Hanarr from Mass Effect don't have even have eyes yet mastered space travel.
>>729400390I like the idea of single-celled protozoa being massive monstrosities. Stellar Blade had a pretty interesting selection of designs.
>>729401886You can handwave shit with telekinesis, but that also leads to similar design issues as a race that can just move shit via their brain Wifi wouldn't have a need for hands, legs, etc. and you just end up with flying featureless orb aliens or some shit. Basically we kind of explored every potential type of "alien" design possible a long time ago, we're just retreading old ground at this point.
>>729401384>there's a possiblity whales are as sapient as any human yet are confined to their huge lumbering bodies living in a hellzone with 24/7 dangergrim
>>729400390OH NO SAVE ME NIGGERMAN
>>729401039Right. You need hands to manipulate objects. Can creatives come up with a better design than the human hand? Typically no, so they just go with that.You need a large brain. Biological efficiency dictates that the sensory organs should be placed near the brain. All of these organs will, 99.999% of the time, be encapsulated in a bony skull (octopus is a counter example). Okay, so now you have a head.There is a specific "surface area-to-volume ratio" that dictates the limits of how large an organism can grow. Human sized, intelligent life form just makes the most sense. What evolutionary need would there be for an intelligent species need to be the size of a brontosaurus? There are also limits on how many neurons you can compact into a brain i.e. "brain neuron density". Therefore there are limits on how small an intelligent species can be.All intelligent species need to have evolved from less intelligent species. There is no reason to suspect that habitable worlds (for life) would not have rocks, and oceans, and forests, and thus would not produce fish, insects, crabs, lizards. So, in sci-fi, it makes sense to imagine that instead of intelligent life evolving from monkeys, maybe they evolved from lizards (intelligent insects do not make sense due to their exoskeleton).Etc. etc. You really can go on like this for a while. TLDR: humanoid shaped life forms just make evolutionary sense.
>>729400390I've seen it done
>>729400664>>729400758This website is so dead lmao
>>729402472>(intelligent insects do not make sense due to their exoskeleton).Why's that?
>>729402612Where the fuck else am I going to get art directly from Q Hayashida?I hope people start reposting shit from bluesky at this point
>>729400390Your first mistake was copying shit from xitterYour second mistake was expecting anything original or good looking from Nolan (and I say this as a Tenet apologist)
>OP isn't awareIt must be humanoid. Other forms simply wouldn't work.It's so deeply ingrained in our consciousness because that is what the actual ayys resemble
It just works
>>729403206The Na'vi are boring though. Not because they're humanoid but they're just so aloof and detached from human struggle. They fit into a trope and not much else, which is the whole "noble savage" thing. Jake and Quaritch are humans in Na'vi bodies and as a result act more human in their actions. Neytiri is up there since shes turning into a revenge seeking murderhobo, but also still has that noble savage air of superiority.
>>729403742The only thing more human than seeking revenge is being addicted to drugs. And I don’t see any Na’vi hitting that skooma pipe until the end of their days.
>>729401930Wtf this looks kino
>>729402472I mean that just means you need hands, a head and to be roughly human sized. There's still plenty of variation from there. Does the head need to be at the top? Do you need specifically 2 hands and feet? Exactly 5 fingers instead of a couple more? Does the torso need to be upright? Do you even really need a separate head or could you put everything inside the torso?
>>729402789
>>729400390All of us in the galactic federation are humanoid. That just seems to be a prerequisite for sapience. It's nature, regardless of your planet of origin.
>>729404063Oddly enough the evil fire tribe consumes psychedelics.
>>729400747Earth wanted resources from Pandora to sell and make money.But the real money maker is sex tourism with the Navi.
>>729404750>Does the head need to be at the top?Obviously. The things you intend to manipulate with your hands are bound by gravity, so looking at them from below would be an unnecessarily restrictive hassle.>Do you need specifically 2 hands and feet?It's probably the best composition for human-level object manipulation, more limbs than that would waste valuable brainpower.>Exactly 5 fingers instead of a couple more?3-5 may be a sweet spot. Thumb is required, but we could theoretically function at 100% without the pinky or even ring finger.>Do you even really need a separate head or could you put everything inside the torso?The advantage of our head is that we can move it independently from the torso to survey our surroundings, it's more energy-efficient than moving your entire body every time you want to turn and look at something.
>>729405078I guess throwing is just that good of a survival strategy.
>>729400664>>729400758what's the fucking point of this? why would op even do this? >its another attempt at lowering the site quality(even more)i know it's probably that, but maybe there is more
>>729405620reactionbating
>>729405620>newfag sees engagement on a Twitter post>posts it on /v/ for (You)s(You) addiction has killed all discussion
>>729404750Of course, there can be some variations to the humanoid shape that would still allow for an alien species to develop a space faring civilization.The biggest variations I can imagine would be>4 or 6 fingers instead of 5>4 or 6 arms instead of 2>digitigrade legs rather than plantigrade>maybe a centaur-style lower bodyI agree with other anons that the standard humanoid form with 2 arms, 5 fingers and 2 plantigrade legs is still the most optimal though
>>729400390>they either have generic Lovecraftian traits, animal-like features, or they’re just humanoid.All of those are acceptable versions of truly alien beingsWhat do you expect from life outside of earth? That their bodies are inside-out and compromised of a non-Newtonian body structure? In the end aliens only have to be evolved animals that make sense within the biosphere of their homeworld
>>729405590Throwing is a top tier strategy but combining with accuracy makes it broken
>>729404063>The only thing more human than seeking revenge is being addicted to drugsRats can get hooked on cocaine DOE
>>729400390there's a limit to how alien a living organism can become. all fictional organisms that are supposed to be able to somehow exist in a real-life setting can only become so-and-so weird before it become too illogical. it needs to be plausible and somehow be able to live and work and be a wagie. how the fuck do you think aliens become star borne? by sitting on their fucking asses in a swamp while being weird-ass slugs?
>>729410296The fundamental problem is, there aren't that many ways for chemistry to produce entropy resisting systems. We know the vast majority of the ways it can happen with carbon, even ways that didn't naturally occur on Earth to our knowledge. The only other viable basis for producing complex life is silicon, and the mechanisms that could enable systems utilizing that instead of carbon are significantly more rigid. There are simply more things carbon can do, and that means more versatile utility molecules. Proteins can do almost anything they need to, and there are multiple ways to get to a protein that performs a specific function. And if the life is carbon based, it's probably going to follow similar rules to life on Earth regardless of the specific conditions. It'll either be radially or bilaterally symmetric, composed of cells, and use proteins made of Amino Acids, maybe they'll use fewer kinds, maybe they'll use more, but the fundaments should be similar. That means any complex life will have more or less the same path to intelligence. It'll need limbs that can meaningfully interact with the environment, it'll need to be long-lived enough to have a need to build tools and structures and pass down information, and it'll need developed senses to scrutinize the environment to actually do all of that effectively. Meaning any intelligent aliens will possess something meaningfully equivalent to sight, hearing, and a sense of touch at a minimum. The weirdest an intelligent alien can possibly be is a radially symmetric creature like a starfish, with multiple kinds of "eyes." Nothing that's complex enough to become truly intelligent can be all that different from something we can relate to as life on Earth. The aliens in this movie couldn't exist, for example.
>>729412119>alien>it's just a weird sea creature
>>72940066450% of the threads here MINIMUM are shit trending on twitter, this board is just a fucking twitter trending tab repository
>>729412104So basically convergent evolution and fiction making all aliens some form of humanoid or a callback to a familiar animal species is legit?
>>729412119these kinds of weird squid creatures could never be able to advance anywhere at all. you literally need four-five fingers to create shit. you need to be able to go on land and use a pickaxe to mine shit. you need to create shit and basically go through the same evolution that humans have gone through, in order to become star-borne. it literally just cannot be done otherwise.
>>729400664>>729400390So 4chan is basically 90% bots right?
>>729401930Source?This looks interesting.
>>729412104this goes for more than biology as well. we already have a pretty good idea of traits that would allow a civilization to become a spacefaring one, such as curiosity, the ability to think logically... I don't remember which short story it was but in it humanity met with aliens and they were apparently quite hostile, but it turned out that they never had to fight wars like we have so their weapons were incredibly puny and irrelevant compared to ours. of course in reality if you can travel anywhere near the speed of light or even 1% of that you already have the capability of destroying planets with pure kinetic bombs but that's not here nor there... but that is to say that while it's a fun story it's also an impossible scenario when we take a step back and consider what traits you need to become so advanced in the first place. you will have to dominate your ecosystem for sure
>>729412119I just really like the "subtle" incorporation of the biblical imagery here. The nonverbal story telling of the inspiration for all western culture there. Like how some people think dragons are a remnant memory / interpretation of dinosaur remains, so too is any angelic or crown imagery from this thing. Of course the ultimate symbol of power and wealth comes from some monkey man seeing the starfish on a giant jellyfish squid alien terraforming the land and going "Oh that's God. That is the ultimate power. I am going insane, Niggergrug."
>>729412495No, you can get as wild as you want, as long as you remember that you can't really have intelligence without limbs that have fine motor control. Nothing sessile like a coral or near-sessile like an Anemone would become intelligent, not even collectively. There needs to be a feedback loop of observations, actions, results and further observations for intelligence to develop. Dexterity develops first as a utility for traversal or food selection, then it enables testing and learning. That learning leads to knowledge becoming more and more important relative to instinct. Generally, the more dexterity an animal has, the more intelligent it can become. Squids and Octopodes are some of the most intelligent forms of underwater life, and that's because they have the most capacity to manipulate the world around them, and making maximal usage of that capacity is strongly positively correlated with survival.Something with four traversal limbs and two manipulator limbs is feasible. Something with two traversal limbs and four manipulator limbs is possible. Something with an arbitrary number of dual-use limbs is entirely possible. But you can't get anywhere with zero or just one. Even if you contrive a reason for them to float.
>>729412740I believe that story is "The Road Not Taken"https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
>>729400390>>729400664I was just about to say. What fucking bots are these running on 4chan? What are they trying to accomplish?
>>729402917Based Shin anon
>>729400883It goes both ways, they steal content from twitter and then they post here in order to steal content from anons.The street shitters are relentless in their need to steal and enshittify every corner of the internet.
>>729413507He is my spirit animalI love him
>>729412104my main issue with alien designs is that they try to jam as much weird shit as possible without thinking about how a lot of life out there would be bound to the same real science like physics/biology we deal with and are products of their environment. A lot of intelligent life would be bipedal vertebrates
>>729412119Aren't Elder Things one of the few amiable species in the Mythos, at least relative to everything else?
>>729402723Something about the square cubed law. At a certain size an exoskeleton can't logically be thick enough to actually support motion.
>>729400664>>729400758>Speculative biology fags have resorted to wholesale stealing posts off litterSUICIDE. NOW.
>>729413627It wouldn't necessarily be bipedal, or a vertebrate in the same sense that we are. We're fundamentally quadrupeds twisted into a weird bipedal shape. Our spines aren't optimal for bipedal locomotion, and they don't support our bodies as effectively as they do in quadrupeds. In the same way, an alien species might be evolved from life with six or more limbs, or from life that doesn't have a skeleton of distinct bones. Maybe they have a rigid "spine" that protects a spinal cord and the rest of their body is more flexible to compensate. They can still look pretty alien, but they won't be totally inscrutable from the perspective of life on Earth. It might just look twisted and deformed in ways that we haven't even considered, because the same thing happened to us and we just treat it as normal because we don't know anything else.
>>729413297still a fun little story, thanks anon for posting it
For me its Witnesstheabsurd
>>729400390No shit. You need limbs to move around and those are going to be attached to some kind of torso. That covers all animal-like or humanoid shapes.If it doesn't walk then it's going to be some kind of floating/swimming blob or tentacle monster.
>>729401265This is where you're mistaken. Some body configurations are simply impossible to house advanced intelligence. People like to pretend they're smart, but at the end of the day it's a simple mollusk with no centralized nervous system. Primates are extremely odd. Nothing else in the animal kingdom over Earth's entire history has ever been anything like a primate. Tentacle monster is kind of old hat by comparison.
Oh shit back tracking that artist I just mentioned in my post and just found out about thishttps://store.steampowered.com/app/3824720/Descent_Of_Lunaris/
>>729400664Lmfao
>>729414629This entire post is just vile, real sloppa shit stuff
>>729414701You are real daft one aren't you? do you know how to even use the search function or read a fucking filename?
>>729401265An octopus like creature can't move freely on ground, it will always need water.In water, you can only use basic tooling, you can't rely on friction. No friction, no fire, no fire, no cooking. Cooking saves the body a shitton of energy that it's usually for digesting, so it relieves that energy for brain power.There's also no concept of storing food.No concept of storing food, no agricultureNo agriculture, brain is constantly in search for food and maximizing brainpower to hunt and survive.I could go on forever.You are such a pseud lmao
>>729413741So how big is too big for bugs? This planet at one time had giant insect roaming the earth and some of them was as long as humans are tall.
>>729404360>>729412587Eureka
>>729400664basedsomeone turn this into a screencap, i'm too lazy to do it
>>729414853The biggest land one was Arthopleura and I think it only got as big as a medium sized dog. The largest possible arthopods to exist were all underwater dwelling and I think they maybe got twice as big as a human. This was all when there was way more oxygen and CO2 in the atmosphere.
This thread is simultaneously too smart and too dumb for me.
>>729404360>>729412587Eureka 7. It is interesting, but not in the way you would like. It has moments like these but they are fleeting. I still recommend it but just have low expectations.
>>729400664>>729400758as I don't use xitter if you hadn't posted those screencaps I would have no idea that OP had "stolen" his post from xitterat least he didn't post an actual xitter screencap threadbetween him and you I'd rather you kill yourself
>>729415509stop bumping this garbage and kys op
>>729412505how are you sure the human form is the ideal one for space travel?
>>729400664This board needs flags already
>>729400758>he can't envision a blurple apple in his mind
>>729414920>>729415506Fuck I now remember Alien 9https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHnGMc1PVvM
>>729415737because you need fingers in order to do literally anything. flippers won't do the trick also, why wouldn't a spacefaring race go through the exact same shit we've gone through? imagine some fucking humanoid rat or grasshopper sitting on a fucking couch watching cartoons, or something, seriously, that's exactly what they would have gone through in their multiple-millennia long evolution towards the final frontier, space. it makes zero sense that a sentient species wouldn't also be highly individualistic and basically behave like us.
>>729416384Such a great OVA
>>729400390convergent evolution would make any species look like usyou can't make shit without a pair of eyes for 3d viewing or arms and handsalso forget industries in waterworlds
>>729400390>stealing threads from the rest of the internetWhy do this? 4chan threads are temporary and (you)s are worthless in the long run.All I can think of is that you're either just some shitposter looking for content to post to r/4chan or some niche 4chan gimmick Twitter account, or you're trying to push off something in the catalog you don't like. (Don't lie, we've all done it at least once.)Anyway, a big part of the issue is that outside of absolute fantasy, aliens aren't going to be unknowable beings made of the ephemeral dreams of a dying star, they're going to be flesh and blood, probably with two legs, two arms and two eyes.The most variation you're going to get is that they might be shorter/taller based on their planet's gravity, and they might have more/less hair depending on how hot/cold their planet is (no extremes).If we end up meeting an alien race and they end up looking like orange humans, I wouldn't be surprised. We're not going to see crystalline aliens that shoot lasers from their fingers, or floating geothermal "ghosts" that possess people for their warmth ever since their planet died and cooled.>>729414853Earth had giant bugs for only a "short" period of time, and it was almost entirely just for that frame of time where they had a head start before other shit escaped the ocean and ate them.
>>729401930eureka 7 was an absolute mess, retarded and all over the placethere were a few kino parts but they were few and far between
>>729414853giant insects existed because high oxygen levels in the atmosphere were caused by carbon being trapped in undecomposed forests (that turned into coal)the later evolution of efficient wood-rotting fungi gradually changed the carbon cycle and helped bring oxygen levels back downthey breathe through tracheae, not lungs, so they got fucked in their insect anuses
>>729400664>Anons can't even come up with their own shitposts anymore
>>729420001>insect anusesGo on..
>>729418118I memory holed it so hard your convo made me remember it
>>729413674they wont outright rape your mind which is pretty chill for lovecraft
>>729400747>The most sadist
>>729400390>I’m fascinated by the fact that no matter how hard we try, we seem incapable of designing truly alien beingsConvergent evolution. Deal with it.
>>729400664If this site was moderated at all and our manager wasn't a fucking Twitter jeet himself threads like these would result in public bans
>>729405830remember when hiro removed (You)s for a week and people whined about it so hard that he brought them back
>>729400390There's no such thing as human novelty
>>729404843is that a fucking flying squidthey turn themselves clear to help with avoiding predators?incredible evolution
>>729413674Elder Things are fairly apathetic, which is at least not antagonist. They did make Shoggoths and in turn, and all life on Earth so that was nice of them.Some of the extended mythos stuff has the Yithians as being benevolent towards humanity. They are essentially parasites though, so they're not the best friends to have around.
>>729412119When I was a kid, that book & the fantasy one were my jam.
>>729422314Its very interesting stuff deep ocean creatures fascinate me
>>729400664Based anon calling out twitter tranniesWhy is this thread still even up
>>729400747esl meme
>>729400664>>729400758Why are americans like this...
>>729416384>>729418118One of the few shows and books of anything that ever really totally disturbed me. The comic in particular has this totally alienating apathetic but leering style that just fucks with my head.
Aliens are either going to look like us, or they're going to look like crabs.
>>729423831redpill me on crab theory
>>729423962Many crustaecean species have evolved from slightly crab like to just a crab over time. Look up carcinization. Apparently crab is the optimal body plan.
>>729400664I always thought the aliens in the movie were more or less big jellyfish. In fact, I think I liked them more as jellyfish.
>>729400758Pantone literally "invents" a new color every yearhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone
>>729400390>>729400664this shithole is 80% or more made of bots, glowies, shills and browns
>>729412505That thing has at least 18 fingers shared between 3 "hands", you muppet.
>i'm fascinated that we can't imagine what we can't imagineriveting thread
>>729401930Blood?
