Established Member
Certainly full-scale intervention wouldn't be our preferred option today.Originally Posted by Murphy
OTOH, in the story humanity - 500 years from now - hadn't known war or disease for centuries,
and every potential disaster was addressed immediately in a global effort.
They don't share our experience of just not being able to help every soul on the planet, even if we wanted to.
Such a society might feel much more compelled to intervene...
Order of Kilopi
I am resurrecting an old thread because I thought of a wonderful example to illustrate a point. I mentioned on literature/fiction forum that I hate SF in which aliens are simple humans in funny clothes -- I like alien aliens, with behaviours completely incomprehensible to humans. Some, including Elukka, do not believe in such "alienness":
Here is an example. Think of a species that reproduces asexually (surely that's no too implausible?). How would you explain to a member of such species why exactly Governor Elliot Spitzer resigned his position?
Or better yet, imagine you are a member of such species. The concept of sexual reproduction is, to you, a bit odd but hardly incomprehensible -- "To create an offspring, one of set A must exchange material with one of set B". The concept of pair bonding is harder to figure out, but you chalk it up to "that's how humans do things." Now imagine you were unobtrusively observing the Elliot Spitzer events -- up to his mistress having become Washington Post columnist. What would be your conclusions? I think it would be "Humans are totally batty!"
Order of Kilopi
You don't have to be non-human to reach that conclusion.
But seriously, I would expect an asexual species to generally comprehend the Elliot Spitzer scandal. If they have crime and punishment, then that specific scandal is comprehensible in terms of the following:
1) Governor Spitzer was primarily known for being an enforcer of the law.
2) He broke the law, while he was making a name for himself as an enforcer of the law.
Also, if this asexual species is social, they may comprehend that Governor Spitzer had accumulated a network of powerful enemies, while not accumulating any network of powerful friends. As such, he lacked the sort of support which helps others survive scandal.
So--now that I've answered your explicit challenge, I feel the urge to answer the implicit challenge. What sort of aliens would find all of the above, well, "alien"?
I think that a second generation ETI could be designed to be entirely non-individualistic. Individualism may be a requirement for naturally evolved life forms, but a designed life form could be monolithic. There would be no need for crime and punishment, since all components are part of a single whole. Similarly, there may be no need for "friends" or "enemies".
Order of Kilopi
Here's an article from today's Guardian about Simon Conway Morris, who thinks that aliens will be very similar to humans, in ways he doesn't quite describe.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...e-earth-humans
I have great respect for Conway Morris, but I do tend to disagree with him.
He says at one point 'Extraterrestrials ... won't be splodges of glue'. I am not sure we can entirely rule out glue-like aliens, especially as we might expect our own future robots to resemble 'splodges of glue' in many ways.
Here is one of my own most glue-like aliens
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/4802823b18d67
Order of Kilopi
True, but the reasons why this particulat law exists in the first place would be hard to understand. At least without some human actually explaining it to them.You don't have to be non-human to reach that conclusion.
But seriously, I would expect an asexual species to generally comprehend the Elliot Spitzer scandal. If they have crime and punishment, then that specific scandal is comprehensible in terms of the following:
1) Governor Spitzer was primarily known for being an enforcer of the law.
2) He broke the law, while he was making a name for himself as an enforcer of the law.
And the fact that Ashley Dupre ended up rewarded for breaking the law with her Washington Post position would be really hard even to explain -- I mentioned it in previous post on purpose.
Order of Kilopi
If they observed, say, our mass media, then they'd notice that we devote a lot of attention to sexuality and sexual relations. Even if they didn't know the specific rules, they'd know that it's something which we humans find important.
We have a lot of obtuse rules, like blasphemy or profanity, or the difference between good and bad humor. These rules are hard enough to explain to fellow humans. If the aliens similarly have obtuse rules that they themselves find "weird", then they may not be bewildered by the fact that humans also have "weird" (to them) rules.
If they have crime and punishment, then they'd recognize that generally criminals who get away with their crimes do indeed get rewarded for it. And they would observe that many humans do get away with their crimes.And the fact that Ashley Dupre ended up rewarded for breaking the law with her Washington Post position would be really hard even to explain -- I mentioned it in previous post on purpose.
If crime didn't pay, there wouldn't nearly be so much of it.
Order of Kilopi
Please refer to my post #52:
And in much of science fiction which deals with aliens, human protagonists had not spent nearly that much time studying the aliens involved. So incomprehensible (within story context) behavior is entirely justfied.
Order of Kilopi
I don't dispute that, I simply don't think it's so strange. There are a lot of human things which fellow humans might intellectually understand, but never relate to. For example, there are rules to baroque music which I could intellectually understand, but I lack the ability to viscerally relate to the difference between good and great compositions.
Established Member
I was going to mention music too, but you got in first!
So what about art (i.e. paintings, sculpture etc?) Paintings of scenes (landscapes, still life) and portraits, as well as sculptures of people and/or animals (or even things) would probably be reasonably easy to explain and understand (although deciding which are just ok, good, and great isn't always easy)
However, what about impressionistic work? How would you explain that? And how do you define poor/average/good/great?
Established Member
I always liked Niven's fictional Pak Protectors. They were interesting because their motives were alien, but also because their motives made a lot of sense, given what they were. (What they did in implementing their motives was a different story - I have a hard time seeing them behaving in such a recklessly warlike manner if they are trying to solve for the greatest defense of their breeders, even without any sort of empathy and a pragmatically ruthless attitude).
A lot of aliens in science fiction, when not being humans in funny clothes, are exxagerated projections of human self-loathing, or some sort of clumsy aesop. It's rare to find something in fiction that makes sense in terms of what it is, self-consistently. Authors would be more interesting if they thought, instead of "what do I do to illustrate lesson Y", "What would it make biological/goal-oriented/resource-constrained,unconstrained sense for me to do if I was xxx in situation yyy"
Niven's aliens always were more interesting to me, because they were more self-consistent. Star Trek's aliens, by contrast, are clumsy aesops and exxagerations of human traits.
Established Member
Maybe that's only me, but somehow that sentence (slightly altered to make it more generally applicable) sounds like a great signature
I shall use it from now on...
Established Member
IMO most baryonic life will "look like us" in the sense that much of the alien life will be composed of the same elements and structures as us.
It's no surprise that we're primarily composed of Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Carbon, 3 of the 4 most abundant elements in the Universe.
While it's possible that there are other elementally different life forms out there I think it's more probable to find ones like us given the previously mentioned abundance of H, O, and C.
However, it's very difficult to take our small sample size of life in the Universe and make assumptions about what the rest of it will look like. Is DNA a unique structure to life on our planet or is it a ubiquitous structure common to most H-O-C based life? We won't know until we have a larger sample size.
Order of Kilopi
Who is "we", pale-face?
Order of Kilopi
Not saying the stories were perfect, but the Pak were not just ruthless and highly intelligent, they were highly bound by instinct in ways which left them no option but to behave in ways which they fully understood were counterproductive.
As for the scandal...that's perfectly comprehensible in intellectual terms to any species capable of comprehending the function of sexual reproduction, game theory, and the processes of evolution, whether they're asexual, eusocial, or whatever else they might be. Pair bonding is easily understood in these terms, and the various possible social structures associated with it can be understood with a little more work. For various reasons, in our current culture, prostitution is viewed as unacceptable, and his actions were also a major breach of obligations to his mate. In his position in our social structure, this was widely unacceptable.
There are other, stranger things that would be harder to explain. The various superstitions humans believe, logical fallacies and approximate shortcuts we are particularly prone to or concepts that give us unusual difficulty (or which give them particular difficulty), differences in perception or in weighting of sensory information...they might be almost entirely insensitive to right angles or mirror symmetry, and regard our rectilinear, highly bilaterally symmetric constructions (which honestly go far beyond simple efficiency) as a curious, almost pathological obsession. They might be utterly baffled at our gambling games. Or they might become even more fanatically obsessed with them than we do...
Established Member
The most convincing explanation for superstitions (and, partly, religion) that I have come across is quite simple, really:
The human mind seems to be hard-wired to always obsessively search for causal relations.
It seems to have enormous difficulty to accept that there can be effects with no obvious cause (chance, coincidence, you name it).
Superstitions are 'artificial' causes our mind creates in order to avoid the unacceptable...
Established Member
It's more complex than that. If that were all it was, the limit of human superstition would be ritual magic and magical thinking.
For whatever reason, rallying around a charismatic leader, and propagating doctrine is bound up with the way socialization and social control works. The actual contents of a political/religious/philosophical (and I do believe all three call on the same mental mechanisms) scheme may as well be random (in terms of the way the group behaves - the contents may end up very important when the group finally goes up against nature, rather than their fellow man!), the group behaviors generated are very similar. I would highly recommend Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer".
Established Member
I would argue that the panda's thumb IS essentially a convergent development. (OK, it's a different bone exapted to replace a lost digit, not technically convergent since panda-ancestors had thumbs; but it's a similar phenomenon in that the panda's "thumb" and a true thumb are two structures from different evolutionary origins with a similar form & function.)
How common convergent evolution is depends on how strong the constraints on a workable form are. Any fast-moving free-swimming creature will be 'torpedo-shaped' and probably have fins or something similar (squid, lamnid [mako, great white etc.] sharks, bony fish like mackerel, ichthyosaurs, metriorhynchid marine crocodiles, dolphins). Of course, no one would mistake a squid for a shark (though people do commonly confuse sharks and dolphins) but the similarity in form is still clear. In this case the shared evolutionary pressure (the necessity to be hydrodynamic) affects the whole form of the creature.
On the other hand, the aye-aye fills the same niche as woodpeckers (arboreal eaters of insects underneath bark) and have no similarity in form beyond having a long pointed tool for extracting insects - as that's all that's affected by the shared evolutionary pressure (grub-eating).
We do not actually know where on this continuum technological intelligence falls, as we have only one example (ourselves) and a very poor understanding of what evolutionary pressures led to our own development of intelligence. It COULD be that all technological intelligences are viviparous, K-selected, endothermic, upright bipeds with two arms and a head at the top. It doesn't seem the most likely given what we know -- but there's nothing in our actual experience to show otherwise, just inference from non-intelligent lifeforms.
(I actually would argue that a generally columnar/upright body shape is likely a big advantage as it allows freer use of arms. Something like a dromaeosaur with arms hanging down from a horizontally-directed body likely wouldn't be able to throw a spear, swing an axe, use a sledgehammer nearly as well as a human can, since it wouldn't be nearly as able to rotate its arms totally upright -- at least without 360-degree rotation, which would cause big problems for nerve, muscle, blood vessel etc. connections.) Also putting the head at the top simply makes sense for greater sight range, hearing less likely to be interfered with by walking sounds, low plants etc. as it would be if ears were on the feet or even hips. And the brain should be close to the major sense organs for nerve-length considerations -- though increased protection in an armored-box thorax might override this.
So though they likely won't be humanoid, we might see a lot of 'centauroid' or mantislike forms - with upright, arm-equipped 'torsos' rising out of a quadrupedal or more body.
Those that break this mold would probably be those who evolved intelligence from pressures unrelated to tool-use or hunting; possibly sexual selection for increasingly complex and innovative courtship songs or dances, for example. These sorts of intelligences could take essentially any form; but not being naturally tool-using, they would be far less likely to become technological intelligences of the sort SETI can look for. Possibly these sorts are vastly more common -- which would imply little chance of SETI results.)
Established Member
*Were* they really counterproductive? They survived as a high-tech, space-capable species for millions of years (about 2.5 million years between the two Earth expeditions, AFAIK). That's a pretty good record.
Not totally sure of this - *we* can come up with evolutionary explanations for it, but this is IMO largely 'just-so stories'. I don't think you could derive anything of the sort from evolutionary 'first principles' without prior familiarity with a culture having those traits.As for the scandal...that's perfectly comprehensible in intellectual terms to any species capable of comprehending the function of sexual reproduction, game theory, and the processes of evolution, whether they're asexual, eusocial, or whatever else they might be. Pair bonding is easily understood in these terms, and the various possible social structures associated with it can be understood with a little more work. For various reasons, in our current culture, prostitution is viewed as unacceptable, and his actions were also a major breach of obligations to his mate. In his position in our social structure, this was widely unacceptable.
The phenomenon of modesty is IMO totally evolutionarily unexplainable (seemingly neutral at best, usually maladaptive). But I think *lots* of cultural things are totally non-evolutionary, being things produced by society and not biology and never subjected to evolutionary pressure. (I don't think modesty is an 'instinct' or present in human biology, but purely learned.)
Later post on superstitions etc. - gotta go.
Established Member
i personally think that even within carbon-based life there is a much larger range of possible sub-systems then the sub-cellular fundamentals our life is based on. its really more of a question about the chance of potential-fundamentals emerging naturally in the same place, and since we don't even know how most of our own fundemental life components came to be, we have no current way of answering it. some might be really common, perhaps cellular membranes, while others may be very rare, perhaps DNA/RNA translators.
Established Member
Superstitions, philosophy and religion may indeed be different manifestations of the same mental mechanism.
Probably even science (in the sense that it serves the need for answers and explanations, though not purpose).
Order of Kilopi
You're quite right. The Panda's thumb was a stupid example...perhaps the stupidest example possible--an example of the exact opposite of what I was saying. I don't know what I was thinking there.
I suspect that animals with other manipulator layouts would do just fine with tools that are more optimized for their layout.(I actually would argue that a generally columnar/upright body shape is likely a big advantage as it allows freer use of arms.
[...]
So though they likely won't be humanoid, we might see a lot of 'centauroid' or mantislike forms - with upright, arm-equipped 'torsos' rising out of a quadrupedal or more body.
Our arms and brains seem unusually optimized for throwing stones. Maybe this is because our ancestors hunted by throwing stones. So it's natural that our tools (including hunting weapons) would follow our strengths.
But other animals seem to do rather well with what they have at their disposal. For example, many birds are capable of constructing delicate nests despite their severe limitations.
So, what sort of tools are really needed? A throwing spear? Not really (and non-thrown spears are best used underhanded). A hammer? Sure, but these don't require swinging your arms very far, even in the case of a simple hammer stone.
Established Member
i would think that the environment for which the life form evolved in would more or less dictate the what an alien would look like.
if earth was only an ocean whit no land, then maybe the tool using lifeforms would be more like a squid or octopus.
through out the history of earth, fossils have shown that in general land mamals have 4 legs (appendages), a body and a head.
even birds have these traits, legs wings and a body.
however, if oxygen levels were high enough and gravity was low enough, maybe insect like lifeforms would become dominate, and the variable world of insects in form is huge. from 4 legs to as many as a hundred.
if life was seeded from the cosmos, then it might be speculitive that the origional dna available to build life forms came from the same source which would suggest that the various lifeforms here on earth reflect what is seen throughout the visible universe...
Established Member
i think that's both right & wrong. right in the sense that ofcourse the environment would be central, but wrong in the way its used in speculative xenobiology where often an environment is thought of first and then we take creatures from earth's most similar environment and refit them to the differences.
our own environment has an amazing diversity of body types, even though (as your mammalian & bird example points out) they are all related.
an ocean-born alien could look like any of our ocean animals or more likely completely different in its means of motion & manipulation - even within the "limits" of a water based environment.
p.s.
i did not understand from your example how the lack of beach-side hiding & corral reefs would make octopus/squids more sophisticated tool users then the ones we have today (or was it that the lack of us/monkeys would leave them at the top?).
Established Member
the octopus example was suggested because they are the "brainer" or smarter of the non mamilan ocean life forms.
and there is evidence of tool useage within the octopi genus.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1214121953.htm
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...octopus-tools/
Established Member
i guess that i am extrapolating that if given enough time, on a watery world, the 8 appendages being very flexible would be the best "design" for using tools..
non-scientifically speaking ofcourse. purly speculation on my part....
Established Member
what i'm saying is that so much of octopus evolution for tool using seems to stem from coral reefs that mostly grow on the shallower waters near continents, i find it hard to believe that without land octopus would be as smart as they are now (not to mention smarter).
and i don't think our existence is in anyway interfering, if anything lately our extra CO2 has increased the oceans acidic levels that seem to cause population explosions. that's a lot more competition and potential genetic diversity.
Order of Kilopi
Coral reefs grow where there's the greatest amount of flow of their prey. Here on Earth, that's in shallow regions with concentrated tidal flows.
But on a deep ocean world, there would simply be different regions where the flow of prey is concentrated. If there aren't significant tidal flows, then there would still be convective flows.
Order of Kilopi
They spent much of that squabbling over the limited land not contaminated by dirty bombs. They were barely able to manage to cooperate on a large scale long enough for one real colony expedition, and that one failed. Those from human colonies and the Ringworld habitually engineered their own deaths so they wouldn't be around to get in the way...
But you can. Game theory and evolutionary theory are applied mathematics, not ad-hoc "just-so stories".
To be blunt, your opinion is uninformed. It's not impossible to understand how traits such as modesty can arise in mathematical terms. As for its adaptiveness...you seem to assume that evolution only comes up with globally optimum traits. The simple response is that it doesn't.
Those things *are* subject to evolutionary pressures. Cultural and other learned behavioral patterns are not exempt simply because they aren't encoded in genes.
Established Member
All true (except, AFAIK, they did colonize or at least terraform other planets - just close-to-home ones. Earth was a significant fraction of the galaxy away.) Even so, they did maintain a technological civilization for millions of years.
Yes, of course -- that's not my point.But you can. Game theory and evolutionary theory are applied mathematics, not ad-hoc "just-so stories".
When trying to find out how *something that already exists* evolved, modeling is tricky, since you don't really know what the conditions or selective pressures were. Your model can only be as good as your knowledge of what you are modeling. The problem is your assumptions of initial conditions, and these are subject to bias.
Of course it doesn't; but except in SMALL populations where genetic drift and such non-selection-based modes of evolution occur, it generally doesn't produce actively maladaptive traits (unless they're side effects of something giving sufficient advantage to make up for it).As for its adaptiveness...you seem to assume that evolution only comes up with globally optimum traits. The simple response is that it doesn't.
Anyway, these things are too variable between human populations to be biologically encoded rather than cultural and learned.
If it's not biologically heritable, evolution can't work on it.Those things *are* subject to evolutionary pressures. Cultural and other learned behavioral patterns are not exempt simply because they aren't encoded in genes.
If you're saying that cultures that are sufficiently maladaptive will die off, sure (sometimes)... but cultural change still doesn't follow the rules of biological evolution.
There is very little reason to believe any parts of human behavior but the absolute basics are genetically encoded. Only things that are truly universal have any real claim to be, and even these aren't necessarily ... one can't rule out the possibility of cultural inheritance from before the great Paleolithic expansions of humanity (though this is admittedly unlikely).
Established Member
Probably, but those basics do influence our everyday behavior, don't you think?
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
