Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Carl on May 14, 2005, 01:27:32 am
-
http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/alienplanet/alienplanet.html
-
oh, yeah, I wanted to see that... I just hope the think things through a bit better than the "life on earth 40 million years from now" show. and I hope they don't pull that "and all experts agree that giant land squid will rule the conifer forests" crap from the same show either.
honestly I think they could have been more creative in the animal designes, well it's on tomarrownight, I'll watch it if something more important doesn't come up, wich is likely the case.
-
Yeah, I have a book called "After Man" with much more creative species about 16 million years after humans leave Earth/become extinct.
Its species are a lot more logical. Such as penguins replacing the endangered whale species, rabbits filling in the deer/cow niches, etc. Pretty much species which have been domesticated or threatened by man being replaced by "little guys," as usually happens during mass extinctions.
-
I once read an astronomy book that had some intriguing, albeit far-out, ideas about what sort of life could have evolved on other planets. The few I remember were some sort of gas-filled creatures floating in Jupiter's outer layers and some sort of intelligent crystalline structures on Pluto. Kind of silly, but the illustrations were pretty cool.
-
yeah. big toad things eating the landers on venus, and blimp things flying around in jupiter's atmosphere being popped by bird things. oh, and the thingys with ice skates on jupiter's moon. i had that book.
-
Sounds like Cosmos by Carl Sagan to me, he certainly mentioned the 'Floaters' and 'Hunters' hypothesis in Jupiters atmosphere. Considering that book was written in the early 70's, and knowledge was far more limited then, it was almost like a 'A Brief History of Time' for my generation :)
That series got me interested both in Space and Composing (Vangelis did the music for the TV series based on the book).
-
I dunno. When Discovery has to resort to inventing cool looking CG aliens just to get audiences, something gone wrong. Aren't they supposed to be a science channel? I'm not too keen on dumbing it down and sexying it up just to make it appeal to the masses.
I don't remember who did it, I think the History channel, but there was a series of shows in prehistoric animals, done in a similar style, and I thought that was a tasteful treatment (well, they had beter CG).
Eh, don't listen to me, I'm too judgemental.
-
That was BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs program (which was pretty well done).
Hopefully this will just be something similar with an emphasis on the science needed to extrapolate what life on other planets could be like. Do that and I'll be happy with it even if the creatures involved are fantasies.
Hell if it just manages to pursuade 1/10 of the audience that extra-terrestial life couldn't possibly be little green men then I'll be happy.
-
Originally posted by Rictor
I dunno. When Discovery has to resort to inventing cool looking CG aliens just to get audiences, something gone wrong. Aren't they supposed to be a science channel? I'm not too keen on dumbing it down and sexying it up just to make it appeal to the masses.
That was once true, but now Discovery Channel has transformed into the motorcycle/house-building channel. :p They've shifted all of their science-related shows to digital channels like the Science Channel or Discovery Wings that require paying an arm and a leg to get access to.
-
Originally posted by karajorma
That was BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs program (which was pretty well done).
It was a joint venture between the discovery channel and the BBC. In the states it was on the Discovery channel. Gee whiz, i hope the BBC didn't take full credit for it in England. The Discovery channel put both them and the beeb's names on it when they aired it here.
They spent more money on walking with dinosaurs and it was a bigger deal (it won an emmy for visual effects) so the CGI was better. now they just keep trying to capitalize on it by making all of these future in wild and alien planet thingys with less spectacular visuals, not realizing that that is what got them the emmy in the first place.
-
wow...
-
it's starting
-
Originally posted by Mongoose
I once read an astronomy book that had some intriguing, albeit far-out, ideas about what sort of life could have evolved on other planets. The few I remember were some sort of gas-filled creatures floating in Jupiter's outer layers and some sort of intelligent crystalline structures on Pluto. Kind of silly, but the illustrations were pretty cool.
I have that book! :eek:
It's called 'Our Universe' by National Geographic. Awesome book indeed! :yes:
My favorite are the Europa Brinker-Roos. They seem like they live a fun life. Plus, being an animal with photosynth capabilities would be awesome.
-
^ I remember that book, it had very interesting, colourful pictures.
Ya, I saw ads for this when I was in Florida a week ago, and I was going to watch it, but alas, Discovery Channel Canada is stupid...
-
*Carl is watching it now*
Hmmm, apparently Darwin IV has bullsquids.
-
looks like there doing the same thing tey did with the last thing like this.
"experts agree..."
:doubt:
sence when? especaly on massive speculation.
like the two leged thingy, they say it's something that we'd never expect, but then provide no explaination for why something like that would come about. they just basicly try to make the most imposable things posable.
and the way they talk about this stuff like it's fact :ick:
hmm... that daggerwrist is kind of neat
-
Originally posted by KappaWing
I have that book! :eek:
It's called 'Our Universe' by National Geographic. Awesome book indeed! :yes:
My favorite are the Europa Brinker-Roos. They seem like they live a fun life. Plus, being an animal with photosynth capabilities would be awesome.
one of the coolest parts is the trying to figure out what the looks of animals based on their skeletons, like the poodle.
-
For some reason, they appear remarkably Halflife-ish...not good.
-
that's what i meant by the bullsquid remark.
http://halflife.pl/img/blueshift/bullsquid_old.jpg
very similar.
-
Just finished watching it a bit ago.
Pretty damned good, I thought. I don't care about the creatures as much as I did about the probes (Leo, Ike and Balboa). The design on those is just awesome, especially the stowaway equipment modules on the arms.
As for that book everyone is mentioning, I had that as a kid, but it also had a RECORD with it (vinyl thing, like a big compact disk, but black and used a needle, not a laser).
-
Yes, mikhael, we know what records are. We aren't that young.
-
Everyone should know what a record is.
-
Actually, some of you ARE born post-Vinyl. ;)
-
We might be born after the vinyl-era, but that doesn't mean our parents were.
-
Wh00t!? Vinyl? Is it like an I-pod 2 or something?
[/sarcasm]
-
My dad has a huge collection of records like 100's of em of course he cant find a needle for the record player.:(
-
We have like a jillion Beatles vinyls... and quite a few others, as well. Hell, we got rid of a lot of them, but we still have so many, and we still have our player from ages ago.
-
Originally posted by Swantz
My dad has a huge collection of records like 100's of em of course he cant find a needle for the record player.:(
you can use your fingernail. it works, but it messes the record up.
-
Originally posted by Carl
you can use your fingernail. it works, but it messes the record up.
:wtf:
w00t! my 100th post!
-
...eh.....
anyway...
the probe design was prety good, but I'd hope they would make something a bit more resiliant than robot blimps. makeing one or two blimp bots isn't a bad idea, but something that moves on treds and is built to take a beating.
if they want the things to live they should let them loose in africa for a few months, to test the design out.
-
they probably had them loose in several areas on earth for testing. deserts, plains, forests, arctic, oceans, etc.. they also should have equipped them with anti-air missiles for those damn birds.
-
or a minigun at least.
hehe, we ome in peace... or do we?
what they should have done is come up with a small primitive animal and tryed to make a complete evolutionary tree out of it.
-
Thing is, thinking aliens would be radically different from Earth-based life forms is as silly as the little green men theory. There would, no doubt, be notable differences, but, and I point out this is only for the evolutionists amongst us, the species that exist on this planet have mutated and been put through the mangle of life for millions of years. The designs work, that's why the creatures survive. If conditions on another planet are similar to an area on Earth, then there is no reason why the creatures that evolve there wouldn't be pretty familiar. The random mutations would have to cope with the same challenges, and would, most likely, come up with pretty much the same answers.
-
they would have a similat style to them yes, but the basic layout of there bodies would be totaly diferent, what happens if rather than starting out with a wormlike creature with a radial spine anf fins you start our with something like a three leged spider thingy. the divergence from that origin would produce fundementaly diferent shapes and mechanisms, even if the over all behavior and look was... familiar. there are only like three uniqe animal styles on this planet, arthropods (hard shelled exoskeliton, one or more segmented main body cavities, multi-segmented legs (usualy conected to one part of the animal)), vertibrates (spine with arms and legs, head on the top of the spine), and moluscs(lumps of squishy flesh, usualy one main body cavity and tentical like apendagease if anything).
-
lol, butcher tree, so halflife.
-
you know maybe we should make a evolution game in the art forum
-
LOL You know, that would actually be quite fun ;)
-
Originally posted by Flipside
The designs work, that's why the creatures survive. If conditions on another planet are similar to an area on Earth, then there is no reason why the creatures that evolve there wouldn't be pretty familiar.
but the way it happened to us isn't the only way it could happen. our designs work, yes, but so could a trillion other ones.
-
Originally posted by Flipside
Thing is, thinking aliens would be radically different from Earth-based life forms is as silly as the little green men theory. There would, no doubt, be notable differences, but, and I point out this is only for the evolutionists amongst us, the species that exist on this planet have mutated and been put through the mangle of life for millions of years. The designs work, that's why the creatures survive. If conditions on another planet are similar to an area on Earth, then there is no reason why the creatures that evolve there wouldn't be pretty familiar. The random mutations would have to cope with the same challenges, and would, most likely, come up with pretty much the same answers.
This point is specifically answered in the show, Flipside. The discussion of the gyroloper (i think that's what the two legged in-line creature was) included some mention about how similar, but geographically disparate, places on Earth evolved different solutions to the same problems. Thus, Darwin IV's native life forms would likely have evolved different solutions to the same problems as well.
-
i think they drew there inspiration from the zerg. this is what you call a mocumentry. this should have been on the scifi chanel. i personally think the discovery chanel has gone to hell, the history chanel is still pretty descent. best documentries are still on pbs. that nova special on string theory was awesome. and trippy too (i had just finished a j when i watched it) :D
-
I actually thought that the string theory special was repetitive to the point of frustration. I understand that string theory is something that few physicists even understand, not to mention the public in general, and that there's not even any feasible way at this point to prove or disprove it, but that doesn't mean that the special had to use twenty or thirty analogies in a row to explain a single concept. I felt like yelling, "Great, you've shown us this ten times, now move on and get a little more in-depth!" :p
-
I wonder why they had to make up a star system - they could have just used Alpha Centauri.
-
LOL Well, I haven't seen the show yet, but I just hope we are all still around this is proved one way or another. My own theory is that, since most things must start from below the single-cell level (there was even an entire stage of evolution that started, faltered and died out, Enchelons or something), we might be in for a bit of a surprise on how similar life on other planets may be in many ways, but then, I'm not a Xenobiologist or the like, it's more a gut feeling. I've never denied the possibility I could be wrong ;)
Still, the whole point of theories is for future generations to grab them and stretch them to breaking point and we won't know till we go take a look ;)