[Ford Prefect]

Wow, that's a beauty.

I don't know how to do that stuff, but I've always thought it would be a good idea to do a planet orbiting one of the Pleiades. That would be a spectacular sky.

[Flipside]

Oddly enough, it was a picture from a hypothetical world orbiting Pleione, the youngest of the Pleiades, which spins so fast it's elongated, that got me into this sort of artwork...

The picture was in the book 'Cosmos' by Carl Sagan, I'll have to track it down and scan it on one day

[Aspa]

You can't beat the Chtulhu Mythos for alienness. Underneath all the angsty 19. century victorianism there's some very cool science fiction.
Like in Mountains of Madness, where the shoggoths rebelled against their makers, the Elder Ones. That's the classic evil-robots-kills-their-human-masters all over again, except it was published in 1936.

[Grey Wolf]

There was a book I read a while back that had an interesting premise.  I believe the title was Forge of the Elders. Featured all sorts of interesting sentient species from alternate timelines on earth, including trilobytes, squid, and birds. The story itself was a bit odd, but the diversity of species was interesting.

[mitac]

Gregory Benford had some really weird aliens in the later books of his "Contact"-series.

Just to contribute to this thread.

[Black Wolf]

Originally posted by Da Vinci

I once read a dissertation on the idea; basically it boils down to mechanics: the idea that larger creatures are too inefficient to sustain themselves forever (in our gravitational field). There was evidence that this article cited that the dinosaurs were on their way out before any cataclism occurred. Certain scientists believe that it was because they were simply too big. If you look at life that is that big, imagine what happens when it falls over, or tries to rest; its own mass will tear the body apart. Even elephants today cannot lue down for long because their own weight will crush their organs. The pulmonary system in giraffes gives them Massively overdeveloped hearts because they have to pump their blood so far. Evolution can be flawed in the short-term, the traits for survival at any given point in time are not neccessarily going to be a long-term benefit to a species. With size it's a matter of efficiency.....an intelligent being needs to be big enough to defend itself against predators and have a long enough lifespan to develope as a society, but be small enough be able to concentrate on things apart from eating enough to sustain its body.

That theory works... so long as you don't look at the fossil record. Most of your really big dinosaurs (The gigantic sauropods) evolved back in the Jurassic, and while the late cretaceous did see the development of the biggest predators (Late stage Tyrannosaurs, like Tyrannosaurus itself, Albertasaurus and Giganotosaurs ), it also saw the development of a lot of small, quick little predators, and he continued dominance of the Hadrosaurs and Ceratopsians among the plant eaters, all pretty much medium sized, some distinctly small. It's true (Or at least, a pretty much accepted theory - It's hard to be sure of much of anything from >65 million years ago) that dinosaurs had been on the decrease for several million years, both in overall numbers and diversity of species, but this was far more likely the result of specific environmental factors than any inherent faults with the dinosaurs themselves.

[Bobboau]

there were big preditors becase there were big prey, it was a scale based arms race, the biggest prey was able to fend off the preditors and the biggest preditors wer able to get the most prey, the same thing has happened a few times, includeing recently, noticed whales? elephants? biig prey speciese, soon there will be big preditors to eat them (untill quite recently big whales had a preditor, the megalodon)

now a suficently inteligent creature will beable to learn enough about it's self to recreate it's self into what ever form it wants (Shivans)

and I also hate it when people say stupid things like "we must assume that life will only evolve in a water rich world with an oxygen based atmosphere and a warm temperature."
why?
why can't life evolve from some bizar set of chemicals that we would never think of that is reactive only in the temperature range of 800-900 or -200- -300?
tell me why that is imposable?
why is it imposable that an inteligent life form couldn't evolve in a liquid environment and end up building star ships?
or a gas giant?

[Black Wolf]

Originally posted by Bobboau

and I also hate it when people say stupid things like "we must assume that life will only evolve in a water rich world with an oxygen based atmosphere and a warm temperature."
why?
why can't life evolve from some bizar set of chemicals that we would never think of that is reactive only in the temperature range of 800-900 or -200- -300?
tell me why that is imposable?
why is it imposable that an inteligent life form couldn't evolve in a liquid environment and end up building star ships?
or a gas giant?

The extreme cold doesn't provide enough energy for the neccesary chemical reactions to take place, and the extreme heat would break down the simple organic compounds that would have to form for the earliest life to start up. The Basic theories behind biogenesis state that water is probably neccesary, that temperatures are likely to be reasonable (Within a large field of "reasonability" - there're strong hypothesies supporting life creation at places like hot springs or black smokers, or other high temperature conditions where modern day arachaebacteria live), and that Oxygen is probably not going to be present in large quantities (It certainly wasn't when life started on this planet, and it'd be too reactive for the kind of delicate chemistry we're talking about here.

That said, these theories are based on Earth based life, and as Karajorma mentioned, Archaebacteria, are changing a lot of long standing beliefs about life in general, so it's possible that alien life would be even more varied. There are certain limits placed on things by the basic chemistry we're talking about though.

[Bobboau]

"organic compounds"
AAAAARGGHHH!!!!!
/*bangs head repetedly*/

[Bobboau]

ok, why couldn't we have live chemistry based on /*grabs a few ellements*/
Germanium, Selenium, and... Bromine?
why not?!

[Black Wolf]

In the case of Selenium and Bromine, it's because they don't have the four valence shell electrons neccesary to form the complex chains you need for "organic" (In the sense of life forming, as opposed to carbon based). In the case of Germanium, while it does technically have the valence shell electrons, it's damned heavy compared to Carbon (~6x), and also a true metal, which changes the way it reacts. I'll admit I'm not 100% sure on Germanium, but there are limits on what can exist as a living molecule based on simple chemistry.

[Ford Prefect]

Right, although it has been theorized that silicon could be a viable organic base.

[karajorma]

Silicon is a possible base but it's not as good as carbon. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of silicon based life but there are probably a large number of carbon based lifeforms out there for every single silicon based one.

Although silicon can form long chains it's hard to make the huge variety of chemicals you can with carbon.


That said I'd rather see silicon and germanium based life forms in Sci-fi than humanoid ones. At least it shows that the writers are thinking

[Grey Wolf]

Silicon would be interesting, too. It's not a true metal like germanium, but it is a metalloid, and it has that interesting property when you contaminate it. Biological transistors, anyone?

[redsniper]

Hmmm, silicon based life... HAL 9000

[Tiara]

Originally posted by karajorma

That said I'd rather see silicon and germanium based life forms in Sci-fi than humanoid ones. At least it shows that the writers are thinking

Tholians, the Horta, Crystalline Entity...

Viva la Star trek

[karajorma]

Star Trek has a lot of humanoid life forms to make up for. In fact it's probably the worst offender

[Black Wolf]

Heh - I have a slightly different pattern of bumps on my head. Thus I am different to last weeks alien race by 4 billion years of evolution.

Viva la Star Trek!

[Tiara]

Originally posted by karajorma
Star Trek has a lot of humanoid life forms to make up for. In fact it's probably the worst offender

Well, they do have a reason for this.... it's actually not unlike SG-1. but unlike actually transplanting Humans they transplanted DNA

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Tiara

Well, they do have a reason for this.... it's actually not unlike SG-1. but unlike actually transplanting Humans they transplanted DNA

Except it's a pretty crap reason. Makes absolutely no scientific sense whatsoever.

Why is it that the science of evolution gets such a ****ty explaination while physics gets inertial compensators and Heisenberg compensators to deal with Trek's physics  flaws?

What should Trek have done? Leave the matter well alone and don't try to explain it. You're just digging a bigger hole for yourself if you do.

Look at Stargate. Everyone in the universe speaks English. Probably one of the most idiotic things ever to happen in Sci-fi but I love the show so I'll forgive them.  That said if they tried to come up with an explaination for WHY everyone spoke English it would be even more stupid.

Trek has to have humanoid aliens cause it's too expensive to not have them and still be able to interact with aliens. The audience know this and I'm much more willing to forgive them for it than I am to accept this idiot suggestion that the DNA seeded billions of years ago means that everyone is humanoid.