[KappaWing]

Terrans and Vasudans. Evolving on different planets, totally seperate throughout the entire evolution chain starting from single celled organisms, yet they still end up walking upright with two arms, two legs, two eyes, similar body structure, etc. etc.

In my opinion, I think [V] really screwed up here. I know they wanted to make the vasudans seem more similar to the Terrans than the Shivans but the Terrans and Vasudans are still just too similar to be believable.

Arguments?

[Sarafan]

Well, Vasudans have the same structure (two eyes, legs, etc) but that's it, even their legs are different then ours, also Vasuda would seem to be an Earth like planet only with more deserts wich could explain why they're so "similar" IMO.

[Mad Bomber]

When you come down to it, it's certainly not impossible. Just... somewhat improbable.

But regardless, the Shivans more than make up for the Vasudans' comparative lack of weirdness.

[NGTM-1R]

Are the Vasudans really that similar? Sure, two arms, two legs, two eyes, mouth, stuff like that. But even in terms of purely visual differences their limbs are obviously not constructed in the same fashion. We know pretty much nothing of their physiology; I can't recall off the top of my head whether it was ever stated they were even mammalian.

Sharks and dolphins have a lot in common visually. Doesn't make them similar.

[Herra Tohtori]

The thing is, it's actually even plausible.

Obviously life *could* develope to many directions. But seeing as how Vasudans and Terrans can live pretty comfortably on similar atmosphere, it's pretty obvious that Vasuda Prime was not too different from Earth after all in most fundamental regards such as atmospheric mixture of gases.

In fact, as far as we know, humanoid form could actually be the most likely basic form for sentient, culturally advanced life. Sentient being needs some things to develope an advanced culture. These are for example:

-relatively big size - requires either endoskeleton or plenty of nutrients for renewing exo-skeleton periodically during growth
-means to move - pre-requisite for pretty much all higher animals with few exceptions.
-means to think (central nervous system most likely)
-means to observe (sensory organs - eyes, ears and the like)
-means to manipulate (hands or other kind of manipulators)


When you combine this to two of nature's very fundamental tendencies - minimum energy principle and symmetry - it is possible that two legs, two hands, two eyes, two ears and so forth can actually be the most effective combination for a sentient being.

Obviously bilateral symmetry is not the only possibility on Earth either - but radial symmetry is the remaining option and it's mainly seen on simpler life-forms such as medusae and stuff.


Of course there is a chance that the life in Vasuda Prime would have evolved much differently, but just as possible is that it went to much the same direction as in Earth. If, for example, the initial members of phylae Mollusca would have happened to be superior to Cordata and eaten them, Earth might be populated by some sort of invertebrates or with a hard exo-sceleton and indeterminate amount of limbs... but then again, the gravity would be pretty difficult to beat for an octopus. Harder than for a vertebrate amphibian fish species for sure.

Chance is an important factor in evolution, but in the long run, natural selection will eventually spin up the best structures from the available pool. And if Vasuda Prime indeed is/was anything like Earth, then I see no reason to doubt why the Vasudans are humanoid form.


The Shivans are much more of an evolutionary oddity. I mean, the beam weapon and energy claws are pretty much even weirder than the electric eel, but they are possibly augmentations... weird symmetry is actually more mystifiable in an evolutionary sense. Their front end is clearly bilaterally symmetric, but the rear seems to be trilateral or something. They have way more limbs than they actually need and most notably, they don't seem to have the necessary motoric functions for finer manipulation of objects. So it's quite a mystery to me how the hell do Shivans do the stuff they do, or how they ended up the way they are.

[Dysko]

Play The Procyon Insurgency, there is an explanation for that

Now for my opinion.
I think it's possible that 2 sentient species might be both umanoid, but what I find unlikely is that we have actually the chances of encountering them.
First of all, you must find a star which isn't neither too hot or too cold. Second, you must find a planet at the right distance from the star (so that it is not fried by the star's energy like Mercury and Venus, but it is not extremely far from the radiation like the outer planets). And the star has to be "quiet" (by "quiet" I mean rare flares and so on, the star of the Earth-like that has been just discovered has a lot of flares, and this reduces the likelihood of finding life on that planet).
This planet must have a mainly solid composition (I think it's quite impossible there could be life on gas planets like Jupiter, and this means that the star must be at least a "2nd generation" star, generated by a previous supernova), and a precise mixture of gases in the atmosphere. Oh, add also a lot of water on the planetary surface.
The Universe is big, surely a planet like this exists (other than Earth, obviously).

Now, we must find life.
Evolution seems to have started 3,5*10⁹ years ago (correct me if I'm wrong). Man appeared only at the last stage (I read somewhere that if the story of Earth could be reduced to 24 hours, man would appear only at the last second). Let's suppose another sentient species follows a similar evolutionary line. It would also need 3,5*10⁹ years to reach our stage. A similar form of live may have already existed, or will exist, but it is unlikely that could be find in our lifetime (by "lifetime" I mean the existance of a species until its extinction).

[Wobble73]

It's not that unbelievable. Being a bi-pedal species helps in the develpoment of tools and technology as it frees up the other two limbs for manipulation of such tools. Having two eyes helps when you wish to judge distances, helpful when you wish to hunt something, (and we all know Vasudans wuv fishies, we just don't know how they catch them). However, most predators have two eyes that point forward, like I said helps to judge distances, where as most prey have eyes on the sides of their heads, which gives them a wider field of view, helpful when looking out for possible danger!

Therefore it is more likely that the Terrans and Vasudans would have travelled down a very similar evolutionary route to each other.

What is more unbelieveable are the Shivans, how they are able to create and utilise technology, when they don't appear to have any way manipulate tools etc. is somewhat unbelievable and has led to people speculating that their ships are grown and they are living ships? Who knows, but this is also what makes them more scary than the Vasudans, because thay are so different!

[karajorma]

Completely unbelievable.

People like to pont out convergent evolution but fail to consider that the animals involved started out from the same ancestor. The animals that are commonly mentioned (thylacines and wolves, icthysaurs and dolphins) already shared a common evolutionary history. Look at the examples, convergence only occured with those pairs well after the evolution of the backbone (something which happened pretty late in the development of life on Earth).

If you look you'll see that the foetus of most vertebrates are very similar so it's hardly surprising that the animals can converge. The other example given is the eye of the octopus but if you read up on the subject again it's an issue of having the same starting points. Yes the two have similar structure. It's because the two are expressing the same genes.

Now lets take a look at vasudans. Unless you're a proponent of panspermia the vasudans won't have the same starting points. They certainly won't have the same genes to express. You will still get convergent evolution of course. There are some things like wings which are useful enough and general enough to evolve all over the galaxy.

What I find hard to believe is that you'd get so much of it in a pair of animals like humans and vasudans which are completely unrelated. There are other solutions to the problems animals from another planet are going to face for me to believe that a shape so similar is likely to evolve.

[Herra Tohtori]

May I point out that external similarities are about the worst possible way to define similarities between species? Take the sharks and the dolphins for example. Both have long sleek body, two eyes, sharp teeth in a mouth, a tail fin, back fin and two main side fins. However, internally they are much different - more different than a giraffe and a mouse are from each other.

I know they are both vertebrates and have common origins to relatively late in the evolution, but the point still stands - dolphins line of evolution includes life forms much unlike sharks, yet they have evolved into much similar form due to similar environment.

Anyway, about the only thing we know about Vasudans is that they have a torso, two legs, two arms, a head with visible mouth, eyes and some other stuff (possibly ears and/or olfactory organs), and they are big and bloody strong. They also likely eat proteine based stuff like headz and fishes. But we know practically nothing of their metabolism, inner organ structure, central nervous system specialities and stuff.

Given the fact that they can obviously tolerate such deadly and corrosive materials like oxygen and dihydrogen monoxide in atmosphere, I'd say also that their metabolism and structure is based on carbon cycle, likewise to us. That is another very likely thing in extra-terrestrial life forms, and it is one similarity to begin with - carbon is about the best suited basis for life there is in the universe, assuming the laws of nature are similar everywhere. But I slightly digress...

I already pointed out that since Vasudans and humans can pretty comfortably co-exist in similar atmosphere, it means that chemically Earth and Vasuda Prime aren't fundamentally different. And, despite different origins, similar environments give advantages to vaguely similar solutions, which means that perhaps, just perhaps, it is generally advantageous for higher ground animals to have bilateral body symmetry, strong endo-skeleton, a torso, four limbs and a head. More limbs is obviously possible, but due to very likely existence of symmetry, they would add in pairs with very high probability. And you have to consider, would extra limbs offer significant advantage to a ground animal? In most cases they would just be a burden to grow. Which means that those big animal types with more than four limbs would have hard time growing up which would put them into a disadvantage if there perhaps was other big animal types with other number of limbs on the same region/planet. Again assuming that symmetry is as common in universe as in Earth, four limbs is pretty much the most likely number of limbs for a big ground animal to have evolved with.

As for anything but the very basic humanoid form, we know nothing of Vasudan evolution and what they have been before evolving into what we see in the game.

[Nico]

I know they are both vertebrates and have common origins to relatively late in the evolution, but the point still stands - dolphins line of evolution includes life forms much unlike sharks, yet they have evolved into much similar form due to similar environment.

It's even worse than that: sharks and its ancesters never left water, dolphins come from a land animal.
Other humanoid lifeforms is a perfectly acceptable idea to me, as long as it doesn't turn into Startrek or Babylon5 where 90% of the aliens are people with make up ( and the remaining 10% almost all come from B5, btw). Vasudans don't even fit in that category (try to make someone fit in a vasudan costume )

[Commander Zane]

Or Stargate, how can you have nearly every single race in the known universe look an awful lot like an Earth human?

[Herra Tohtori]

Well, in Star Trek there was this ancient humanoidd race that purposefully modified evolution to eventually produce humanoid sentients all over the galaxy. In Stargåte, ancient humans themselves had occupied a large amount of planets, therefore humans are usually met in the series instead of actual alien life forms (and it's cheaper to shoot the series with humans with only light or no make-up at all).

In B5 there's no sign of such alterations, even though the remaining first one races did manipulate the younger races as they saw fit. Likewise in FS universe, panspermia is not likely, though remotely possible of course.


At any rate, the evidence points to the fact that in one case out of one known planet with Earth like environment, life has evolved to form bi-pedal, sentient humanoid species capable of developing complex, advanced culture. So clearly it is not impossible to happen on other planet with similar enough environment.

[Alikchi]

I rather like the theory in Procyon Insurgency.

[TrashMan]

Tink about it - any species that wants t odevelop culture, writing and interstelat travel has to have a few things:

- decent size (not too big, not too small)
- flexibility (ability to survive in different enviroment, not tied to a specific food type)
- very accurate manipulators (hands - still the most perfect manipulator)

So I don't see what's so strange with having humanoid species out there...

[karajorma]

I'm not saying that humanoids are impossible. I'm saying that humanoids so similar that they look like they could have evolved on Earth are impossible.

[BS403]

There is only one possible explanation for the similarities. They had a common ancestor. The facial configuration of humans and basically all others animals on earth is because we had common ancestors. True aliens in our universe would not look like any animal we have seen before.

[Wobble73]

There is only one possible explanation for the similarities. They had a common ancestor. The facial configuration of humans and basically all others animals on earth is because we had common ancestors. True aliens in our universe would not look like any animal we have seen before.

What about the Greys, they have two eyes, one mouth and possibly two ears, (although they could be missing a nose)?


 

[Mobius]

Boooooo!!!!

You forgot sì and no.

[karajorma]

Greys were obviously made up by someone with a poor grasp of evolutionary theory too then.

And believed in by people further down the evolutionary ladder too.

[Mobius]

There is only one possible explanation for the similarities. They had a common ancestor. The facial configuration of humans and basically all others animals on earth is because we had common ancestors. True aliens in our universe would not look like any animal we have seen before.

Well...no. Scientists have discussed about it. It's probable that there might be insect-like primitive life beings in other planets. Their shape and their dimensions could be worrying, but insect-like creatures should be common in the universe...they easily survive, so it is probable thay many other habitable planets are full of insect-like life beings.