Could one intelligent species fall in love with another?

[Cainkane1]

Ok Hopefuly this question isn't as absurd as it sounds. On Star Trek I've observed love affairs between humans and aliens who don't even look human. On the first Star Trek they actually had an episode where a human male was in love with an energy female. It may have been possible for cro Magnon man to fall in love with a neanderthal woman and vice versa. So could a bond be formed between a human and "The Brain From Planet Aeros"?

Please no references to anything unwholesome. I'm certain that a human could meet an intelligent alien find common grounds for friendship. But is romance possible? Yes I know. They couldn't have kids.

[Marquis de Carabas]

Yes (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10694972/)

[Neverfly]

Part of the problem with this question is that the nature of intelligence form elsewhere is a complete unknown.

Who knows what direction evolution would have taken with that species. They might be intelligent, but quite unlike Star Trek which must cast aliens to suit a plot and actors, but they might be completely different from us in how thoughts are formed- how we perceive existence, etc.

As long as we have enough common ground to understand eachother, I can see that it would be possible for a human to feel romantic toward an alien intelligence- very easily.
Whether or not that alien could return the sentiment would be based on how similar its intellect was to ours.

[paximperium]

Well that depends on what you mean by "love".

There are different kinds of love ranging from familial love, the passionate lustful love among new couples and extending to the loving friendship among mature-long term couples. If it is the latter, it is plausible if the other creature in question has similar emotional response and quirks like humans do.

You can also project your love by anthropomorphizing the object of affection. This is pretty common with pets even if the pet in question doesn't really "love" you in a similar human sense. If a human can love a rock alien that gurgles, I guess this form of love is possible.

[HansMustermann]

There are people who are turned on by all sorts of animals, including reptiles or birds. And there was a man who married a goat.

So at least for the less exotic alien species, I fail to see the problem. Strong violent Klingon woman, whose "fight or flight" reflex doesn't have the "or flight" part? Someone out there is probably getting a hardon about that right as you read this.

Even for some of the more exotic ones, but still biological, there's probably someone out there who'd think "mmm, purple tentacles are soo hot."

When you get to the really exotic stuff, like beings of pure energy and whatnot, hmm, there I'm finally starting to have some doubts.

[Soapy Sam]

What paximperium said , basically.
I love ice cream. I doubt it's mutual.

[Metullus]

Yes (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10694972/)The OP postulates two intelligent species. Your link involves a dolphin marrying a rock band promoter.

I will concede the intelligence of the dolphin, but the rock band promoter?

[paximperium]

The OP postulates two intelligent species. Your link involves a dolphin marrying a rock band promoter.

I will concede the intelligence of the dolphin, but the rock band promoter?
That is a remarkably good point.

[drkitten]

Ok Hopefuly this question isn't as absurd as it sounds.

"Species" don't generally fall in love. Individual beings do.

I've met lots of people who claim to love their cats, dogs, and hamsters. I see no reason why that couldn't be reciprocated.

[paximperium]

"Species" don't generally fall in love. Individual beings do.

I've met lots of people who claim to love their cats, dogs, and hamsters. I see no reason why that couldn't be reciprocated.
Man-Hamster love is illegal in many states :D

[ravdin]

Well... I'm thinking that this hypothetical "intelligent" species would have to have evolved on another planet. Unlike on Star Trek, they really wouldn't look like us- perhaps features like eyes and radial symmetry would appear separately but I don't think they'd look like human beings with rubber prosthetics.

Carl Sagan pointed out that other species in the universe are unlikely to be at a similar level of development as our own- either they'd have achieved our current level of technology millions of years ago or they are still millions of years away from building radio telescopes or sending spacecraft to explore their local star system. An emerging species such as our own must be incredibly rare. This lack of parity would not be conducive to a love story.

Let's add to the mix the extra hurdles that they would almost certainly not be able to breathe our air, or even eat our food (we have evolved to take advantage of minerals that are abundant in the Earth's crust that would almost certainly be poisonous to an organism that didn't evolve here). The language barrier would be a pretty significant hurdle as well- I'm assuming for the purposes of your question that we've figured out some way to effectively communicate with each other.

Finally, this species' home might be hundreds of light years away. Long distance relationships are a bitch. My advice is to find a nice person of your own species who can at least receive an email of yours in a few seconds, instead of a few centuries.

[Cainkane1]

Well... I'm thinking that this hypothetical "intelligent" species would have to have evolved on another planet. Unlike on Star Trek, they really wouldn't look like us- perhaps features like eyes and radial symmetry would appear separately but I don't think they'd look like human beings with rubber prosthetics.

Carl Sagan pointed out that other species in the universe are unlikely to be at a similar level of development as our own- either they'd have achieved our current level of technology millions of years ago or they are still millions of years away from building radio telescopes or sending spacecraft to explore their local star system. An emerging species such as our own must be incredibly rare. This lack of parity would not be conducive to a love story.

Let's add to the mix the extra hurdles that they would almost certainly not be able to breathe our air, or even eat our food (we have evolved to take advantage of minerals that are abundant in the Earth's crust that would almost certainly be poisonous to an organism that didn't evolve here). The language barrier would be a pretty significant hurdle as well- I'm assuming for the purposes of your question that we've figured out some way to effectively communicate with each other.

Finally, this species' home might be hundreds of light years away. Long distance relationships are a bitch. My advice is to find a nice person of your own species who can at least receive an email of yours in a few seconds, instead of a few centuries.
Well my question takes a lot for granted. In my fantasy you might be exploring the Universe and discover intelligent beings who are happy to know that other intelligent species exist. We learn to communicate and learn from one another. We discover similar interests for instance an interest in biology and while exchanging studies we discover that we eagerly anticipate each others company even if we do have to mutually don spacesuits to meet halfway. Ok thats friendship not romance. I believe I've answered my own question. No romance. Posts like this show how much time i have on my hands.

[HansMustermann]

Actually, Ravdin, there are good reasons why at least some aliens would be "built" to the same general plan. The short answer is: because what we are is already the results of gazillions of different things tried, and is what works best. Long answer follows.

For a start, we'll have to give up notions that can't evolve short of magic or ID. E.g., sure, you can imagine gas-sack beings on Jupiter, but that's skipping an essential earlier step: how would individual _cells_ evolve in the clouds of Jupiter? Ephemereal distilled water drops are a whole other thing than a whole primordial ocean on Earth, and even if a self-replicating reaction evolved in one such droplet, it would have a hard time spreading to the other droplets before it fell back or dissipated.

From there let's start with something simple, which I think we can agree on rather quickly: any creature as complex as to reach sentience, will have a lot of cell specialization. Just because it's a big advantage to worry about different sets of proteins in, say, your skin cells than in your liver cells. So there go amorphous beings. Not gonna happen.

They'll also need _some_ kind of encoding their "recipes" for making more of themselves. I'll call it DNA for ease of understanding, although it can be anything else to the same end.

It'll probably have _some_ kind of symmetry, just because it saves a lot of DNA right there, and it has other advantages too. E.g., it's a lot less of a problem to move when your left and right legs are the same length.

Also, whatever kind of "neurons" it uses to transmit signals across its body, they'll be chemical things (even if it's based on fluoride and silicon, instead of oxygen and carbon, it's still chemical) that evolved out of its other cells. They'll be slow and the number of hops will matter. It will have to be a massively parallel machine, and minimize the number of hops involved, or at least such designs will have a distinctive advantage over other decentralized design. E.g., the human brain is so massively parallel, that neurons in your cortex can have direct connections to around 100,000 other neurons, _and_ the whole cortex is wrapped around a high speed hub. I'll go and predict that if we meet an alien intelligent enough to hold a conversation with, they'll have a central nervous system too.

For the same reason, hive minds probably won't exist. Either they involve telepathy, or the delays between getting a stimulus and dealing with it are way too high.

It will have _some_ sensors for light, vibrations, ambient chemistry, etc, just because it's so incredibly big an advantage to do so. On Earth, for example, even single-cell organisms can sense chemical gradients and/or have some simple photo-sensitive protein connected to the flagellum.

Eyes alone involve some incredible bandwidth, and some thick bundles of nerves. It's also an advantage to minimize the latency, because often who reacts a microsecond earlier wins. But at any rate, even from an energy use and vulnerability point of view, there's an advantage in keeping them short. So they'll have their eyes in their head, or at any rate close enough to their brain.

For similar reasons, probably the mouth and brain will be near there too.

The brain also uses incredible amounts of energy, so whatever life form we'll meet, if it's smart enough to be sentient, it will be based on some very reactive gas. Fish people or the continuation of life on a methane planet that never evolved photosynthesis, are right out. Dolphin people, though, maybe. Maybe.

For that matter, there's another problem at work there. A young star is pretty "cold", and heats up gradually over billions of years. Earth _had_ to evolve from a methane and CO2 atmosphere to Oxygen, or it would have transformed into another Venus. Look at Venus and that's pretty much an Earth where photosynthesis (and probably life) never evolved in the first place. The fact that we had so many billions of years to perfect increasingly complex life, was based pretty much on successive atmosphere changes that successively reduced the greenhouse effect, and kept temperature within a narrow band in spite of what the Sun was doing. An alien planet where the same doesn't happen, will have a billion years tops before its temperature goes from "just right for whatever their chemistry is" to "too freaking hot, game over."

Etc.

So basically, Hollywood or no Hollywood, I would indeed expect that if we meet a sentient alien, chances are it won't be too horribly different from our general construction plan.

[ponderingturtle]

Actually, Ravdin, there are good reasons why at least some aliens would be "built" to the same general plan. The short answer is: because what we are is already the results of gazillions of different things tried, and is what works best. Long answer follows.

No, evolution is not about the absolute best, but about the least worst. A series of least worst does not lead to the best.

In an answer to the OP. Well the most likely other inteligent species people are likely to meet are ones that humans make. So it would depend on things like "What is the emotional make up of an uplifted dog", it is hard to say how much antropomorphizing there is in reading emotions into animals but I think that animals do have some emotions.

So as there are people who love their dogs in any sense of that word, I don't see why there couldn't be created dogs who can love people back and are inteligent enough to express it.


Extra Terestrials, I do not think it is likely that we will meet any inteligent aliens and wouldn't guess who human or alien they would be. I would think that any technological society would need to social animals in some sense and as such a sense of empathy would be an advantage, so you could get a somewhat human emotional make up. Of course they might not have a reproductive drive to form familial groups with in society or any such things.

[Madalch]

Well... I'm thinking that this hypothetical "intelligent" species would have to have evolved on another planet. Unlike on Star Trek, they really wouldn't look like us- perhaps features like eyes and radial symmetry would appear separately but I don't think they'd look like human beings with rubber prosthetics.

One could imagine a scenario where a sentient and advanced race sends out colony ships to nearby star systems. Hundreds of thousands of years later, the various colonies have evolved into slightly different species, and one of them invents faster-than-light travel so that they can run off and visit the others.

Me, I think the cultural differences would be overwhelming...

[Gagglegnash]

Hi

Actually, Ravdin, there are good reasons why at least some aliens would be "built" to the same general plan. The short answer is: because what we are is already the results of gazillions of different things tried, and is what works best. Long answer follows.

For a start, we'll have to give up notions that can't evolve short of magic or ID. E.g., sure, you can imagine gas-sack beings on Jupiter, but that's skipping an essential earlier step: how would individual _cells_ evolve in the clouds of Jupiter? Ephemereal distilled water drops are a whole other thing than a whole primordial ocean on Earth, and even if a self-replicating reaction evolved in one such droplet, it would have a hard time spreading to the other droplets before it fell back or dissipated.

Cease locomotion and place your dexterous members vertically above your sensory organ cluster, alien!!

Individual cells are pretty much an aquatic phenomenon because they are neutral buoyancy in water, so in water, they can move around easily, right?

In the atmosphere of Jupiter, at some point, the constituent gasses get to the density of earthly water, right? I mean, the pressure down towards the surface is high enough for there to, maybe, be metallic hydrogen laying around!

All you need is a medium to get chemicals together and a medium for the resultant chemical-bits to get together, and all of a sudden, after a few million years, you might have cells... and things that eat them!

The gas-balloon creatures are simply an extension of the process to get further away form the, "things that eat them," part.

From there let's start with something simple, which I think we can agree on rather quickly: any creature as complex as to reach sentience, will have a lot of cell specialization. Just because it's a big advantage to worry about different sets of proteins in, say, your skin cells than in your liver cells. So there go amorphous beings. Not gonna happen.

Lesse: Intelligence as a function of acquisition, processing, and correlation of data means a processing structure and afferent structures. As an added function required for having that intelligence DO something, efferent structures are equally necessary.

Hypercube computers are N-connected (where every node of a size N hypercube is connected to every other node) microprocessors, each with its own memory and I/O. The physical proximity is less important than the logical proximity.

If we had an M-hypercube-creature composed of M-connected N-hypercube composites, where every cell was generalized, with its own afferent, efferent, processing, and manufacturing capabilities, with each cell taking on the responsibility of whatever task is currently and locally most beneficial to the collective organism, why couldn't it be amorphous?

They'll also need _some_ kind of encoding their "recipes" for making more of themselves. I'll call it DNA for ease of understanding, although it can be anything else to the same end.

No argument, specially with the, anything else," proviso.

It'll probably have _some_ kind of symmetry, just because it saves a lot of DNA right there, and it has other advantages too. E.g., it's a lot less of a problem to move when your left and right legs are the same length.

I'll go for that, if for no other reason that creatures with only one dexterous member have trouble catching a thrown basketball, and ANYONE form Indiana KNOWS that playing basketball is a species' requirement for sapience.

Also, whatever kind of "neurons" it uses to transmit signals across its body, they'll be chemical things (even if it's based on fluoride and silicon, instead of oxygen and carbon, it's still chemical) that evolved out of its other cells. They'll be slow and the number of hops will matter. It will have to be a massively parallel machine, and minimize the number of hops involved, or at least such designs will have a distinctive advantage over other decentralized design. E.g., the human brain is so massively parallel, that neurons in your cortex can have direct connections to around 100,000 other neurons, _and_ the whole cortex is wrapped around a high speed hub. I'll go and predict that if we meet an alien intelligent enough to hold a conversation with, they'll have a central nervous system too.

Neural channels might not necessarily rise from strings of cells. They might just as easily rise from channel-like structures.

F'r'instance: Hollow tubes in a fibrous structure, filled with gas and a pressure sensor to govern the gas pressure, could evolve to be efferent and afferent structures by articulating the pressure sensor to send sounds up and down the tubes. A single channel can act as both simply by changing the pitch of the sounds.

Put a knob of these tubes and pressure sensors somewhere, and hook them up to manage things like relative pressure in competing tubes, gas pressure management, nutrient monitoring, leaf alignment and manufacture, and you have the makings of a perfectly functional massively parallel processing [/url=http://www.blikstein.com/paulo/projects/project_water.html]fluidic computer[/url].

Ok - not likely, if for no other rreason that it would give an Eeeewwww connotation to the term, "tree hugger..."

but STILL....

However, I'll agree on the central nervous system thing, with caveats on the concept of, "central."

For the same reason, hive minds probably won't exist. Either they involve telepathy, or the delays between getting a stimulus and dealing with it are way too high.

...and the reason that biological radio transmitters are impossible are...?

All you really need for a receiver is a bit of metallic selenium, after all.

It will have _some_ sensors for light, vibrations, ambient chemistry, etc, just because it's so incredibly big an advantage to do so. On Earth, for example, even single-cell organisms can sense chemical gradients and/or have some simple photo-sensitive protein connected to the flagellum.

Eyes alone involve some incredible bandwidth, and some thick bundles of nerves. It's also an advantage to minimize the latency, because often who reacts a microsecond earlier wins. But at any rate, even from an energy use and vulnerability point of view, there's an advantage in keeping them short. So they'll have their eyes in their head, or at any rate close enough to their brain.

Proximity is the important thing here. When nervous transmission is as slow as ours, you're close or you're late... in the, "Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy," sense of, "late." Our nerve impulses travel at about the speed of sound.

HOWEVER.

Sound travels faster in water, so fill the pressure channels above with water, and your sensory organs can be a bit further away and have about the same response time.

For similar reasons, probably the mouth and brain will be near there too.

In hunting-intelligence creatures, probably, as good eye-teeth coordination is a big advantage.

If the mouth is simply a structure for gathering food, and the food isn't particularly elusive, make with a nerve ganglion to control biting and chewing, and the mouth could be just about anywhere.

The communicative structure, on the other hand, probably will be fairly close to the processor because of the bandwidth required to manipulate the articulatory structures, no matter what the method of communication is.

(NOTE: I don't think that the notion of sign language would arise in the absence of the a primary, vibration-based language. A baby laying in the nest signing, "Snake! SNAKE!! SNAKE!!!" to a parent outside on the branch doesn't seem to me to be conducive to a species' long-term survival.)

The brain also uses incredible amounts of energy, so whatever life form we'll meet, if it's smart enough to be sentient, it will be based on some very reactive gas. Fish people or the continuation of life on a methane planet that never evolved photosynthesis, are right out. Dolphin people, though, maybe. Maybe.

You're assuming an oxidizing metabolism where the organism provides the fuel and the atmosphere provides the oxidizer.

What if we swap it around, so the organism provides the oxidizer, or a catalyst, and the atmosphere provides the fuel? How about a symbiosis where one organism processes an atmosphere to produce the reactive substance for the other organism, which ingests fuel for the reaction, producing nutrients for both organisms?

For that matter, there's another problem at work there. A young star is pretty "cold", and heats up gradually over billions of years. Earth _had_ to evolve from a methane and CO2 atmosphere to Oxygen, or it would have transformed into another Venus. Look at Venus and that's pretty much an Earth where photosynthesis (and probably life) never evolved in the first place. The fact that we had so many billions of years to perfect increasingly complex life, was based pretty much on successive atmosphere changes that successively reduced the greenhouse effect, and kept temperature within a narrow band in spite of what the Sun was doing. An alien planet where the same doesn't happen, will have a billion years tops before its temperature goes from "just right for whatever their chemistry is" to "too freaking hot, game over."

No arguments there. I wonder, too, if old stars have the gumption to fuel the development of life.

(Oh. And. Planets don't, "evolve," a'ight?)

Etc.

So basically, Hollywood or no Hollywood, I would indeed expect that if we meet a sentient alien, chances are it won't be too horribly different from our general construction plan.

While I tend to agree, what with this particular body I'm wearing right now being quite efficient at the things it has to do, flexible and adaptable enough to the the things it wants to do, and smart enough to build tools to do the things it can't, I still feel that there are other roads open to the production of sapience.

Also, just statistically speaking, it's generally a bad idea to make global predictions based on a single sample, and also statistically speaking, given a reasonably large set of sample data, there are bound to be both clustering of data (similarities), divergent data (dissimilarities), and things that lie outside the two-standard-deviation envelope (just plain... uhhh... nutty stuff).

[ponderingturtle]

You're assuming an oxidizing metabolism where the organism provides the fuel and the atmosphere provides the oxidizer.

What if we swap it around, so the organism provides the oxidizer, or a catalyst, and the atmosphere provides the fuel? How about a symbiosis where one organism processes an atmosphere to produce the reactive substance for the other organism, which ingests fuel for the reaction, producing nutrients for both organisms?



Fuel and Oxidizer are pretty much dependent on what the common part is in the chemistry. Of course it is possible that they are anaerobic and not dependent on the atmosphere in the ways we think.

[Gagglegnash]

Hi

Fuel and Oxidizer are pretty much dependent on what the common part is in the chemistry. Of course it is possible that they are anaerobic and not dependent on the atmosphere in the ways we think.

I accidentally deleted the anaerobic bit of the response.

I tried to edit the thing to put it back in, but The System Lords won't let me perform an edit. I begin the edit, and I'm immediately logged out, and I can't post the edit. :(

AH, well. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

[HansMustermann]

Individual cells are pretty much an aquatic phenomenon because they are neutral buoyancy in water, so in water, they can move around easily, right?

In the atmosphere of Jupiter, at some point, the constituent gasses get to the density of earthly water, right? I mean, the pressure down towards the surface is high enough for there to, maybe, be metallic hydrogen laying around!

Hydrogen doesn't actually _have_ a liquid phase above -250 Celsius or so. Hardly useful as a solvent for the other elements to form life from, because everything else is frozen solid at that temperature.

And metallic hydrogen is a really weird phase, I'm not sure I would equate it to water.

All you need is a medium to get chemicals together and a medium for the resultant chemical-bits to get together, and all of a sudden, after a few million years, you might have cells... and things that eat them

Well, you also need it to be a polar substance, and some non-polar stuff to form a membrane, and a bunch of elements and elementary substances forming that can combine into configurations that can react with anything else, etc.

The gas-balloon creatures are simply an extension of the process to get further away form the, "things that eat them," part.

Let's just say it takes a heck of a leap of faith. While I can't 100% exclude the whole process, I find it somewhat unlikely. Going by the chemistry as we know it today.

Lesse: Intelligence as a function of acquisition, processing, and correlation of data means a processing structure and afferent structures. As an added function required for having that intelligence DO something, efferent structures are equally necessary.

Hypercube computers are N-connected (where every node of a size N hypercube is connected to every other node) microprocessors, each with its own memory and I/O. The physical proximity is less important than the logical proximity.

Independent ganglions with their own IO and memory, have been tried before (that's how insect legs still work), but for some reason that seems to have gone nowhere above insect sizes.

Well, not exactly. The brain _is_ composed of billions of neuron clusters, interconnected via a massive bandwidth hub. Still, there seemed to be an advantage to having them concentrated together.

If we had an M-hypercube-creature composed of M-connected N-hypercube composites, where every cell was generalized, with its own afferent, efferent, processing, and manufacturing capabilities, with each cell taking on the responsibility of whatever task is currently and locally most beneficial to the collective organism, why couldn't it be amorphous?

Well, for a start it would need some kind of blood, lungs, etc. It's structures which evolved independently more than once, so it's obviously of _some_ advantage. (Plus, we already know that just tubes from the surface stop working above butterfly size.)

I'll go for that, if for no other reason that creatures with only one dexterous member have trouble catching a thrown basketball, and ANYONE form Indiana KNOWS that playing basketball is a species' requirement for sapience.

I wouldn't go that far. The Neanderthals seem to never have built any kind of missile weapons, and it's even a hypothesis that they couldn't do ballistics in real time. They were sentient anyway.

I'm just saying that it's easier to coordinate a symmetrical body, and sometimes you need every little advantage you can get.

Neural channels might not necessarily rise from strings of cells. They might just as easily rise from channel-like structures.

F'r'instance: Hollow tubes in a fibrous structure, filled with gas and a pressure sensor to govern the gas pressure, could evolve to be efferent and afferent structures by articulating the pressure sensor to send sounds up and down the tubes. A single channel can act as both simply by changing the pitch of the sounds.

Put a knob of these tubes and pressure sensors somewhere, and hook them up to manage things like relative pressure in competing tubes, gas pressure management, nutrient monitoring, leaf alignment and manufacture, and you have the makings of a perfectly functional massively parallel processing [/url=http://www.blikstein.com/paulo/projects/project_water.html]fluidic computer[/url].

Ok - not likely, if for no other rreason that it would give an Eeeewwww connotation to the term, "tree hugger..."

but STILL....

They'd also need to be fairly rigid, and well isolated from the exterior, or just getting kicked in the stomach or jumping off a tree would stimulate every single synapse in your body.

...and the reason that biological radio transmitters are impossible are...?

I wouldn't say "impossible", but you'll notice that networking is a pain in the rear when everyone is on the same trunk. There's a reason we moved beyond having all computers on the same coax cable, or why wlan protocols are so complicated.

I wouldn't go "irreducible complexity" about it, but there's certainly less pressure on evolving such a sophisticated long range protocol, when you can do well enough by just pumping air through some modified muscles.

Proximity is the important thing here. When nervous transmission is as slow as ours, you're close or you're late... in the, "Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy," sense of, "late." Our nerve impulses travel at about the speed of sound.

HOWEVER.

Sound travels faster in water, so fill the pressure channels above with water, and your sensory organs can be a bit further away and have about the same response time.

Well, that doesn't change the problem, I'm affraid.

If your alien herbivore with pressure tubes transmits signals faster, the alien carnivore from the same planet would likely be based on pressure tubes too. Whichever has the fastest reaction time, still has an advantage. So there still would be the same pressure to have those signal lines as short as possible.

In hunting-intelligence creatures, probably, as good eye-teeth coordination is a big advantage.

If the mouth is simply a structure for gathering food, and the food isn't particularly elusive, make with a nerve ganglion to control biting and chewing, and the mouth could be just about anywhere.

Well, maybe, but in a complex ecosystem, virtually any complex species will have evolved to and fro through several changes of nutrition. Being easier to adapt to some other mode is an advantage.

You're assuming an oxidizing metabolism where the organism provides the fuel and the atmosphere provides the oxidizer.

What if we swap it around, so the organism provides the oxidizer, or a catalyst, and the atmosphere provides the fuel? How about a symbiosis where one organism processes an atmosphere to produce the reactive substance for the other organism, which ingests fuel for the reaction, producing nutrients for both organisms?

I suppose when you look at what the mitochondria do, it's certainly not impossible.

The problem starts when you look at what are the choices? Creating the oxidizer, usually means getting it off something it's well bound to. It's a process which uses energy from outside. Plants do it by photosynthesis, but plants don't do much else to need even more energy out of it. And look at what surface of leaves is necessary to feed a cow or a monkey.

Basically a monkey which does its own photosynthesis (by itself, or via a symbiont) just won't have enough surface to be too horribly complex or do much. Plus, it's boned at night.

(Oh. And. Planets don't, "evolve," a'ight?)

It was metaphorically speaking. I trust you'll notice I said it was life on Earth that did the change, not some kind of evolution of Earth itself.

While I tend to agree, what with this particular body I'm wearing right now being quite efficient at the things it has to do, flexible and adaptable enough to the the things it wants to do, and smart enough to build tools to do the things it can't, I still feel that there are other roads open to the production of sapience.

The problems start though when you basically ask yourself: what would the evolutionary pressure be? There's an intrinsic disadvantage in being a huge brain on legs (like apes and humans are), and I don't mean just as in "painful childbirth". It also means a _huge_ energy use, so basically needing more food at the same total body mass. IIRC some 25% of the energy use in your body, and a ridiculous percentage of your protein intake goes just into keeping that big brain working.

It also means a very long and very vulnerable childhood, fewer "cubs" per litter, and a long time until you're ready to produce the next generation. Humans are born with a fraction of the final neurons, and only get their final brain after 3 years, because really you can't get that head through your mother's pelvis otherwise. Also, the myelin sheaths and support cells are barely there at all, again obviously to save space at birth. A newborn's brain is barely enough to keep that body alive, and will take a long time and a _lot_ of food to get into the final shape.

Basically the huge brain has a lot of disadvantages. It needs some even bigger advantages to actually be on the winning side of the natural selection game.

So I'd say it kinda puts some limits to what kind of creature it will happen in. E.g., you won't get sentient super-intelligent trees, because if you can't move, you don't even need a nervous system at all. The tree which just uses that energy to grow faster would outcompete the trees with useless brains.

Also, just statistically speaking, it's generally a bad idea to make global predictions based on a single sample, and also statistically speaking, given a reasonably large set of sample data, there are bound to be both clustering of data (similarities), divergent data (dissimilarities), and things that lie outside the two-standard-deviation envelope (just plain... uhhh... nutty stuff).

1. I'm not looking at just the one sample called "Homo Sapiens", but also at what we know about other species and mutations which lived or died, and what we know about biochemistry generally. It's still not a perfect guess by a long shot, but I'd say it's slightly more informed than just a sample of one.

2. You'll notice I didn't say that it 100% has to be the same general build, but used wording like "chances are" or "I expect". But basically even that is probably too strong a wording. I'm just saying that it's not exactly tripping suspension of disbelief to imagine aliens built the same way. There are advantages in this shape, at least for certain environments.

[HansMustermann]

Fuel and Oxidizer are pretty much dependent on what the common part is in the chemistry. Of course it is possible that they are anaerobic and not dependent on the atmosphere in the ways we think.

1. As I was saying in the other messages, a brain consumes a _lot_ of energy. A human brain for example is something like 2% of the body mass, but uses 20% of the oxygen and some 25% of the glucose.

Anaerobic metabolisms work well for bacteria, but not much else. I'd be hard pressed to imagine the kind of anaerobic metabolism that would support a _sentient_ species.

2. See the argument about star temperature over time. The Earth _had_ to go from methane and CO2 atmosphere to oxygen, or we'd be cooked by now. Look at Venus with its hundreds of degrees Celsius on the surface. That's what Earth would have turned into, if life hadn't transformed the atmosphere to oxygen somewhere along the way.

[fuelair]

Ok Hopefuly this question isn't as absurd as it sounds. On Star Trek I've observed love affairs between humans and aliens who don't even look human. On the first Star Trek they actually had an episode where a human male was in love with an energy female. It may have been possible for cro Magnon man to fall in love with a neanderthal woman and vice versa. So could a bond be formed between a human and "The Brain From Planet Aeros"?

Please no references to anything unwholesome. I'm certain that a human could meet an intelligent alien find common grounds for friendship. But is romance possible? Yes I know. They couldn't have kids.Probably, almost certainly. Since it is an SF (and, technically, Fantasy) old standard, I assume lots of other see a problem.

[fuelair]

Man-Hamster love is illegal in many states :D
Ever seen "The Manster"? That's likely why.

[backstab]

if its consensual.

[arthwollipot]

Wow. This thread certainly took an interesting turn.

[Darth Rotor]

Ok Hopefuly this question isn't as absurd as it sounds. On Star Trek I've observed love affairs between humans and aliens who don't even look human. On the first Star Trek they actually had an episode where a human male was in love with an energy female. It may have been possible for cro Magnon man to fall in love with a neanderthal woman and vice versa. So could a bond be formed between a human and "The Brain From Planet Aeros"?

Please no references to anything unwholesome. I'm certain that a human could meet an intelligent alien find common grounds for friendship. But is romance possible? Yes I know. They couldn't have kids.
Do you presume a quid pro quo between the two loving parties here, or are you all about one way "love" affaris?

Without understanding your baseline, no way to answer the question.

[Bikewer]

A lot of science-fiction authors have had fun with the idea; somewhere I have a volume of short stories called "Alien Sex".

Asimov observed (writing about human/robot sex) that humans are rather sexy creatures, and if something along those lines is remotely possible, then someone will likely try it.

We do manage to have "relationships" with a variety of other species....Probably you can't refer to such things as love.
(there was an interview with a gentleman who had claimed to have sex with nearly anything imaginable; women, men, animals.. Asked what he liked best, he said, "Women...But the donkey was very nice...")

We know that there are triggering mechanisms for sexual arousal that involve appearance, odors, and so forth. These would not likely be triggered by say, an alien. However, we are rather adaptable....

[HansMustermann]

Eh, have you seen some cheap blow-up dolls? If a lot of people can get a hardon at that sight, and the smell of cheap synthetic rubber, I don't think they'd be picky about a klingon not smelling exactly like a human :p

[fuelair]

A lot of science-fiction authors have had fun with the idea; somewhere I have a volume of short stories called "Alien Sex".

Asimov observed (writing about human/robot sex) that humans are rather sexy creatures, and if something along those lines is remotely possible, then someone will likely try it.

We do manage to have "relationships" with a variety of other species....Probably you can't refer to such things as love.
(there was an interview with a gentleman who had claimed to have sex with nearly anything imaginable; women, men, animals.. Asked what he liked best, he said, "Women...But the donkey was very nice...")

We know that there are triggering mechanisms for sexual arousal that involve appearance, odors, and so forth. These would not likely be triggered by say, an alien. However, we are rather adaptable....
And, who can forget Alien Nation (the TV series, not the movie). ( And given sex and what the aliens ate, the "salt water is like acid to them" thing was really stupid.)

[quarky]

I'm sexually attracted to bottle-nose dolphins.
And I love my dog, in a non-sexual way.

I find white-tail deer to be incredibly beautiful, but I'm not sexually attracted to them, like dolphins, nor do I love them, like I love my dog.

I'm also curious what it would be like to swim into a blue whale's vagina.




(Am I in the right thread?)

[Beerina]

Could one intelligent species fall in love with another?


I think so.


Cross-breed of elf and orc:
http://forums.randi.org/imagehosting/thum_2317487cb7e9816ae.jpg


Cross-breed of human and machines:
(http://forums.randi.org/vbimghost.php?do=displayimg&imgid=13027)http://forums.randi.org/imagehosting/thum_231748beacc07bbba.jpg


Supra-genius immortal race of gods:
(http://forums.randi.org/vbimghost.php?do=displayimg&imgid=13647)http://forums.randi.org/imagehosting/thum_231749453f539be21.jpg (http://forums.randi.org/vbimghost.php?do=displayimg&imgid=14580)


If ya hafta ask:
http://forums.randi.org/picture.php?albumid=139&pictureid=789


Unsure but cute enuf:
http://forums.randi.org/picture.php?albumid=139&pictureid=790












And don't worry, ladies, here's a hansome brute for you:
http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll38/Gnurl/attachment.gif

[westprog]

A lot of science-fiction authors have had fun with the idea; somewhere I have a volume of short stories called "Alien Sex".

Asimov observed (writing about human/robot sex) that humans are rather sexy creatures, and if something along those lines is remotely possible, then someone will likely try it.

We do manage to have "relationships" with a variety of other species....Probably you can't refer to such things as love.
(there was an interview with a gentleman who had claimed to have sex with nearly anything imaginable; women, men, animals.. Asked what he liked best, he said, "Women...But the donkey was very nice...")

We know that there are triggering mechanisms for sexual arousal that involve appearance, odors, and so forth. These would not likely be triggered by say, an alien. However, we are rather adaptable....

The best story IMO is "...and I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill's Side" by James Tiptree Jr. (http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_06/scholz.html)

The cover of one of the Burroughs Mars novels has the hero and his Martian wife looking proudly at an egg in a pram.

Le Guin's "The Word for World Is Forest" uses aliens as proxies for colonial natives, and involves forced sexual relations.

[westprog]

Supra-genius immortal race of gods:
http://forums.randi.org/imagehosting/thum_231749453f539be21.jpg (http://forums.randi.org/vbimghost.php?do=displayimg&imgid=14580)



You atheists take your Dawkins worship a bit too far sometimes.

[ponderingturtle]

1. As I was saying in the other messages, a brain consumes a _lot_ of energy. A human brain for example is something like 2% of the body mass, but uses 20% of the oxygen and some 25% of the glucose.

Anaerobic metabolisms work well for bacteria, but not much else. I'd be hard pressed to imagine the kind of anaerobic metabolism that would support a _sentient_ species.

But that is in part a result of all this toxic oxigen in the atmosphere.

[Beerina]

You atheists take your Dawkins worship a bit too far sometimes.

Oh I was worshipping her long before she met Dawkins...