If we ever meet aliens from another planet will we be surprised by what we see?

[Dinwar]

Originally Posted by quarky

We've barely begun to manipulate our own species,

An interesting point.

Let's say humans begin augmenting ourselves. Neural implants, nanobots in our bloodstream, etc.--a technogeek's wet dream. We'd be a fundamentally different species at that point. In fact, we'd have added a new type of genetic code to ourselves: the code of the nanobots. This type of thing hasn't happened for a long, long time, even by geological standards.

What if there were an alien species who had never heard of concepts like "Our body is a temple" or "made in the image of God", and had no qualms about manipulating itself? The species may not have a "standard form"--with enough augmentation, they could easily create modular bodies, so that what they looked like depended on what the best option for the job was. Add in some bio-manipulation, and things could get very strange, very quickly, and move FAR beyond mere Darwinian evolutionary scenarios.

[GlennB]

Originally Posted by quarky

We've barely begun to manipulate our own species, which could add to the strange potential. My favorite futuristic human is the Siamese octuplet, with the single central brain, and 32 appendages, in a radial symmetry configuration.
It would work the niche of shallow tropical beaches, eating shellfish and rolling along, partially submerged. If alien intelligent beings had a 1000 year head start on this, with less ethical squeemishness, well, the possibilities are extraordinary.

I picture hot chicks in ??kinis by golden sands. Except, I don't much like the sound of an undefined number of legs on a chick.

edit: I just can't picture the gusset arrangement in the ??kini bottoms, even at the most basic theoretical level. Count me out of this vision.

[Dinwar]

Originally Posted by GlennB

I picture hot chicks in ??kinis by golden sands. Except, I don't much like the sound of an undefined number of legs on a chick.

Engineers of Ringworld presents some.....less than titilating....concepts of mating in extraterrestrial species. You may not want to be so quick to jump into bed with, say, a Puppeteer.

[GlennB]

Originally Posted by Dinwar

Engineers of Ringworld presents some.....less than titilating....concepts of mating in extraterrestrial species. You may not want to be so quick to jump into bed with, say, a Puppeteer.

Glad you didn't post a link. Anything close to the morphing aliens in "Galaxy Quest" ? Just askin', not lookin'

[Marduk]

Lister: Your explanation for anything slightly peculiar is aliens, isn't it? You lose your keys, it's aliens. A picture falls off the wall, it's aliens. That time we used up a whole bog roll in a day, you thought that was aliens as well.
Rimmer: Well we didn't use it all, Lister. Who did?
Lister: Rimmer, ALIENS used our bog roll?
Rimmer: Just cause they're aliens doesn't mean to say they don't have to visit the little boys' room. Only they probably do something weird and alien-esque, like it comes out of the top of their heads or something.
Lister: Well I wouldn't like to be stuck behind one in a cinema.

[Dinwar]

Originally Posted by GlennB

Anything close to the morphing aliens in "Galaxy Quest" ? Just askin', not lookin'

More like parasitic wasps. The "female" Puppeteers were actually another species. The Puppeteers injected their sex cells into the "females", and the offspring basically consumed the creature from the inside out.

[GlennB]

Originally Posted by Dinwar

More like parasitic wasps. The "female" Puppeteers were actually another species. The Puppeteers injected their sex cells into the "females", and the offspring basically consumed the creature from the inside out.

A bit like Ichneumon wasps then? If there's a critter I really struggle to admire it would be those. Tapeworms too. Not their fault, mind

[Soapy Sam]

Originally Posted by Dinwar

Not necessarily. A collonial organism with a hard, mineralized skeleton could concievably withstand the dangers of space--radiation, for example, wouldn't be as much of a concern.

And boredom is only a human problem. I'd say it's likely only a MODERN human problem. People sailing on wooden ships weren't concerned about boredom, despite being on those ships for months at a time. But even if we assume that they take many years to reach us, there's no proof that they'll be bored. When was the last time you saw a bord lobster? Or a bored sheep? I get that those aren't the smartest critters in the world, but my point is that boredom isn't a universal trait on our planet, so we cannot assume that it will be present on another planet.

I think we are considering different timescales.
Either the hypothetical alien has FTL, or not.
If not, we are looking at millennia, not years, of travel.
Phssthpok the Pak was able to spend 30,000 years in a crash chair and still be sane (and apparently not even stiff) afterwards, but I can't see natural selection actually producing anything able to do that.
I can see natural selection producing something capable of producing something that could. Robots are what any sane creature will use for interstellar exploration. If we meet any organic critters in starships, they will probably be crazy. But how would we know?

[quarky]

Ichneumon wasps are seriously cool creatures. Actually, so are tapeworms, but the itchy waspy beasties are way beneficial to us, and our insidious goals.

If you like creepy, focus on the arachnids, as per humans and our weakness.
Ticks are seriously hard to kill, without killing everything else.

Flash forward a few 1000 years.

The mega-meta-tick-like 8 legged parasite.

Becoming parasitic, however bogus that definition is,

That's where its at, as per likely futuristic organisms.

Said 'smart ticks' biggest challenge will be to breed an effectively benign host.

A lot like us and cows. Except 8 legs, and a tiny brain. Big brains just confuse stuff.
Whales are the biggest brained creatures we've ever encountered, and they're pretty much done for.
We used to like their greasy oil for our crappy lanterns, and that was nearly their undoing, despite their awesomely huger brains and longer history.

Small brained humans parasitize large brained cetaceans; easy enough; no brainer, so to speak.
Extrapolating on this might be an indicator of how meaningless the big brain is.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by dasmiller

I'm not sure what you mean by "later," but bear in mind that contemporary crows, chickens, cows, grasshoppers, amoebae, etc, have exactly the same amount of evolutionary time behind them.....

I wasn't counting time as a straight line, but rather when the animal branched of the last common ancestor tree. So how many less intelligent animals branched off from a more intelligent ancestor?

[Marduk]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

I wasn't counting time as a straight line, but rather when the animal branched of the last common ancestor tree. So how many less intelligent animals branched off from a more intelligent ancestor?

Democrats

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Dinwar

This is an example of historic contingency. The reason we have four limbs is because the lobe-finned fish we evolved from had four limbs. If it'd had six, or eight, or three, we'd have six, or eight, or three. And it was entirely possible for us to do so--all it would have taken was a different fish coming onto land.

I get that part, but if you go back to when fish first evolved, were 4 pre-limbs superior in the post Cambrian competition or was that just random? And we have many 6 and 8 legged insects.

My point is selection may or may not have played a role early on, but it would seem from some observations it wasn't just random chance which modes of locomotion or vision or sonar/radar, etc., consistently prevailed.

Originally Posted by Dinwar

I've seen a number of studies refuting this. First and foremonst, dinosaurs didn't go extinct--they're still with us. Secondly, in my opinion the apparent demise of dinosaurs prior to the K/Pg impact event is due to the Signore-Lipps Effect. Studies where extremely detailed sampling have been done up to the K/Pg boundary have shown dinosaurs to be alive and well up to that boundary. Diversity and ecology are always a pain to assess, though.

Yeah, I've seen the paleontologist on the telly all the time with his pet theory it was infectious disease that wiped out the dinosaurs. He's wrong, he doesn't understand epidemiology.

However, whether many of the dinosaur species were already gone before the K [I thought it was a T] event or not, it still seems like the largest animals have been replaced by smaller ones. I can't help wondering if the claim that without the asteroid impact mammals would not have had their day is the only hypothesis. It's just a thought, nothing I have a conviction about. I do however, think some things are more evolutionary certainties and some are pure chance. To think they are all chance suggests natural selection is all random. But it isn't, it's random with selection pressures. I see evidence that certain efficiencies are inevitable. Flight for example evolved more than once. Light results in vision. Cave critters seem to lose eyes when light is lost. There must be a number of limbs that are ideal as well as just randomly coincidental because the fish had 4 pre-limbs. Surely more legs than needed would evolve away. There has to be some selection there.

Originally Posted by Dinwar

I wonder....Plants DO move, both to follow the sun and in response to other stimuli. And venus fly traps are proof that "plant" doesn't equal "autotroph", necessarily. It would be interesting to see what happens to a venus fly trap over a few million years. It's not unreasonable to speculate that they'd develop locomotion, even crude hunting behaviors. If a planet had something like insects (even frogs, which scares the CRAP out of me--PLANTS are eating CHORDATES on our planet, right now!), and something like venus fly traps, I could see those fly traps evolving into primative insectovores not unlike our own shrews and voles (only a completely different bauplan and physiology).

Plants move by sending out roots. But none of them pull up roots and purposefully move do they? An uprooted plant might passively move and reroot itself.

Originally Posted by Dinwar

Mammals started out more or less eating bugs in the Triassic. Look how far we've come. Imagine what an insectivorous and mobile plant could do!

But with all the incredible diversity on this planet why has one not already evolved?

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Marduk

Democrats

Sorry, humans are all still on the same branch. But if they weren't, I'm pretty sure it's the Repubics with their war on science ......

[Saule]

No, I would just say 'Hi'.

[rjh01]

Originally Posted by Correa Neto

I don't think being humanoid and egg-layig are incompatible.

Egg-laying would remove a factor that limits the size of our brains: female's hip bones. Egg-laying could account for a small gray-type (real) alien, with a huge head and small narrow body.

If dinosaurs or birds (or birdosaurs, if you preffer) evolved to a sentient species, quite possiblly it would be an egg-laying species. Heck, why restrict it to reptiles and birds? Maybe in some alternate Earth, the sentient platypus rule...

Glad you said this. 100% agree with it.

[dasmiller]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

I wasn't counting time as a straight line, but rather when the animal branched of the last common ancestor tree. So how many less intelligent animals branched off from a more intelligent ancestor?

Ah, so assuming that crows are more intelligent than chickens (and based on my interactions with both, I'd agree that it's a good assumption) and assuming that we're concerned with natural selection rather than whether domestication of chickens has made them dumber (I have no evidence, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit), the question would be "was the last common ancestor of crows and wild chickens more intelligent than modern wild chickens?"

So after all that: I really don't know.

I suspect that, per Dinwar's earlier post, there's a lot of random walk going on as far as brain size/encephalization/intelligence. Individual lines (e.g. homo) may see relatively quick changes in either direction, but over the long term (10s of millions of years) for most lines, I doubt that there's much of a trend.

As the biosystem gets more diverse over time (and I think that is a trend), then the total range of intelligence, size, temperature tolerance, whatever, should generally increase. That suggests that the smartest (or largest, or whatever) species in the biosphere at time T is likely to be less smart (or large, or whatever) than the smartest (or- you get the picture) species at time T+X. But that doesn't mean that typical individual lines would be getting more intelligent over time.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by dasmiller

Ah, so assuming that crows are more intelligent than chickens (and based on my interactions with both, I'd agree that it's a good assumption) and assuming that we're concerned with natural selection rather than whether domestication of chickens has made them dumber (I have no evidence, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit), the question would be "was the last common ancestor of crows and wild chickens more intelligent than modern wild chickens?"

So after all that: I really don't know.

I suspect that, per Dinwar's earlier post, there's a lot of random walk going on as far as brain size/encephalization/intelligence. Individual lines (e.g. homo) may see relatively quick changes in either direction, but over the long term (10s of millions of years) for most lines, I doubt that there's much of a trend.

As the biosystem gets more diverse over time (and I think that is a trend), then the total range of intelligence, size, temperature tolerance, whatever, should generally increase. That suggests that the smartest (or largest, or whatever) species in the biosphere at time T is likely to be less smart (or large, or whatever) than the smartest (or- you get the picture) species at time T+X. But that doesn't mean that typical individual lines would be getting more intelligent over time.

Ooops, guess chickens were a bad example. I just meant to illustrate a principle, not to argue crows are further down the bird branch than chickens.

I'm going to look into it when I have a little extra time.

[Dinwar]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

I get that part, but if you go back to when fish first evolved, were 4 pre-limbs superior in the post Cambrian competition or was that just random?

Well, you've got me there--from the Lower Cambrian to today four limbs is strongly DISfavored. Particularly for the largest organisms. Whales lost their hind limbs, for example.

Gigantism on land evolved around a four-limb-and-a-head-attached-to-torso body plan, so it's actually really hard to speculate whether four limbs are advantageous or not.

Quote:

Yeah, I've seen the paleontologist on the telly all the time with his pet theory it was infectious disease that wiped out the dinosaurs. He's wrong, he doesn't understand epidemiology.

I'm not talking about Dr. Bakker (I agree with you on his theory--and in fact the European invasion of the Americas shatters it, because while the Americans didn't do so hot the Europeans are still going strong); I'm talking about Dr. Ward, among others.

Quote:

However, whether many of the dinosaur species were already gone before the K [I thought it was a T] event

It's.....contentious. The reason it was called the K/T boundary is because it was the boundary between the Cretaceous Period and Tertiary Era (K=Cretaceous because C=Cambrian). Problem is, the nomenclature that included the Tertiary fell out of favor. Most paleontologists and stratigraphers now refer to the period immediately after the Cretaceous as the Paleogene if they have to talk about it at that level. They prefer to talk about the Paleocene (Paleogene=Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, and Miocene together). So the stratigraphically correct name for the event is the K/Pg event, or the Dannian/Maastrictian event, or the End-Cretaceous event.

I've actually put a lot of time into studying that particular event, so I tend to use the K/Pg nomenclature.

As an aside, I'm no looking predominantly at Quaternary sediments--meaning Pleistocene and Holocene. I don't know why everyone accepts Quaternary; I think it's simply because so many papers use the term that to change it would make half of mammalian paleontology unreadable.

As for size, the effect of the K/Pg event on body size is really an open question. There's a concept called the Lilliputian Effect, which is basically the idea that after a major ecological perturbation small critters are favored. Not sure how much I believe it, but there does seem to be some evidence that size is a downfall when your world gets smacked upside the head with an asteroid. I'd speculate that size is more a matter of the length of time during which the ecosystem has been stable--the longer the ecosystem goes without any major upsets, the bigger the biggest animals in that ecosystem will be. But that's merely speculation based on an extremely broad understanding of the trends; the devil is in the details, and I'd be extremely curious to see if anyone's done a study on this.

Quote:

I do however, think some things are more evolutionary certainties and some are pure chance. To think they are all chance suggests natural selection is all random.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that natural selection was random. However, I do believe that chance plays a much greater roll in evolution than people think. I should emphasize that by "chance" I merely mean "things not governed by natural selection or heritable traits, but which influence evolution". An asteroid impact is a pretty deterministic event; however, as far as the biosphere is concerned it can be treated as chance, since there's no way to predict its occurrence from information within the biosphere.

Quote:

There must be a number of limbs that are ideal as well as just randomly coincidental because the fish had 4 pre-limbs. Surely more legs than needed would evolve away. There has to be some selection there.

The concept you're getting at is fitness space. When you look at all of the possible selection pressures on an organism, and how adapted that organism is to those pressures, you can create an n-dimensional "space" with one dimension being "fitness". Where you get highs along the "fitness" axis is where the organism is more fit; where you get lows is where the organism is less fit. The issue is that organisms can be stranded on local highs that are pretty low when compared to global highs. In order to move from a local fitness high, the organism must become less fit--something natural selection will tend to not allow. Without extreme ecological perturbation organisms tend to rapidly find local fitness highs, and then stay there.

For the question of limbs, this is particularly important. Limbs are controlled by VERY conservative regulatory genes in chordates, and altering the number of limbs is a pretty major process. Losing them isn't AS big a deal--a few lines have done so--but at least for lobe-finned fish and their offspring, including terrestrial vertebrates, GAINING limbs is extremely problematic. Try to imagine all of the steps necessary to grow a new limb and you'll see why. The easiest way is an error in the genes controlling our segmentation (we are segmented animals), but the overwhelming majority of such mutations would flat-out kill us. The rest may or may not be beneficial--depends on if the limb is attached to something important, like your liver, or if the limb is attached to anything at all (the support structures for vertebrate limbs are pretty remarkable).

I find it extremely unlikely that any new limbs would grow on terrestrial vertebrates, even if there was some advantage. We have a hard enough time growing new fingers, as can be seen with panda thumbs.

Quote:

Plants move by sending out roots. But none of them pull up roots and purposefully move do they? An uprooted plant might passively move and reroot itself.

Some vines might be able to; I honestly don't know. That was nothing but mere speculation on my part, and if you don't think the idea is as cool as I do you can dismiss it without further consideration.

Quote:

But with all the incredible diversity on this planet why has one not already evolved?

Competition. Many carnivorous plants are flowering plants, and flowering plants didn't evolve until the Cretaceous. At that time, our ancestors were doing a pretty good job as insectovores. Most organisms won't compete over long periods of time--they'll partition resources, or move away. In the case of carnivorous plants, we partitioned the resources: mammals evolved as active predators, and plants evolved as sedentary opportunists.

However, the reason I find these plants interesting is that animals in marine environments include a huge number of sedentary opportunists (filter feeders and the like). It's rather an open question how the sedentary/active thing played out, but there ARE animals that went from sedentary to mobile. This suggests that, given the correct pressures and enough time, plants could do the same thing.

Quote:

So how many less intelligent animals branched off from a more intelligent ancestor?

Impossible to say. We're not terribly good at measuring intelligence in living organisms; trying to do so in the fossil record is, at our current level of knowledge, impossible. There are those who think that domestication breeds stupider organisms, so there's at least some evidence for recent losses in intelligence, and to my knowledge nothing humans have done has been entirely unique (with the exception of genetic engineering), so it's entirely plausible that similar things happened in the past, prior to humans evolving.

[Correa Neto]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

I didn't mean my question that way. I meant, wow, that's weird to think about.

Well, I like to think about weird things... Heck, I even once built a whole history about fictional egg-laying aliens, how they expanded their civilization, how they behaved. Kinda utopic it was, gotta admit. Had too much free time back then.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Couldn't just having a shorter gestation, being born earlier or just having brains grow more in infancy also result in bigger brains?

Marsupials, another solution for aliens with big-heads.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Now that you mention it, however, I'm guessing the maternal heart and lungs provides certain things a yolk cannot. Maybe a large brain really needs more oxygen while growing?

No idea. I guess that even if true, if the environment has more oxigen...

Well, I always had a gut feeling about metabolism being the key. Reptiles and amphibians would not be able to generate enough energy to mantain a large and energy-hungry brain. Birds and egg-laying mammals? Don't know. But its just a gut feeling, and my gut feelings are exact only when it comes down to the products of my guts.

Whatever is the reason, placentary mammals seem to win the race against reptiles, amphibians, birds (in the ground), egg-laying mammals and marsupials. As soon as they enter a new territory, they conquer it. Maybe this egde is metabolism, maybe its some inherent advantage when it comes down to raising their ofsspring, maybe its nothing of the above, maybe its just sheer chance. But it seems to be real, and maybe it defines who can develop big brains.

[Marduk]

Originally Posted by quarky

Whales are the biggest brained creatures we've ever encountered, and they're pretty much done for.
.

probably not, numbers are on the increase, they have hardly any predators and they've been here for 45,000,000 years already

[Dinwar]

Originally Posted by quarky

Whales are the biggest brained creatures we've ever encountered, and they're pretty much done for.

All it shows is that brain size does not correlate with technological prowess. You can be a race where Einstein was considered a moron, but if you're being carpet-bombed from orbit and your best weapon involves chipping cryptocrystalin materials, you're not going to get too far.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Dinwar

Well, you've got me there--from the Lower Cambrian to today four limbs is strongly DISfavored. Particularly for the largest organisms. Whales lost their hind limbs, for example.

Gigantism on land evolved around a four-limb-and-a-head-attached-to-torso body plan, so it's actually really hard to speculate whether four limbs are advantageous or not.

I'm not talking about Dr. Bakker (I agree with you on his theory--and in fact the European invasion of the Americas shatters it, because while the Americans didn't do so hot the Europeans are still going strong); I'm talking about Dr. Ward, among others.

It's.....contentious. The reason it was called the K/T boundary is because it was the boundary between the Cretaceous Period and Tertiary Era (K=Cretaceous because C=Cambrian). Problem is, the nomenclature that included the Tertiary fell out of favor. Most paleontologists and stratigraphers now refer to the period immediately after the Cretaceous as the Paleogene if they have to talk about it at that level. They prefer to talk about the Paleocene (Paleogene=Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, and Miocene together). So the stratigraphically correct name for the event is the K/Pg event, or the Dannian/Maastrictian event, or the End-Cretaceous event.

I've actually put a lot of time into studying that particular event, so I tend to use the K/Pg nomenclature.

As an aside, I'm no looking predominantly at Quaternary sediments--meaning Pleistocene and Holocene. I don't know why everyone accepts Quaternary; I think it's simply because so many papers use the term that to change it would make half of mammalian paleontology unreadable.

As for size, the effect of the K/Pg event on body size is really an open question. There's a concept called the Lilliputian Effect, which is basically the idea that after a major ecological perturbation small critters are favored. Not sure how much I believe it, but there does seem to be some evidence that size is a downfall when your world gets smacked upside the head with an asteroid. I'd speculate that size is more a matter of the length of time during which the ecosystem has been stable--the longer the ecosystem goes without any major upsets, the bigger the biggest animals in that ecosystem will be. But that's merely speculation based on an extremely broad understanding of the trends; the devil is in the details, and I'd be extremely curious to see if anyone's done a study on this.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that natural selection was random. However, I do believe that chance plays a much greater roll in evolution than people think. I should emphasize that by "chance" I merely mean "things not governed by natural selection or heritable traits, but which influence evolution". An asteroid impact is a pretty deterministic event; however, as far as the biosphere is concerned it can be treated as chance, since there's no way to predict its occurrence from information within the biosphere.

The concept you're getting at is fitness space. When you look at all of the possible selection pressures on an organism, and how adapted that organism is to those pressures, you can create an n-dimensional "space" with one dimension being "fitness". Where you get highs along the "fitness" axis is where the organism is more fit; where you get lows is where the organism is less fit. The issue is that organisms can be stranded on local highs that are pretty low when compared to global highs. In order to move from a local fitness high, the organism must become less fit--something natural selection will tend to not allow. Without extreme ecological perturbation organisms tend to rapidly find local fitness highs, and then stay there.

For the question of limbs, this is particularly important. Limbs are controlled by VERY conservative regulatory genes in chordates, and altering the number of limbs is a pretty major process. Losing them isn't AS big a deal--a few lines have done so--but at least for lobe-finned fish and their offspring, including terrestrial vertebrates, GAINING limbs is extremely problematic. Try to imagine all of the steps necessary to grow a new limb and you'll see why. The easiest way is an error in the genes controlling our segmentation (we are segmented animals), but the overwhelming majority of such mutations would flat-out kill us. The rest may or may not be beneficial--depends on if the limb is attached to something important, like your liver, or if the limb is attached to anything at all (the support structures for vertebrate limbs are pretty remarkable).

I find it extremely unlikely that any new limbs would grow on terrestrial vertebrates, even if there was some advantage. We have a hard enough time growing new fingers, as can be seen with panda thumbs.

Some vines might be able to; I honestly don't know. That was nothing but mere speculation on my part, and if you don't think the idea is as cool as I do you can dismiss it without further consideration.

Competition. Many carnivorous plants are flowering plants, and flowering plants didn't evolve until the Cretaceous. At that time, our ancestors were doing a pretty good job as insectovores. Most organisms won't compete over long periods of time--they'll partition resources, or move away. In the case of carnivorous plants, we partitioned the resources: mammals evolved as active predators, and plants evolved as sedentary opportunists.

However, the reason I find these plants interesting is that animals in marine environments include a huge number of sedentary opportunists (filter feeders and the like). It's rather an open question how the sedentary/active thing played out, but there ARE animals that went from sedentary to mobile. This suggests that, given the correct pressures and enough time, plants could do the same thing.

Impossible to say. We're not terribly good at measuring intelligence in living organisms; trying to do so in the fossil record is, at our current level of knowledge, impossible. There are those who think that domestication breeds stupider organisms, so there's at least some evidence for recent losses in intelligence, and to my knowledge nothing humans have done has been entirely unique (with the exception of genetic engineering), so it's entirely plausible that similar things happened in the past, prior to humans evolving.

Thanks for all that. I'm working on a novel that takes place on another planet and I want the flora and fauna to be technically correct. So what life will likely be like in any Earth-like environment vs what is random is where I'm starting when developing the planet scenario.

I'm also a-little-about-a-lot science hobbyist. I love fossil hunting among other things and find anything about paleontology geared for the layperson fascinating. Same with astronomy and meteorites. Along with my hadrosaur bones I have a few meteorites and dozens of other fossils. I've been to Meteor Crater but kick myself for being close to Chicxulub but I didn't know about it at the time or I would have gone to see the remnants of it.

Have you ever seen the computer model of locomotion evolution by Daniel Dennet? It's quite interesting. Is Evolution an Algorithmic Process? The introduction is a tad long put the program is worth it.

[yomero]

If we ever meet aliens from another planet will we be surprised by what we see?

I am surprised by what we can see in this planet. Apparently, so is P.Z. Myers. On today's Pharyngula he has this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E-8_...layer_embedded. PZ speculates, ''If I had to to guess, it looks like a deep sea jellyfish to me.'' One of the commentators links to this photograph of Deepstaria enigmaticahttp://roadlonglifeshort.blogspot.mx...ts-friday.html, which may prove PZ's guess correct.

If we ever come in contact with extraterrestial beings, I would be very surprised if they were not even more weird than this creature.

[Skeptic Ginger]

That's really cool, yomero.

[Craig B]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

There are 2 kinds of eyes. Perhaps a third kind could have evolved and the 2 that did are coincidental but it could also be that the purpose both eyes serve their owners limits the successful options. One thing that is certain is creatures need some means of detecting their environment.

A lot more than two, as far as i understand. Richard Dawkins states that eyes have evolved independently 40 to 60 times, and employ very many different principles and mechanisms to achieve their effect. See his Climbing Mount Improbable, and http://www.scribd.com/doc/17464104/W...-Those-Peepers .

[Halfcentaur]

Originally Posted by yomero

If we ever meet aliens from another planet will we be surprised by what we see?

I am surprised by what we can see in this planet. Apparently, so is P.Z. Myers. On today's Pharyngula he has this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E-8_...layer_embedded. PZ speculates, ''If I had to to guess, it looks like a deep sea jellyfish to me.'' One of the commentators links to this photograph of Deepstaria enigmaticahttp://roadlonglifeshort.blogspot.mx...ts-friday.html, which may prove PZ's guess correct.

If we ever come in contact with extraterrestial beings, I would be very surprised if they were not even more weird than this creature.

That is one of the strangest things I've ever seen.

[rjh01]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Thanks for all that. I'm working on a novel that takes place on another planet and I want the flora and fauna to be technically correct. So what life will likely be like in any Earth-like environment vs what is random is where I'm starting when developing the planet scenario.

Just done a Google search for characteristics of mammals, reptiles and birds. Any alien animal could have almost any combination of any of these characteristics. Though I doubt they would have many of the bird's characteristics.

Here are a few links
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/repti...-reptiles.html
http://animals.about.com/od/birds/a/...cteristics.htm
http://animals.about.com/od/birds/a/...cteristics.htm
http://animals.about.com/od/animal-f...mal-groups.htm

As far as warm blooded reptiles see
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Are_there_...ooded_reptiles
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Are_reptiles_warm_blooded

Also there are several types of eyes. An alien might see in a different way to how we see. They might have an eye like a fly which would make it interesting how they would read.

[Farsight]

Whatever some intelligent alien from another planet looks like, I suspect it will be a predator.

[BravesFan]

I once floated the concept in a fiction writing class in college that alien visitors had already arrived but unfortunately were made invisible and unable to interact with us due to our high Oxygen and Nitrogen atmosphere!!! Can you imagine how frustrating that would be ? lol

[Halfcentaur]

Originally Posted by yomero

If we ever meet aliens from another planet will we be surprised by what we see?

I am surprised by what we can see in this planet. Apparently, so is P.Z. Myers. On today's Pharyngula he has this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E-8_...layer_embedded. PZ speculates, ''If I had to to guess, it looks like a deep sea jellyfish to me.'' One of the commentators links to this photograph of Deepstaria enigmaticahttp://roadlonglifeshort.blogspot.mx...ts-friday.html, which may prove PZ's guess correct.

If we ever come in contact with extraterrestial beings, I would be very surprised if they were not even more weird than this creature.

This reminds me of the first time they encountered Odo on DS9.

[Akhenaten]

Originally Posted by rjh01

Just done a Google search for characteristics of mammals, reptiles and birds. Any alien animal could have almost any combination of any of these characteristics.

Or none of them.

How did you eliminate the likelihood of mollusc or insect characteristics?

No love for bacteria?

Originally Posted by rjh01

Though I doubt they would have many of the bird's characteristics.

Why?

Originally Posted by rjh01

Also there are several types of eyes. An alien might see in a different way to how we see. They might have an eye like a fly which would make it interesting how they would read.

In what way? What's so interesting about the way flies read?

[BravesFan]

The screwiest thing will be that they will most likely have characteristics unlike anything we have seen before. As if a jellyfish and a cockroach had a baby, or lobster meets giraffe...

(not literally, just in the best way we could try and describe them).

They would prolly think of us "hmmm, ugly monkey things..."

[Correa Neto]

Food for thought
http://www.universetoday.com/95071/a...ll/#more-95071

Originally Posted by from the linkie thingie above

The DNA structures that evolved here on Earth — the only place in the Universe we know for certain that life can thrive — have proven to be highly successful (obviously). So what’s to say that life elsewhere wouldn’t be based on the same basic building blocks? And if it is, is it really a “new” life form?

[rjh01]

Originally Posted by Akhenaten

Or none of them.

How did you eliminate the likelihood of mollusc or insect characteristics?

No love for bacteria?





Why?





In what way? What's so interesting about the way flies read?

Do you have any opinions of your own on the subject Akhenaten? If so I welcome some thought provoking posts from you on the subject in this thread (plus other thought provoking posts in other threads). Or are you just going to post jokes, such as this post, which I should ignore?

[Akhenaten]

Originally Posted by rjh01

Do you have any opinions of your own on the subject Akhenaten? If so I welcome some thought provoking posts from you on the subject in this thread (plus other thought provoking posts in other threads). Or are you just going to post jokes, such as this post, which I should ignore?

How did you eliminate the likelihood of mollusc or insect characteristics?

[Halfcentaur]

What if they are gas or vapor or some kind of system of interacting photons in a magnetic field? Are these states too simple or basic a framework to give rise to a complex system capable of replication and emergent awareness?

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Craig B

A lot more than two, as far as i understand. Richard Dawkins states that eyes have evolved independently 40 to 60 times, and employ very many different principles and mechanisms to achieve their effect. See his Climbing Mount Improbable, and http://www.scribd.com/doc/17464104/W...-Those-Peepers .

Thanks for the link. It's good evidence of what I'm talking about. Eyes will likely always emerge in a world where light impacts the organism. And, either there were a couple versions that beat out the rest, OR, there are only a limited number of ways you can make an eye, OR both.

Quote:

Among these 40-plus independent evolutions, at least nine distinct design principles have been discovered, including pinhole eyes, two kinds of camera-lens eyes, curved-reflector("satellite dish")eyes, and several kinds of compound eyes. Nilsson and Pelger have concentrated on camera eyes with lenses, such as are well developed in vertebrates and octopuses.

I think that answers the question. 40 times, with 9 designs, and a couple that were possibly superior.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Halfcentaur

That is one of the strangest things I've ever seen.

The Blob comes to mind.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Farsight

Whatever some intelligent alien from another planet looks like, I suspect it will be a predator.

Intelligence and predation may be common, but socialization also requires intelligence.

[rjh01]

Originally Posted by Akhenaten

How did you eliminate the likelihood of mollusc or insect characteristics?

I never said these were impossible. How about you make that your contribution? Which ones do you think are reasonable?