# Better Aliens



## Shoku (Aug 12, 2009)

I've been trying to cultivate this idea for awhile and it gets to be a bit of a read so I'm going to just list the point of various sections of text so you can judge what parts you want to read.

*Background*
In a lot of scifi and paranormal type media there are aliens but as I've learned about biology they've become decreasingly believable. The most common type you see are human actors wearing makeup and if it gets really bad maybe the aliens are all just humans wearing some giant earrings around their heads. It's understandable because you know they're limited to human actors but lots of shows decide to include puppets and things to liven up the range of aliens available to them. This is where is starts to become disappointing.

The way nearly everyone handles the "more alien" aliens is so Earth-y. We'll make the half human half lizard! This one's got feathers. This one has a turtle shell. This one isn't human at all but part dog, part rabbit, and telepathic.
YAWN.

Even aliens people actually believe in are such obvious Earth-analogs (or if you're about to blow up at me about that then we'll just say people went and described them like Earth animals instead of how they actually are.)

So I thought to myself the obvious way to totally get around this human tendency would be to just fiction up a history of life for an alien world.

*Evolution*
This is one of those parts that I'll be sad to see people skip over but for those of you reading here goes.

Life isn't actually very creative in the creation sense. If you really look to find the steps you see that basically every part of living things is just some other system reused and maybe put to an unexpected but not-novel purpose.

Just changing the size and position of things can go a long way as it is








*to anybody objecting to anything in that picture: ya, I know. It's just for general idea purposes.

So my point here is that we've got teeth and fingernails and in a roundabout way feathers because way back when our ancestor had scales and we just figured out other uses for them. Likewise we've got faces because some kind of sea worm found it pretty handy to have all the sensory organs up front because it really just had move forward and turn as options. If our ancestor was something like a jellyfish instead we wouldn't have faces like these yet every alien that's not some acid-trip abstract blob has usually got an identifiable head with a face on it.

"But maybe having your organs all facing forward is always useful" I can practically hear people saying. Well no, with things like jellyfish we can see there are obviously other forms that work. The reason worms are the ancestor of almost every type of animal is that there was a mass extinction and then they just happened to start filling in the empty spaces left first. 

There's this basic rule in evolution: if nobody else is doing something and you can do it but very poorly you get almost as big an advantage as if you did it very well. A better way to say it is that having no competition is very good for survival but between the two phrases I'm sure it's clear enough to understand.

In much the same way as the worm mammals were just some average little nobodies for millions of years while dinosaurs had their day but then that extinction event came along and for awhile lots of weirdos tried to fill in the now vacant spots in the ecosystem and after awhile mammals got most of them and birds got or made a few others. Flowering plants kind of set up a new thing too but I'm not really going to focus on plants unless somebody wants to.

But you can tell that if you just changed that meteor (or climate shift, whichever,) we could very well have a bunch of reptilian things basically dominating the Earth still. Mammals got lucky and although there's certainly been a lot of specialty adaptation since then the organism that takes over after catastrophe is very nearly random. Seeing as we've had a few of those in Earth's history we would have a very different set of life even if you only changed which organism capitolized on that first one.

*So the actual project*
As much as I'd like to think this all up on my own a whole planet worth of species is kind of a lot and knowing as much as I do about Biology it would be hard to keep myself from just plagarizing the work Earth life did for various situations.

Enlisting some non-Biologist people practically guarantees that there will be unique ideas for early life since most people don't really know anything about it and like I explained above if you change the beginning the whole situation goes in a different direction.

My idea for a starting point is to skip microbes since there's really no way to give them a lasting impact on the form of a creature while avoiding chemistry (which I get the idea artists typically aren't into.)

For simplicity and proof of concept I'm thinking we should just do a planet like Earth, at least for the first time. This means a decent amount of bacteria and that sort of thing in the oceans and we'll say there's oxygen too by the multicellular starting point.

Feel free to ask me what the hell I'm talking about but if you already get it what I'd like to start off with would be a plan for a simple creature without many organs besides skin, muscle (or something like that,) and the obvious stuff for eating. This is going to be the first big thing so it won't have any predators to avoid and will have to get by eating bacteria somehow.

If you'd like to do sketches that would be great but if you've got good verbal descriptions those could work too. Later we'll modify existing things and call them generations (in semi-reality 50 or 200 generations is about how much change this will really represent.)

*And one other thing:
*No you can't do this kind of thing in Spore. They stick hoof, talon, jointed appendage and so on in front of you from the start and then you'll just have the problem I'm trying to get around. It should be fairly little steps that grow into things nobody saw coming but in Spore you'd basically that this or that mouth piece was headed into some other mouth piece because you'd have to always be careful not to make things you didn't have parts for and all of the complex bits are lifted right from Earth anyway.

If it's done with pencil and type first you could go in later and maybe make Spore versions of all of these but it's not a good place to start.


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