Something I've noticed

[Untouch]

Or maybe he's suggesting that dogs are actually from another planet!

This movie was god awful.

 

[Firest0rm]

i believe that it's because people essentially view humanoids as at least semi-sentient beings. Talking to a bear the size of a cat might seem overwhelmingly strange to many people, especially if the bear-cats are major characters while other humanoids are minor, or if the player is playing as a humanoid

 

[Tapp]

my theory on it is that humanoid characters are easier for game designers to make. Imagine playing Half-life 3 as a dog!

Someone made a mod for half-life 1 where you play as a cat. It wasn't great.
The main reason people stick to humanoid shapes is because:
a) they're easier
b) they're quickly identified as "the smart species"
c) very few other forms beyond the octopus have limbs for tools
Life could form in millions of different ways, and in a documentary I saw some of them very hard to identify. For example, a silicon life-form could live on a planet with harsh conditions, and would appear as a rock which grows over the course of 1000s of years. Or maybe the scale could be screwed up, and the aliens would be giant squids.

 

[Numerous]

I think it owes a lot to Star Trek. The reason they probably went with the every-species-is-a-humanoid approach, is for budget reasons, and I suspect it's become a tradition. It also makes acting and posing characters much easier because you can simply use motion capture.

That said, we're only intelligent because we're bipedal (or at least that's how one theory goes)
a) Become bipedal
b) Babies must be born smaller at a younger stage because of adaptions in the legs
c) Because babies are smaller we need to have intelligence to care for them
d) Intelligence grows
e) Success!

It could be said the same applied to other cultures.

The problem I have with the way alien life is portrayed, is that it's essentially implied they're mostly all cellular beings, like us. (real) Life comes in other forms, I believe, but on another planet, it couldn't be said that aliens would develop in the same way as humans (which conveniently contradicts my bipedal-intelligence argument, thus making this post worthless).

It depends on how similar the planet is to earth. Hypothetically, a very similar planet to earth would allow almost exactly the same types of species as on earth. Of course, that's completely oversimplified and I'm sure Drake will come back from the dead to strangle me in my sleep for not mentioning the butterfly effect (imagine if that meteor didnt wipe out dinosaurs, we don't know what would happen) but that's for theoretical biologists to think about.

Trust me, I know SCIENSE!

Also, I think it comes down to sublety. Give someone a blue-skinned humanoid, they think "hey thats an alien" with a bit of "basically human though" on the side. Give them a wookie and they think "hey, that's an alien bear!" with a bit of "so it's a smart bear. Hur-rah, not."

 

[Shmitz]

imagine if that meteor didnt wipe out dinosaurs, we don't know what would happen

(humm dee dumm)

 

[grazr]

There was a Star Trek (Voyager) episode where a species of dinosaur made space ships and escaped to the Delta Quadrent.

Even for Star Trek that was pretty far fetched.. I'm more of a NG fan but i'll ask my voyager fan counter part if he knows what episode i'm on about. If anyone's interested in that amusing plot. Lol.

 

[YM]

There was a Star Trek (Voyager) episode where a species of dinosaur made space ships and escaped to the Delta Quadrent.

Even for Star Trek that was pretty far fetched.. I'm more of a NG fan but i'll ask my voyager fan counter part if he knows what episode i'm on about. If anyone's interested in that amusing plot. Lol.

I watched it last month, they encounter a humanoid, reptilian race that was prosecuting a scientist that believed in the "distant origins" theory.

Both him and the voyager crew did their own research and both concluded that they all came from earth. The voyager crew realised that the alien race was descendant from parasaurolophus. (that awesome near-bipedal dino that was ~ 20ft stood upright, with the maaaaasive cranial crest)

Quite a far fetched one, would have been better explained if they'd been 'sampled' by ancient scientists and allowed to evolve instead of evolving and developing space faring technology on earth, however the timespans involved in prehistoric evolution were immense and the story is actually 100% possible, however unlikely, after all we've gone from "ug" to landing on the moon in just a million years, parasaurolophus was around for at least three times that long.

EDIT: just looked it up, the episode is called "Distant origin" heh, 23rd episode of season 3. This plot does not counter the earlier TNG plot that had all species in the galaxy originating from a single species that lived long ago though.

 

[lana]

(imagine if that meteor didnt wipe out dinosaurs, we don't know what would happen)

Nothing. They'd evolve down in scale. Massive creatures aren't good for energy consumption or collection unless everything else was on the same scale. Which it wasn't.

 

[YM]

Nothing. They'd evolve down in scale. Massive creatures aren't good for energy consumption or collection unless everything else was on the same scale. Which it wasn't.

You seem pretty sure of that, but I'm not.

Here's my evidence:

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrerasaurus[/ame] pretty big, nothing massive though. 228 million years ago
[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus[/ame] fookin massive, died out 65 million years ago.

That's some 163 million years to evolve, that's masses evolutionary and look what happened, they got bigger, not smaller.

However I've heard documentaries say that dinosaurs were already dying out before the mass extinction.

Size of creature also depends on the gravity of the planet, imagine if Earth had a much lower gravitational pull, a creature like a crab or lobster, a really big one, could leave the sea for ever and not be weighed down by it's heavy exoskeleton, giving rise to all sorts of heavily armoured land animals, whilst on our 1g planet that never happened and all the large exoskeletoned creatures remain in the sea.

Life is built up through random mutations and changing the specifics of the environment will potentially have massive effects on the mutations that enable the animal to pass on it's genes.

So yes, from readability and emotion portrayal humanoid is best. but from every other angle it's just unimaginative and lame, if any of you ever become game designers or work with film CGI please make your aliens non-humanoid and try to give all creatures from a specific planet a common grounding from an evolutionary stance (like all the animals on Pandora in Avatar have 6 limbs......except the Na'vi, what's with that?)

 

[Randdalf]

I like Voyager, it's really good. I think Virgin 1 are on season 3 at the moment, so that episode should come up soon.

If you're talking about extinction, read The Lost World by Michael Crichton. I know it's not exactly non-fiction, but what one of the main characters says is that extinction is a result of many small changes rather than one overarching one; specifically, changes in behaviour. A meteor would not have wiped out the dinosaurs, that's for certain, but if they were already faltering at that point it might very well have contributed.

 

[grazr]

YM, Earth is 10 G's. Or 9.81 to be precise. Not 1

Also, there was a documentary that simulated life on other planets that was great. It simulated "sky whales" and floating trees on low G planets, that one was amazing.

edit: Just found it, it's called "Blue Moon".

Seems to be stuff on youtube:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLRijkhDqRU"]YouTube- Creatures: "Extraterrestrial Blue Moon"[/ame]

Sorry it's an amv, National Geographic decided to block the original for the U.K.

Here's the link anyway, incase you want to watch it through a proxy. (Turbohide.com works for me).

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ylJJQVgqjc"]YouTube- Blue Moon (part 1 of 6)[/ame]

Also see "Alien Planet".

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSWKKE4Jc8M"]YouTube- Alien Planet å¼‚å½¢æ˜Ÿçƒ [1/10][/ame]

edit edit: Seems there's only the first part of Blue Moon available. Which is dissapointing. But it does cover why the Dinosaurs are so large and we are not.

 

[YM]

YM, Earth is 10 G's. Or 9.81 to be precise. Not 1 .

No. Earth is 1g. little g is 9.81ms^-1 which is the average acceleration due to gravity at sea level. The moon's gravity is 1.6
Big G is 6.67e-11 Nm^2kg^-2 other wise known as the gravitational constant.
Trust me, I'm going to empirically measure both little g and big G this semester

I think you're thinking of 10N of weight being comparable to 1kg of mass- take 1 kg, time it by the acceleration due to gravity 9.81 ms^-2 and you get a force (F=ma) which is 9.81N pulling it down, all the time. Most people would call the 1kg it's weight, but actually it's the 9.81N.

Of course on the moon, 1kg of mass equals to 1.62N of weight.

when someone asks you your weight reply in newtons

 

[Naso]

I think It's just simply to hard to animate them if they weren't humanoids. Al tho It would be really bad ass, I don't see any non humanoid aliens characters coming soon.

 

[TMP]

when someone asks you your weight reply in newtons

But the gravitational force is different based on your current location, the day, the season, everything! So you'd be lying!

(Technically, by an incredibly small margin.)

 

[Okrag]

In Mass Effect there is actually a debate over why most aliens are so similar. Some believe it was the Protheans making many species more like themselves while many believe that the humanoid form is just the natural result of evolution.

 

[Caliostro]

while many believe that the humanoid form is just the natural result of evolution.

This doesn't seem like much of a point in my view.

Maybe I'm overlooking something, but physically the human race is a disaster...

We're poorly balanced, to the point the human act of walking has been classified by physicists as a series of controlled falls, we're not particularly agile, strong or resistant when compared to other species, especially considering our mass, we possess no natural poisons, spikes, fangs, toxins, camouflage or any other notable defense mechanism seen in other animals, in fact we rely almost exclusively on our brains for our power. Physically we're almost bottom of the chain really.

If anything the cephalopods would seem like the most versatile form of life, off the top of my head, and, ergo, the natural end result of evolution.

 

[Okrag]

This doesn't seem like much of a point in my view.

Maybe I'm overlooking something, but physically the human race is a disaster...

We're poorly balanced, to the point the human act of walking has been classified by physicists as a series of controlled falls, we're not particularly agile, strong or resistant when compared to other species, especially considering our mass, we possess no natural poisons, spikes, fangs, toxins, camouflage or any other notable defense mechanism seen in other animals, in fact we rely almost exclusively on our brains for our power. Physically we're almost bottom of the chain really.

If anything the cephalopods would seem like the most versatile form of life, off the top of my head, and, ergo, the natural end result of evolution.

Well that is why there is a debate in the Mass Effect universe.

 

[YM]

But the gravitational force is different based on your current location, the day, the season, everything! So you'd be lying!

(Technically, by an incredibly small margin.)

Approximation isn't lying. When will people realise this??

 

[Shmitz]

Yeah, it's a bit silly particularly considering that the approximation you tell people (likely rounding to the nearest whole number) isn't going to change at all even if you knew the exact impact from all of those factors.

 

[Caliostro]

Well that is why there is a debate in the Mass Effect universe.

Here's a better one: lack of creativity from the art direction team.