# Alien Civilizations & the Arc of Technological Development

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alien-civilizations-the-arc-of-technological-development/57191>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [March 8, 2001, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alien-civilizations-the-arc-of-technological-development/57191 "2001-03-08T03:55:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![kabbes](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/e99b99/32.png) [@kabbes](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kabbes)\
**Post date:** [March 14, 2001, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alien-civilizations-the-arc-of-technological-development/57191/41 "2001-03-14T11:30:05Z")

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I hugely recommend _The Dark Side of the Sun_, one of Terry Pratchett’s first books and pure science fiction at its very finest. It’s a story about this very subject and includes all these ideas and more about what “alien” really means. The spectrum goes from a few fairly humanoid species that are really incredibly different in their outlook on life to creatures that would consider those species brothers to creatures that would be incapable of even considering those species “life”. It also takes into account sentient planets and oceans and even galaxies as well as different “levels” of sentience via different complexity of robot. The central theme - what is life and where could it have come from? Simply brilliant.

And on the literature front - was it _The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_ or _Red Dwarf_ that had eight-armed aliens that were unique in the galaxy for having invented the underarm deoderant before the wheel? Amusing but there is still a germaine point there I feel.

pan

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**Author:** ![Xploder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/a183cd/32.png) [@Xploder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xploder)\
**Post date:** [March 14, 2001, 12:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alien-civilizations-the-arc-of-technological-development/57191/42 "2001-03-14T12:42:26Z")

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In my last post here, I quoted Sojourn when I **should** have quoted Tracer saying this:

> [@](#):
>
> This would only be a problem if the creature’s biology were water-based. If they were ammonia-based, or (in a much colder environment) liquid-methane-based, alkaline and alkaline-earth metals would not have nearly as much water to react with.

The worst thing is that I even previewed it to make sure I didn’t mess up the coding!

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