Wanted:
Experienced taxonomist with knowledge of neurophisiology, computing processes, and combinatorial geometry. PhD preferred but suitable research experience will suffice. Prior experience with non-terrestrial life necessary.
BTW-I’m Not Qualified In Any Of The Relevant Fields Either
Get small enough and surface tension and air resistance become bigger factors than gravity.
James Blish explores microscopic inteligent beings coping with surface tension in Surface Tension
I think that the size of an inteligent species is related to it’s environment and reproductive strategies.
Be big enough and your species will survive just fine without inteligence (Think aligators). Produce enough offspring at a time (I can't remember if this is R type or K type reproduction) and enough will survive, reach maturity and continue the species. Thus, I think an inteligent species would not be the largest in its environment, nor would it produce hundreds of eggs, spores, or what have you.
In addition, armored plates, spikes, poison sacs etc make inteligence unnecessary. With a good defense mechanism, an organism doesn't need a defense strategy. With natural claws, venom etc there's no need to develop knives or spears.Doc: So you’re saying that the specieses who have developed intelligence have found it was either that or get pounded to a pulp, evolutionarily speaking?
Sentient races are dorks!
[sub]Come to think of it, that explains my High School experience pretty well…[/sub]
well of course, it would have a fin on its back. Fins always get rid of excess heat.
good for attracting mile-wide mates, as well.
I would asume that they would be shorter because they probably don’t eat food that is over stuffed with hormones. Unless of course there world is over populated and they need to make food faster and in larger numbers.
So those astronomers in Detroit were right on the money with this 1:250 scale model of an alien species.
What? 
I read a book back in middle school that postulated how aliens might look - lots of cool illustrations and captions, and quite thought-provoking to my nerdling mind. One of the aliens was this simply enormous winged whale that floated in a gas-giant sort of environment. Now, how such a large creature could float with neutral buoyancy with such a design escaped me - the surface-to-mass ratio would be off to anything not flying at a really high speed - but the idea was cool anyways.
Now, on a gas giant, the only thing to land on is a core compressed so much by the thousands of kilometers of gas above it, that it’s liquified. So anything flying’s gonna have to do it from birth to death. That means either a very abundant food source or a very efficient alien. I’d go with the very efficient route if the planet is to support a population enough for breeding purposes.
This rules out wings - they’d take too much energy to keep flapping, or even to be held out to glide on the winds. This pretty much leaves gasbags. Since many biological processes produce hydrogen, this is at least slightly viable, especially if the planet has a methane atmosphere. An enormous gasbag or series of them with a nervous system and appropriate organs is what I have in mind here.
Now, our friend would have problems, the least of which would be getting enough food, even with its slow and efficient metabolism. It’s gonna leak gas and that gas needs replacing. Airborne krill? Photosynthesis? Mating would be a problem, too, but maybe spores would work better than a mile-long, err… Member.
A spore-dispersing, photosynthesizing balloon is what I have in mind. Now, since this population can support predators, and these predators will have a much better food source, we can support much cooler things, like wings, provided this creature is much smaller than the balloons. Swarms of alien crows? Parasitic flies? Hmm…
(note - I am not a biologist. This is pure speculation backed up by a lot of Carl Sagan and his ilk. Please feel free to riddle holes in my logic.)
Assuming the atmosphere is not pure hydrogen, relatively simple chemical reactions could produce a purified hydrogen lighter than the mix outside the creature, thus producing lift to offset weight. Basically, you’re talking about a giant, living blimp.
Heating could also reduce the density (and thus increase boyancy) in a contained volume of gas. Assuming a metabolic rate sufficient to raise the temperature of interior of the animal significantly above that of the environment, you also have a giant, living blimp.
Or even combine the two methods for maximum lift.
False assumption on the latter half of that sentence. The albatross, for instance, has a “lock” on its “elbow” joints that allows it to hold its wing outstretched with no effort, allowing the bird to soar for days at a time, and even sleep aloft. This is similar to the joint mechanisms that allow birds to perch on a branch without letting go during sleep, and also allows horses to sleep standing up without falling over.
However, a “gasbag” alien might use “wings” more for steering rather than propulsion, in which case it might be more accurate to call them “fins”.
On such a world, “flappers” might use the giant gasbags as floating islands, nesting and resting on them and perhaps even in some sort of parasitic/symbiotic relationship with them.
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Now, our friend would have problems, the least of which would be getting enough food, even with its slow and efficient metabolism. It’s gonna leak gas and that gas needs replacing. Airborne krill? Photosynthesis?
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Remember - MOST of our hypthetical “blimp” alien will be a gas volume which is not metabolizing. The actual deflated volume of such a creature will be considerable smaller than its inflated state, and consequently may not require as much food as you might think at first.
Also, postulating a very dense atmophere means that small particles will stay aloft much easier (for that matter, so will large objects). The denser the atmophere the smaller the ratios between wing area, required speed to remain airborne, and mass/volume. In such instance, though, draft would be much increased. The critters will look more like fish than birds or bats. The atmospheric density may be less than water - but it could also be considerably greater than Earth’s atmosphere.
Mating would be a problem, too, but maybe spores would work better than a mile-long, err… Member.
A spore-dispersing, photosynthesizing balloon is what I have in mind. Now, since this population can support predators, and these predators will have a much better food source, we can support much cooler things, like wings, provided this creature is much smaller than the balloons. Swarms of alien crows? Parasitic flies? Hmm…
(note - I am not a biologist. This is pure speculation backed up by a lot of Carl Sagan and his ilk. Please feel free to riddle holes in my logic.) **
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Problems I see with the gasbag scenario:
When/if the gasbags die and rupture, they would fall into the denser uninhabitable core of the gas giant and nutrient would be lost from the system (not to say that a system couldn’t arise that could cope with these inefficiencies, but it just makes it harder).
Initial conditions; how did the gasbags evolve?
Judging from Lara Flynn Boyle’s appearance in Men in Black II, I’d say we’re looking at C-cup territory.
Thanks fof finding that one femtosecond; I was beginning to think it had gone.
Remember how density increases as you go down. Eventually, you go from ‘thick atmosphere’ to ‘ocean’ in a gentle gradient of increasing pressure. As you go down, it becomes easier and easier for something to maintain neutral bouyancy without needing gasbags or an active propulsion system. So the dead gasbags fall, fast at first then more slowly as they hit the denser regions, and get gobbled by the things that ‘swim’ in the pseudo-ocean down near the core.
It sounds remarkably like what happens to things that die in our oceans: From the well-lit low-pressure surface regions to the completely dark, high-pressure areas in trenches and such. Recall that not even the Marianas Trench is devoid of life. Things can live in even the worst places.
Good question. Possibly from smaller gaseous organisims, which in turn evolved from single-celled creatures? Remember that at the amoeba scale and larger, up to the small insect scale, you don’t need to worry much about gravity. The more pressing concern is air currents, and I’d imagine a gas giant would have plenty of those. So single-celled live evolved, much as in the oceans, agglutinated to beings perhaps resembling slime molds with primitive bouyancy systems, then to more complex beings with suitably complex bouyancy evolutions.
On the subject of gas-bag aliens, see Arthur C. Clarke’s story, “A Meeting with Medusa.”
(I don’t remember how many of the questions raised above he answers in the story, but it’s a good story.)
See Philip Jose Farmers Windwhales Of Ishmael
(The following will include environment spoilers, but no plot spoilers.)
Farmer sets the book far in Earth’s future. The oceans have largely evaporated, making them too salty to live in. Sealife has adapted its fins and airbladders to sails and gas bladders.
These animals are much as Broomstick describes. Rather than wings, their fins are used for steering and riding wind and air currents(Ishmael describes their movements in sailing terms). Many of the creatures have multiple gas bladders. Thus, a localized injury won’t cause a total loss of bouyancy.
BTW-The Old Carbon VS Silicon Question
Previous threads by folks more learned than I have placed me solidly in the carbon based camp. What are your thoughts on the likelihood of silicon based life? Are other bases possible? NOTE-Please folks, don’t respond with “All your bases are belong to us!”
sorry about the weird coding in my last post .
All your… oops, sorry!
I thought Cecil had touched on this, but I can’t find anything.
The question has come up before (I think I may have asked it here myself once) - part of the answer, IIRC is that Silicon is quite similar to Carbon in terms of what you can combine it with, but there are problems, for example CO[sub]2[/sub] is a gas, SiO[/sub]2[/sub] is a solid - makes waste products more difficult to eliminate. This alone doesn’t rule out a biochemistry based on silicon, but other similar factors might (or at least might make it orders of magnitude less likely/feasible than carbon).
/hijack/ cal where did you get your sig ? As someone who thinks 1984 isnt a impressive book in any manner I think it rocks
I have often wondered about encountering aliens. It seems to me that given the problems of traversing interstellar space, we are more likely to encounter an artificial life form than one that actually evolved on a planet. My reasoning being that intelligent beings made of organic stuf would want to exploit and explore space - an efficient way of doing this would be to create an artificial life form ideally suited to living in space - using solar power, solar sails, being very long lived and, of course, not at all reliant on atmosphere or water. Such a species might outlive its progenitors and slowly spread from star to star. Our first alien encounter might be with robot bugs that might be of any size and any degree of individual or collective intelligence.