Watching A Clockwork Orange something caught my eye. It’s supposed to be a movie with a futuristic feel to it (at least I think so, it’s not the main point any way), and instead of using a casette to listen to music, he uses a really small casette.
It occured ot me that in all sci-fi movies that offer dazzling predictions about what the future would look like there are always just variations of what we already have. Faster space ships, better computers and smaller cell phones.
Even the aliens that visit us from another part of the universe have a very familiar look. Big eyes and long fingers, maybe squidlike tentacles or even in the form of a pink cloud of dust. Either way, all the different sketches and recreations seem to suggest that wherever in the universe the alien is from, it will look like something familiar.
In fact, when I challanged myself and others to come up with an entirely new animal the suggestions were just combinations of animals I have already seen (A lion with wings and a fishes head etc).
So can we actually come up with ideas that are completely new? It has happend, sure, but it always seems to be by accident when someone was actually trying to come up with a variation of something old and somehow stumbled upon something new.
Some might say the reason we can’t come up with any new creatures or aliens that don’t have any of the features we already seen is beacuse they’ve all been used.
Maybe…but if you never seen a flying creature or object, would you be able to draw a picture of one, or would you give that same reply?
All my questions boiled down to this example:
Let’s say we have an Eskimo (Sorry if I piss any Eskimos off that may be browsing the forum) who has only seen two animals in his life; humans and penguins. And let’s say we ask that eskimo two draw 3 new animals. Would it actually be possible for him to draw 3 animals that have the charachteristics of animals he hasn’t seen yet, or would he just draw 3 different combinations of human-penguin?