Once again, TV Tropes has a relevant page: Starfish Aliens.
Despite what most people think there were at least two non-humanoid aliens in Star Trek TNG. The first was the giant snowflake alien from the first episode. I’m not sure if they ever even showed the second since it interacted with the crew via dreams.
what about some of the aliens from the “aliens” series?
Well done whoever mentioned Catspaw. I want to sing the praises of The Man Trap again.
I dont know how much was a choice of the director or writer…but aside from even the true appearance of the Salt Monster…its played more domesticated animal/companion then it is “sentient trickster”. If we take everything at face value that is. “Why didn’t it just ask for salt? Why didn’t didn’t it just go to the kitchen?”
Cause its a frightened animal. When it gets on the Enterprise? All the stuff the actor was doing about ‘how did that door open? did i have to make a gesture??’ And the stuff about it needing love and being attracted to people that have strong emotions for it. Not to say it isnt intelligent but its definetly alien.
Theres that thing that was going to kill half the crew in the second season. Appeared with kind of a fuzzy face.
Theres the “Conspiracy” claymation insects. That was another well-done episode if we take everything at face value. The aliens are undone by their own alienness.
They were about to let Picard walk right out of the maggot-brunch! Out walks Picard, Picard beams up, Picard beams down with security a couple of minutes later…theyd probably still be eating.
As it was, a lightly armed Picard and Riker managed to stop it alone anyway! All because these aliens love a sense of theatre!! Now yes…they got off that signal we never really saw resolved (yes i know this was supposed to be the Borg) but still…
More than two–the guy who talks about “ugly bags of mostly water” comes to mind, and the Trill symbiote. and the Sheliak.
I remember the Martians from Stranger in a Strange land being non-humanoid too although this is a book. I think we may have more luck looking at books than visual media because visual media often has to keep it simple, doesn’t have much time and has to actually show in some way what it’s talking about. A book can get a lot deeper and take its time to establish characters, settings and the rules. Perhaps as importantly, it doesn’t require a special effects budget.
That makes me think: Atoms form together to create the next higher-order emergent phenomenon that is molecules. Molecules do the same with cells. Cells are alive but not aware. When they form together to create the next higher-order emergent phenomenon, they can create animals which are aware even if the cells that compose them are not aware. We’re aware. When self-aware consciousnesses form together, can they create a higher-order emergent phenomenon? What might it be? Could we perceive or conceive it anymore than the neurons in our brains or the bacteria in our guts can perceive or conceive us?
The best analogue for The Thing is probably a virus. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that The Thing has a very biological feel to it, including blood and contagion by contact, and came out when AIDS was freaking people out.
Arguably, the internet is already an example of this. And of course we witness some of effect in hive animals–a hive of bees displays more complex behavior than any single bee.
But yeah, we can imagine a group of human-scale intelligent beings that communicate more closely than we are capable of and form a real superintelligence. It’s hard to guess what that would look like.
Well, it’s maybe our best approximation from a human perspective. And you may be right that the contagion aspects come from the AIDS scare and the like. But whatever it is, it’s more intelligent than a virus (which is only a step or two beyond a self-replicating molecule)–just not in a way that we recognize. We don’t have the slightest clue what sort of universe it inhabits.
Aliens are hard, obviously. We can barely understand other mammals, despite sharing most of our biology. Who knows how a bat experiences echolocation, or how a platypus experiences electroreception? They have a complex sense that’s totally unavailable to us. Their motivations are reasonably easy to understand, but they have an inner life that’s utterly mysterious.
That’s why the OP wanted to skip books:
I recently reread Neil Asher’s Polity novels and have been thinking about starting a thread about really alien aliens, but I was thinking that it had been done just a few months ago. I did some searching after this thread appeared, and found that the thread I was thinking of was from 2013 and not updated since then (I must have found the thread recently through some key-word search for something.) You might want to bump that that thread for mentioning alien aliens in books (which I was thinking of, but didn’t want to parasitize posts from this thread.)
It’s flying a spaceship at the beginning. Unless it took over a different alien species as a host, it needs a civilization to build a starship.
It’s possible that it DID take over another alien race, but see below.
Campbell, in his original story “Who Goes There?” strongly hints that the Thing’s people were the ones responsible for the ship.
As for “What makes you think it has a civilization?” even if it starts out as a brainless, mindless chimaera or cancer of a living organism, it’s pretty evident that when it takes over a host, it acquires its knowledge. A bunch of these Things living together have to deal with each other or else there’s anarchy. That’s a Civilization. The Thing that appeared in both Campbell’s story and the Carpenter movie could build a Starship from raw materials – it’s shown doing that. It didn’t get that information from any of the guys it absorbed at the base. It was carrying that information from its previous existence. It’s a thinking creature that can use tools and manipulate its environment at a high level. You get a bunch of those together, you’ve got a Civilization.
Oh, but you say, it’s really just one creature. No, it’s not. It takes over multiple bodies. Unless it’s telepathic (nothing indicates that it is)*, each of those is a unique individual. Remember what Macready points out – each piece of that Thing is a distinct being that will try to save itself. Once you’ve got several trillion Things infesting the Earth (I assume it takes over animals as well as humans) they have to deal with each other somehow. When they fully take over, food’s gonna be scarce. Civilization is how groups deal with limitations like that.
*One of my favorite dialogue exchanges from the 1951 version:
“This is for real – What if it can Read our Minds?”
“Then it’s gonna be real upset when it gets to mine.”
Originally Posted by CalMeacham View Post
What the hell kind of civilization did The Thing have, for instance?
I’d say the fact that it could build and operate an interstellar spacecraft strongly suggests a civilization.
The alien aliens I remember in Star Trek TNG are:
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The space jellyfish from the pilot “Encounter at Farpoint”
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Armus–The Skin of Evil that killed Tasha Yar from “Skin of Evil”
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The Crystalline Entity from “Silicon Avatar”.
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The Microbrain that lived in the soil of Velara III in “Home Soil”
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Nagilum from “Where Silence Has Lease”
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The baby space-borne lifeform that attached itslef to the Enterprise in “Galaxy’s Child”
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The coalescent organism that mimicked others in “Aquiel”–the episode was basically a ripoff of the 1980 movie “The Thing”
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Gomtuu—the living star ship from “Tin Man”
I haven’t read the short story, but even assuming this is the case, it doesn’t mean the alien developed the underlying technology, just that it remembered enough from previous hosts to build a new ship.
Maybe telepathy is common in the universe. Or at least higher-bandwidth inter-mind communications: humans are rather limited in this respect, and can only transmit a few bits per second to each other. A high-bandwidth acoustic or optical link might be enough to sustain a distributed consciousness, and that ends up being the case for most hosts.
The alien is pretty good with reconstructing a creature’s biology, but it has limits. And the more limited the biology, the harder a time it must have in improving things.
We’re seeing an alien that’s frightened and in survival mode. It was unlucky enough to land in an isolated outpost with hardly any substrate to go around. We don’t know how it would behave with more material. If it was a distributed consciousness, it may have required dozens or hundreds of hosts just to act in a way that we’d consider intelligent, and with with just a few hosts is pretty much an animal.
Right, the Internet kinda is humanity’s brain. A lot of situations where game theory gives us predictions which are both accurate and counter-intuitive might count as a super-organism.
Human organizations like countries might also be similar.
You’re right, it’s more than a virus.
Was that a reference to Thomas Nagel? If not, he’s an academic who wrote a philosophy of the mind article titled: “What is it like to be a bat?” which is a bit of a speculative deep dive but relevant here for those interested in utterly alien beings: Nagel – What is it Like to be a Bat? | Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
It Came from Outer Space (1953) - The Xenomorph
The Blob (1958 and 1988)
The Creeping Terror (1964) – Unnamed aliens from planet of sentient shag carpets
Dark Star (1974) – unnamed (bipedal) alien from planet of sentient beach balls
The Abyss (1989) – unnamed alien(s) not shown in original form, iirc.
Life (2017) – Calvin, brought to Earth thanks to the bungling of some of the dumbest scientists ever sent out into space
How about the Organians (Star Trek [TOS]: Errand of Mercy)? Pure energy beings.
Not directly, though it’s likely that I got the idea from some philosophical reading or other, which may have itself been influenced by Nagel. Anyway, thanks for the link.
I did choose bats for the same reason that Nagel did: being a mammal, you can’t just write it off as having no internal experience as you might an insect. In most respects, it obviously experiences most of the same things as humans: hunger, pain, comfort, etc. It just happens to also have this sense of sonar which is utterly inconceivable to us. We can try to make some analogy to sight, or hearing, or touch, but all of these will fail since it’s not quite any of those (even if it shares some characteristics with all of them).
So we have a creature that’s more alien than almost anything on Star Trek (with exceptions), and yet is closer to us than almost anything else on Earth, let alone the cosmos. That should recalibrate our scale of alienness.
With a lot of dedication, it might not be that inconceivable; Meet the real Batman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a05kgcI9D2Q
A neurologist has been looking into enabling people to experience a greater slice of the universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c1lqFXHvqI
Yeah, it’s a TED talk which is often very introductory but if that’s not deep enough for you (and I’m pretty sure it won’t be), he also made a 6-hour BBC documentary titled “The Brain” I’m having difficulty finding a high resolution version of each part but here’s the link to some of them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH_nypAO3GE0S7TDsJcqFudX2aebICjP_
One thing that’s really fascinated me is computer vision and “thought” if we can call it that. That might be more alien than any extraterrestrial. In the movie Upgrade, the protagonist gets implanted with a chip that works as a kind of second mind. There are fight scenes in which he’s having difficulty and has to resort to asking the chip to take full control of his body so that it can beat his opponent. The chip does so and kills the opponent in very gruesome, unexpected ways. He’s completely freaked out by what the chip does to win the fight but it does win the fight so he keeps using it.
I think we’ve all had moments when we asked a computer to do something and were surprised by how the computer interpreted our command. With neuron networks, it may become too difficult for humans to understand exactly what’s happening during the computer’s thought process and yet neural AI will be very powerful so we’ll use them anyway. We can expect that, once in a while, it’ll give us a inappropriate output (including behavior) for reasons which our brains can’t understand because it’s just too complex for us to make sense of it.
Which brings us back to HAL 9000 in 2001 and whatever the aliens/monolith/starchildren were in that movie. We’re still arguing about what those were.
If you want an example of creepy computers, have a look at these missiles: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
The Organians were kind of a cheat, though. They used human bodies before they transformed. Their non-hominid aliens consisted of some large fried eggs, an enormous amoeba and tribbles, none of which had much to communicate. There was, of course, the Gorn, but he was basically a cold-blooded wookie, and a few other either transcendent beings or critters we never saw (though Enterprise did depict Tholians as giant lobscorps).
How about Audrey 2 from* Little Shop of Horrors*? That was one mean green mother from outer space.