Can’t remember specific episodes, but Farscape did a better-than-average job making aliens alien.
I don’t think sonar is so ineffable. It is sound, and an average human can get a lot of position information with their ears. But our vision is so dominant that our stereo-aural ability is underappreciated.
Sighted people don’t sonicly ping their environments, but some blind people do, such as with canes or palatal clicks. Bats just have better ears and their ratio of sound to sight is different than the human sensorium. (I’m not taking issue with Nagel, just making a distinction.)
The “starfish aliens” from Star Trek have been covered, so from Doctor Who:
The TARDIS - based on what we’ve learned over the past 56 years of the show, they grown as much as built, and they clearly possess sentience, which meet my criteria for lifeform.
The Daleks.
The Nestene Consciousness, although it does use humanoid creations called Autons when it finds them useful.
The Fehndal
The Rutans - these are the ones the Sontarans are always at war with. We don’t seen the as often as the Sontarans.
Whatever the hell that thing was in the episode “Midnight”, although we didn’t actually see it so maybe it doesn’t count.
The Atraxi from “The Eleventh Hour”.
The Vashta Nerada from “The Silence in the Library”/“Forest of the Dead” which… are sort of like carnivorous shadows.
Those are just the ones off the top of my head. Others might include Alpha Centauri - the diplomat, not the star. And an actual sentient star in “42”. Despite a special-effects budget that in the early decades, especially, makes the average high school production look lavishly funded Doctor Who has actually put a surprising number of “alien aliens” on the small screen.
It’s hard to say–perhaps utterly inconceivable is exaggerating slightly, since we can do a few sonar-like things, like detect some degree of texture (metal vs. wood vs. no walls, etc.). But it’s so crude that I have to think there is a kind of step change–a creature with a single light/dark sensor probably doesn’t have vision in the sense that we do.
At any rate, sonar is pretty middle of the road anyway. We can understand it, if not actually experience it at a deep level. But alien aliens may have senses that no Earth life shares, including things that barely have contact with our physical world at all.
That’s pretty good. I’ll have to watch the other series when I have some time.
It may well be that the best way to understand an alien intelligence is to turn a human into one.
Great thread.
“Aliens” being in fact poorly disguised humans has always been one of my pet peeves in science-fiction. There’s no better way to ruin a movie for me than to show aliens that are basically humans with big eyes or weirdish noses.
Solaris is an oustanding example of what you’re looking for, indeed. I haven’t seen any of the movies but the novel on which they’re based may be my favourite science-fiction book. The whole concept is precisely the absolute alienness of the “creature” and the definitive, essential impossibility for us to establish any kind meaningful communication with it. Are the colossal structures that rise occasionally from that sentient ocean an attempt at establishing contact ? Are the creepy hallucinations experienced by the crew proof of evil intent or innocent efforts thwarted by our utter incompatibility ? It’s impossible to tell.
Fascinating concept, brilliantly pulled off by Lem.
Truly non-human aliens don’t think like humans; they’re not just odd bodies with human goals and emotions.
The best examples from literature show up in Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey, which was one of the first to show aliens as alien and still one of the best examples.
The best ones from movies/TV have been mentioned: Annihilation, Arrival, Solaris, Dark Star, the Blob, etc. It’s difficult to portray on the screen (not even counting the need for special effects), since if you don’t understand the motives of aliens, you usually reject the movie. Thus creatures like the Rutans or the Horta are shown to have understandable human thinking and behave in that manner. And even in literature, the truly alien ones appear in short stories more than novels, since it’s very difficult to keep them from being annoying to the reader in a longer work.
They can manipulate water, but I recall them looking like manta rays with lights. Ed Harris sees them when they take him to their city.
They may not even be aliens, we just have never been deep enough to come in contact with them. In the beginning don’t they mention how less than 1% of the ocean floor has been explored?
[QUOTE=Colibri;21542366In The Thing (1982) I don’t think the alien’s true form was ever seen, since as in the original story Who Goes There? it was a shape shifter. That one counts as an alien alien.[/QUOTE]
Indeed, it is not even clear if the alien HAS a “True form” or if it only exists in the guise of other creatures.
*Futurama *has had some:
-
The Horrible Gelatinous Blob
-
Blorgulax–the shapeshifting alien in “Murder on the Planet Express”—which is a parody of the 1980 movie “The Thing”
3.The energy being Mellivar who was big Star Trek fan.
-
Yivo–the title monster in “Beast with Billion Backs”
-
the ball creatures from “War Is the H-Word”
-
the water creatures from “My Three Suns”
There were others as well. Despite looking bizarre, the vast majority of aliens on Futurama were just “odd bodies with human goals and emotions” as RealityChuck put it. So i’m not sure how much they qualify for this list.
Except, when we see the original Dalek [del]Dave Ross[/del] Davros, he is a wrinkly humanoid.
There was, of course, the first segment to the key to time, an enormous cephalopod, but I cannot recall whether it exhibited signs of sentience.
The aliens are here and they are house cats. As an example I give you from Star Trek [TOS] episode Memory Alpha, Gary Seven’s cat Isis which only takes on bipedal human form when its territory is threatened.
A contemporary take on those things would probably be horriifc. Scuttering about on their tendrils, wrapping themselves around peoples arms as people try and fend them off.
There was the Lovecraftian critter from the Space: 1999 episode “Dragon’s Domain”.
Interesting you should mention Lovecraft.
A great many posts here are mentioning aliens that look weird or whatever but they still - deep down - maintain some level of understandable motivation. The way food, conquest, rescue or whatever. For something to be truly alien we face the daunting task of writing or conceiving of something that we can’t properly conceive.
So Lovecraft works pretty well at this level. Certainly Cthulhu et al are alien. But they’re at such a level/age/difference that connecting with us - and even being concerned that they connect with us - is entirely irrelevant to them. We don’t matter and can’t fathom their motivations.
That’s why they’re so creepy. And that’s what makes the aliens in Arrival and such so weird. We don’t matter until they want or need something and understanding is - mostly - out of our ken.
So what about we make one ourselves? Ava, from the astonishing Ex Machina, is a true machine intelligence. But her thought processes are so entirely different from ours - she appears to be able to imitate empathy, concern and connection but doesn’t truly care about them - that both her benefactor and her creator have trouble understanding just what they’re dealing with and have created.
Arguably, Davros is NOT a Dalek. He’s a Kaled. A Kaled who bio-engineered the Daleks.
There was also a cat alien in the 1978 Disney movie “The Cat from Outer Space”.
Yeah, there’s alien in physical shape and appearance, and alien in mentality. The Horta is definitely way beyond having a funny-shaped forehead, but its–or rather her–motivations are perfectly intelligible; she’s a Mama trying to protect her offspring.
Contrast that with the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; physically, they’re only about a step beyond “rubber-forehead aliens”–still basically humanoid (kind of giant human fetuses, I guess)–but mentally, they’re actually very strange. They seem mostly to be “playful”, but their “playfulness” manifests in such ways as playing chicken with airliners and maybe violently kidnapping your children (and trashing your house). I mean, sure, they give the kid back–but some of the people they take aren’t returned until decades later, at which point their entire lives are presumably completely trashed. CE3K doesn’t present the aliens as “bad guys”; it’s not an “alien invasion” movie, and when the protagonist goes off to be with the aliens on their spaceship, it’s presented in very positive terms (the aliens are seemingly “child-like” and “innocent”; the music is soaring and upbeat; we see the protagonist looking joyous as he disappears into a brilliant white light). But the aliens in CE3K nonetheless come across as something like The Fair Folk, complete with child-stealing and Blue and Orange Morality (and messing about with the passage of time, though justified in this case not by “fairy magic” but by relativity).
My favorite alien from B5 was Kosh, the Vorlon ambassador. Not only alien in physical form, but also in mindset - it was sometimes difficult to understand him because, being completely non-human and probably millennia old, his frame of reference was completely different from the human characters.
One that has not been mentioned is the monster from the id. Its apparent shape was fairly conventional looking, but that may have been projection on the part of the men there. It was one of the most compelling animations I can recall having seen.
Are you referring to the id creature in Forbidden Planet?