Why do people seem to assume that extraterrestrial aliens would look humanoid, yet hairless, with an enlarged head? If life evolved on another planet, why shouldn’t some other form of species evolve to be the “intelligent” ones? Why not a species of bird, or insect, or fish, or something or than mammal, that evolved into the dominant species? Or at least the dominant species could have hair, or feathers, or SOMETHING…
You’re making a big assumption here. In science fiction and speculative articles about alien life forms, a huge number of possibilities have been considered, many of them non-humanoid. (Example, “Last and First Men” by Olaf Stapledon alone considers everything up to and including intelligent stars.)
Of course, in Sci-Fi shows on TV, it’s cheaper to portray aliens as humanoid because you can then stick a human in a rubber suit, or simply glue on the appropriate forehead ridges. Saves a lot on the budget.
What you’ve described as the “generally assumed” view of ETs is known as the Grey. This is a description from some UFO sightings. Strangely enough, once that description was circulated, other people started claiming to have seen or even to have been abducted by similar creatures. You can choose to either believe that there are actual aliens fitting the description of the Grey, or you can believe that a lot of people are hoaxing/hallucinating/have vivid imaginations. Doesn’t much matter. This portrayal is now part of the UFO culture as seen on the X-Files and countless films. Call it a meme. Now it’s cinematic shorthand. If you show a Grey, you tap into the whole Area 51 mythos and don’t have to go into a lot of backstory.
To summarize, no one really thinks that aliens, if they exist, would look anything like us.
I don’t mean to hijack, but I thought it was spelled “mime,” shortened from “mimetic” to parallel “genetic” and “gene.”
Think of this for comparison: If all vertebrate life were to suddenly become extinct, what would the most intelligent organism on Earth be? The octopus! It is only by a set of fortuitous and probably irreproducable circimstances that vertebrates even came to exist, let alone produce intellegent life. See the late, great Steven Jay Gould’s incredible book, “Wonderful Life,” for a discussion on this topic.
- The hairless aliens bit is definitely recent Hollywood tripe. It’s more convenient, especially in terms of short TV shows to make “aliens” be instantly recognizable. Go back 35 years, and note that few of the Star Trek aliens are that way, Roddenberry went in for hair styles and bizarre makeup colors.
This trend isn’t just to cut costs, however. It’s harder for a writer to create a hugely non-human alien, and harder for readers to empathize with one. That is, if a very compelling picture was drawn of a creature that lived on an airless rock, singing endlessly, pretty quickly the number of points of common interest would dry up.
- There is, however, some reason to believe that other intelligent species would look vaguely like us. It’s nothing like compelling evidence, but once you put together needs like: stereo, big brains, omniverous, able to move through trees and through water, dextrous, able to vocalize a wide range of sounds, able to control body temperature through extremes (with the aid of clothes), etc., the possibilities narrow.
As far as birds becoming intelligent, well, it does seem like they’ve had millions of years to give it a shot. No noticable progress. Parrots have some intelligence, for instance, but mankind generally passed their capabilities like a rocket. Looks like they’re a dead end.
Anomalocaris, the octupus may have one of the highest proportions of nerve and brain cells to body weight of any creature, but that doesn’t automatically make them intelligent. They might be like my ex, who lives just for pleasure.
A need like “stereo”???
I think partly_warmer meant “stereo vision.”
Haj
I think he/she meant multiple eyes, ears and/or other sense organs for depth perception.
Yes, he/she did, by implication. I was thinking firstly of stereo vision. Acute depth perception at a distance too far away to let an attacker get you without warning.
Of course, ratotoskK, we’d expect aliens to have stereo sound regardless of their place of planetary origin, otherwise, how could they use headphones??
i know because i saw them, really. and then this one alien was very friendly even… he spoke to me and said he was lost… wait, that was E.T.
ducks and runs shouting E.T. E.T. E.T. E.T. E.T. E.T. E.T.
Um, no. Hollywood started using the big-heads-big-eyes-no-hair image of the “Greys” as shorthand for “space alien” because it was popular culture’s idea of what alien invaders would look like. It was reactionary on their part.
That popular culture image, in turn, arose from the infamous Barney & Betty Hill incident, which allegedly occurred in 1961. It was dramatized in an NBC-TV movie called “The UFO Incident” in 1975. The movie starred James Earl Jones, and you can see a still with the “Grey”-like aliens here. Once that aired, it became the dominant image for what space aliens must look like. Whitley Streiber’s book Communion featured a similar creature on the cover, further solidifying the image.
Ahh, but Octapuses are intelligent.
pldennison, don’t “ok, no” me :;
It’s “ok, yes”. There were lots of architypes for aliens. The fact that the current vogue came from somewhere is hardly surprising. But Hollywood, and other mass media intellectuals, such as the ones that popularized happy faces, latched on to the skinless wonders because, I’m guessing: they look like ghosts and they’re easy to model. Personally I’ll take some of the aliens James T. Kirk runs into any day. Nothing like aliens with great figures, that’s what I always say.
Epimetheus, but your source even says dolphins and whales are in the “mensa class” of oceanics. I was just saying that octopuses weren’t gonna take over the world in the next millenia. Besides, this article claims that water animals following you around with their eyes is intelligent? Guppies and goldfish do the same.
It would be, but it’s memetic, not mimetic, so it’s a meme.
pldennison didn’t “ok, no” you, partly.
or, they latched onto them because there was already a huge public identification with the grey. as pldennison said.
i favor the latter, because (as you yourself pointed out) a lot of different alien designs have been float by. like all the aliens james t. kirk encountered (in star trek, which i am assuming, was characterized neither by the descriptive ‘Hollywood’ nor ‘mass-media intellectuals’). but only one design has really and truly taken off.
and the only reason i can think of is that people identified with the aliens from Close Encounters etc, so the greys became paramount.
jb
Reminds me of the Stuff HP Lovecraft wrote, for some reason.
Just wanted to point out that there are notable exceptions to the “Gray alien” stereotype in fiction and film. SPOILERS …
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See the aliens in The Abyss, or the Old Ones in Isaac Asimov’s novel The Gods Themselves*.
Richard Dawkins invented the word ‘meme’ in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’
‘Memetic’ followed later: World Wide Words - meme
In The demon-haunted world, Carl Sagan speculated on this matter. To him, the renditions of aliens resembled human children (disproportionally large eyes and heads, hairlessness). He also observed that accounts of abductions commonly feature sexual experimentation. How this pair of observations informs us about human sexual psychodynamics he leaves to the reader’s imagination
The New Yorker had an article on this several years ago, noting that aliens in popular imagery had much more variation pre-Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and that Spielberg’s hugely popular film helped solidify this type in the popular mind. Whitley Strieber’s book Communion, with its striking cover image, came out years afterward.
There was actually a notable lack of images of aliens in the movies and television in the 1970s before The UFO Incident and Close Encounters, so it is hard to claim that the creators of those films were simply reacting to popular imagery and not in fact helping to create it. Before then, we had the great variety of alien lifeforms seen in sixties television series Lost in Space and Star Trek.