Physical science fields like chemistry, physics, astronomy should be identical. So should most formal science fields involving math (I assume) and theoretically most forms of applied science. Maybe. If the gravity, texture of the planet, atmosphere is totally different then engineering would likely be totally different. But it would still be based on the same math and physics.
Biology would likely be totally different. But would there be overlap in the social sciences? If there was an advanced alien technocracy wouldn’t they have some of the same social structures we take for granted like reciprocation, cooperation, in group/out group dynamics, etc? I don’t see how you can get an advanced civilization that doesn’t follow the rules of individuals acting within a social organism. But maybe they’d develop entirely new ways to maintain the integrity of a social unit using different tools of reward/punishment and the rules that govern our social organizations aren’t universal but like life sciences are just located here.
Would communication and computer science be similar?
For some tasks, there’s a clear best way to accomplish that task, and in such cases, alien technology is likely to be fairly similar to ours. For instance, if they have independently-powered vehicles, then it’s likely that those vehicles will be powered by the burning of a hydrocarbon in the same general vicinity as gasoline, since gasoline has a much higher energy density than most other chemical energy storage media. Or, at least, until they develop non-chemical means of energy storage which are even better (capacitors, in principle, can be much more energy-dense than chemicals).
The real kicker, though, is that we don’t know what tasks an alien might want to accomplish in the first place. Maybe they don’t see the big deal in vehicles being independently powered, and just get power their vehicles via catenary wires (or perhaps some other method of keeping the vehicle connected to an external supply). Or maybe they never saw the value of vehicles in the first place, and instead developed telecommuting-like technologies much more heavily than we did. Or maybe they naturally evolved some ability for long-range communications without devices, and don’t even need technology for that at all.
I’m not sure what advantage intelligence would provide a sessile creature. It wouldn’t help it survive much as far as I can tell, although I’m sure it might evolve as a happenstance.
But how is a creature rooted to the ground going to develop technology? They’d have to pass raw materials hand to hand (or whatever) until it got to a member of the species that could work it.
Could they make anything above blacksmith level technology? They aren’t going to be able to mine at any serious pace. It would literally require them to be sitting on a natural supply and within reach of another member of the species.
Hmm… although if there is a trainable animal on the planet maybe they could use it to do the grunt work?
Well there’s another possibility. Maybe something about human nature keeps us from seeing what would otherwise be a really great idea, or maybe just keeps us from incorporating it into our society.
For example something mundane would be eliminating poverty. We have the technology to do that, but we don’t. It’s a social problem, and all social problems stem from the nature of humans.
Something more exotic would be some technology that requires humans to visualize higher dimensional space to see to develop. We can do the math and make computer programs that show us 2d shadows of 4d objects, but actually see it in the minds eye? Nope.
So, an alien species will develop tech along the lines of what their particular needs are. I forget the race in Star Trek who suffer from the Phage and slowly whither away. Their whole society is geared to finding an answer for that problem so they have developed some of the best medical tech in the galaxy (they also have spaceships and such too but perhaps they wouldn’t bother with inventing lingerie ).
You could have a eusocial insect-esque societal structure where they wouldn’t understand the concept of individuality.
Or perhaps a symbiotic relationship between species or different classes of the same which cause sentience. If the relationships change constantly then the idea of individuality will be blurred or non-nonsensical.
Or a race of Christlike beings who are always nice to each other and live in complete harmony, but if they find any other sentient race they nuke it immediately no questions asked. This would go under the ingroup/outgroup category, but ignore the rest.
I think Computer Science would be similar in the broad theoretical aspects. but certainly not in the details. Much of IC design is driven by the fundamentals of semiconductor physics and the refinement of our processes - these would be similar.
The society would likely be nothing like ours. Look how much diversity there is even in humans. Say they evolved from something like lions, with a dominant male and a harem. Perhaps the other males would become the risk takers, the explorers, since they could best contribute to the genome by encouraging the genetic success of the dominant brother with some of their genes. They’d no doubt be gay, and homosexuality in this society would be practically a sacrament.
Different technologies would advance at different speeds. Imagine if you started getting radio signals from a planet 2 or 3 light years away. There would be a lot more money thrown into the space program in that case, and they might be behind us in computers but well ahead of us in space technology.
When I go to the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, MA, I’m fascinated by the Japanese tools there, the kind that Perry encountered. You can see some at the Boston Children’s Museum, too. You realize that these are hammers, saws, and other tools familiar to Westerners, but they have surprisingly different form. Just because they were for human beings doing the same job, you would have thought that identical tools would be developed, but it’s not the case
hal Clement’s short story Technical Error concerns the discovery of an alien space ship which uses technology different from human standards – things attached with interlocking ovoids rather than screws, the use of molecular attraction rather than mechanical means to stick things together, and so on. Harry Harrison’s “Eden” series posits an earth with intelligent dinosaurs who develop a civilization without fire or mechanical sciences – they create “tools” through genetic manipulation of other life-forms, such as breeding a bat-like creature into a warm-blooded “cloak”, or breeding a frog into a microscope (with what were its eyes becoming lenses). Exactly how they performed this manipulation without mechanical tools isn’t explained, but the idea of a biologically-based rather than mechanical-technology-based civilization is an interesting one.
Just because we’re shooting for many of the same goals doesn’t guarantee that the same technology will be developed.
A species that evolved with a much higher degree of radiation resistance might well use nuclear technology all over, especially if the rest of its biosphere has too. I’m thinking of something like the old Heinlein juvenile era, with the casual use of nuclear fueled rockets.
There’s also the question of what is and isn’t poisonous to them; there are I’m sure a variety of technologies that we either never developed, we gave up on, or use only in very limited ways because they involve poisons. For example, heavy metals; we use a lot less of those than we used to because we found them to be poisonous; an alien species that wasn’t susceptible to heavy metal poisoning would still use use lead and mercury and so on liberally, and wouldn’t have bothered to developed the alternatives we did.
And that extends to the rest of their biosphere; what is and isn’t poisonous - or even tasty - to the local critters will affect what they make things out of. They might, say, not use aluminum as much as we do because the local bug equivalents tend to gobble it up to incorporate into their shells.
Different elemental abundances would also affect what technology gets developed and what doesn’t.
Interface technology would be different, perhaps very different. For example, a blind species that relied on sonar instead would naturally never invent the video display, except perhaps for animal experiments if there are sighted animals. They’d have some sort of extremely sophisticated sound system instead.
A species of aliens that are self assembling colonies of simpler creatures and not just a single unitary organism might develop cyborg technology earlier than us, and use lower tech versions of it we’d find impossible*, depending on how their self assembly process works. Instead of needing sophisticated surgery to graft machinery onto itself, it could simply grow into it. Rather than having so much trouble finding a means of linking nervous systems to machines, it could simply use the plugs evolution included so it could link its own components together. Or go the opposite route, and create fleshy-bodied “androids”; versions of itself that replace the sub-creature that performs higher brain functions with a computer or a transceiver linked to one.
*We can’t just lop an arm off and bolt some crude mechanical replacement arm on and have it do anything but sit there and probably get infected. They might be able to; by growing into it they might be able to make even crude clockwork “body parts” work, or graft themselves onto a metal skeleton (or claws, or hooks, or…). They could even have Bronze Age “cyborgs”, of a sort. I’d think that a creature with a skeleton partly made of bronze would count as a cyborg.
I think their technology would only resemble ours insofar as their values resemble ours.
The OP makes a good point in stating that the laws of physics are constant and math is (probably) universal. However they would only build what they want to build and perhaps they would want to build things at an earlier point in their evolution that, being different from what we wanted to build at a comparable period in our evolution, progressed them into different areas.
It would be interesting if we find that they build radically different kinds of things in, say, their version of the stone age, that converged with technologies that we develop.
I assume there would be some overlap. Inasmuch as their body plans, planetary environment, and position on the food chain are similar, so would they care/need to build the kinds of things that we do.
Too bad all they’re too far away for us to find out. If they exist at all, that is.
Well math would be the same, 1 + 1 = 2, although they might not use base 10, they would probably use base [how many something they have] to make it easier to count but some humans cultures use base 60. Base 8 is more efficiency. Who knows maybe they use an irrational base number system
Star Trek is a bad example because every race or planet does one and only one thing. Desert planet. Garbage planet. Jungle planet. Planet that looks like Southern California. Evil capitalist species. Warrior species. Super health care species. And every civilization has only one problem where the Enterprise can just swoop in and be like “oh we have an app for that!”
In real life, our planet has a wide range of climates and species and civlizations. And we have a wide range of interconnecting problems. Take **The Tao’s Revenge’s **example of poverty. It is not a “mundane problem” that can easily be solved with willpower otherwise we would just give poor people food and money and housing. Poverty is more of a symptom of a wide range of other interconnected problems.
Aliens would likely have problems both similar and very different.
Some things would need to be similar though.
Aliens would need to be mobile in order to get at resources. They would need enough dexterity to manipulte small objects. Their technology will have to evolve from rocks and sharp sticks similar to ours.
Maybe they might transition to 100% biotech, after a nonbiotech boot strapping society. Heck we could end up doing that. They’ve genetically engineered silkworms to produce spider silk now.
They might evolve with a natural ability to genetically engineer themselves and control their own form, which would naturally lead to them being able to make all sorts of biotech products and maybe even split off/birth specialized organisms. That could even be the driving force being evolving intelligence on their world; a biosphere full of creatures capable of directing their own evolution would be even more complicated than ours, and change a lot faster I’d think.
I’m not 100% sold on the premise that alien physics and math will be the same. I suppose the nature of reality and the laws of deduction are probably the same everywhere in the universe, but an alien conception of it would be quite different from ours.
Our science revolves around matching the models we make in our heads to the real world by maximizing their explanatory and predictive power. I believe aliens, with completely different brains (which may not be brains at all), could make completely different models which nevertheless predict and explain reality as faithfully as ours. That is if they had any science at all.
Maybe. I’m not really sure either way, I’m just throwing it out there.
If they were going to work in the real world, I’d think that both math (as applied to real-world situations) and physics would have to be the same as ours. You can hold completely incorrect models and structures in mind, but if you’re going to have genuine predictive ability, anything that doesn’t correspond to the real world is going to get weeded out. And I really only think there’s one way to model the Real World. *
Of course, the way that’s expressed might not be at all similar, and might be so completely different that it’s hard to tell they’re the same. As crude examples, consider math as done in Roman Numerals vs. math as done in Indo-arabic numerals. Or the way algebraic problems were treated up until the Renaissance – a simple quadfratic equation might be broken down into four subclasses because they didn’t use subtraction or negative numbers, and the problem might not be recognized as the same one you have. Or in Ancient Greece algebraic problems were visualized as geometric ones. Or the way the Egyptians wrote fractions as sums of unit powers of other fractions (except for 2/3) – so 3/4 was 1/2 + 1/4. (They didn’t like to have anything but what we would write as a fraction with a “1” in the numerator, so they broke all fractions down to that form. 5/28 was 1/7 + 1/28)
Even when the fields are close, I’m surprised at how differently they’re expressed. Opthalmologists and Optics Engineers might as well be using different language. Geophysics struck me as oddly different from Mechanics.
And these are all topics covered by human minds. Imagine it filtered through different jargon and different number systems (base 5?). If we ever do contact an alien race, translating our concepts into each others’ ways of expressing them could be a lifetime job.
*You know what I mean. Don’t bring up how Taxicab Geometry is different from Plane Geometry, or how non-Euclidean math fits some situations better. There’s still one basic way to treat your rock falling under the influence of gravity and no other forces.
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