Sentient beings with radically non-humanoid bodies: what would they be like?

Great Debates
1

This is something that I’ve recently wondered about, but my imagination isn’t good enough. Therefore, I humbly submit it to the doper community.

I don’t think anyone can deny that our worldview is largely influenced by the shape of our bodies (i.e., bipedal, bilateral symmetry, etc.). So that makes me wonder what the worldview of a sentient being with a radically different body would be like. How would their personalities differ? What about their psyches? Their societies?

I guess you can’t answer some of those questions without some knowledge of their evolutionary histories. Of course, I’m not going to attempt to provide that kind of information; make whatever assumptions you need.

I have three specific creatures in mind; feel free to add to these.[ol][li] A minivan-sized scorpion-like creature.[/li][li] A creature with radial symmetry (rather than bilateral symmetry).[/li][li] An amorphous being (possibly even with a distributed brain).[/li][/ol]

2

Hal Clement (aka Harry Clement Subbs) is a wonderful hard-core science fiction author whose books are classics (if you haven’t done so, read Mission of Gravity or Needle). He almost invariably has as his hero a non-human sentient being with radically different body chemistry/shape/whatever. But these creatures almost always have a very human sensibility and worldview. It’s the one thing I didn’t like about his writing.

Of course, one can argue that if your characters are TOO different from humans, it’s hard to have empathy, or to even tell a story. Joe Haldeman made that argument many years ago in one of his story collections.

If you want to read a story with a truly alien point of view, read Terry Carr’s “The Dance of the Changer and the Three”

3

Just look around Congress, you’ll see plenty. Oh, wait, you said “sentient.”

4

IIRC the defunct Omni magazine once had an article where they asked bilogical artists (the people who draw pictures of cells and such for texts) to draw what aliens might look like.

The explanation along with the article mentioned a few salient points when trying to determine what an alien might look like. First and foremost was what the gravity was like on their world. A heavy gravity would see short, squat, stocky looking aliens (since a fall on a high G world would be potentially very damaging). A light gravity would allow for taller, more flimsy looking things.

Now you get into what their atmosphere was like. Hot, cold, rainy, dry, etc… You can see differences here on earth between creatures made for dryer weather vs. wetter climes (camels vs. horses). Also, do winds, atmosphereic density and gravity allow for flying aliens? Maybe…

As to the psyche that is probably formed by just how tough of a planet the aliens live on. Were they the top predators, were they at the bottom or somewhere in between? How brutal was the weather? How readily available was food (or how much competition was there for scarce resources)? The harder a time the aliens had to just survive the more likely you’ll see an aggressive creature (survival of the fittest and all of that). If food was abundant and weather was pleasant you might see a more placid alien.

Finally, if you expect your aliens to have a technological civilization so they can do things like build radios and sapceships then the aliens need some way to manipulate their environment. Think arms and hands (or tentacles perhaps). Dolphins seem to be quite intelligent but they can’t do much beyond swim and have a good time (yes…I am thinking of Douglas Adams here). No spaceships for interstellar commerce for them.

In the end it is probably pretty much up to your imagination. If life is common inthe universe chances are there are some things even your imagination can’t imagine living out there somewhere. Why limit yourself to bipedal or quadrapedal creatures? Maybe there are millipede creatures or pogo-stick creatures. Who knows? To borrow (again) from Douglas Adams maybe there are super-intelligent shades of the color blue. The universe is a big place…lots of opportunity for (by our standards) weirdness.

5

This is a decent enough place to ask such a question:
Is it conceivable that it could be something other than carbon-based? I wonder if the strength of carbon just applies to its chemical properties vs abundance, but ever since that old Star Trek episode I’ve always wondered about silicon-based life (and no computer jokes, please…well, ok, maybe a few).

6

This site discusses some of the issues with silicon based life forms (including a very quick overview of all of the Star Trek episodes with silicon based life in them).

The site also mentions a few other problems with silicon based life (bad metabolism, not many solvents for silicon and not abundant in space [even though it is abundant on earth]).

In short the site concludes that silicon based life is possible but not likely except under very specific and unique conditions. On the whole carbon is a much better element to base life off of so one would expect nature to take the path of least resistance in most instances and create largely carbon-based life anywhere you are likely to find life in the first place.

7

As far as knowing their evolutionary histories goes, I would argue that there are plenty of Kansans out there who still live and work in square structures, so we might not need to know that.

A deeper question is whether or not logic exists outside of the human construct. If an alien lives in an environment where it rains, and the alien doesn’t like rain, will it naturally conclude that it needs shelter, or will it just complain from generation to generation?

Then you have to consider that humans aren’t very logical at all, at least not on the surface. What, for example, would an alien think of a cathedral, with eight-foot high doors and 150-foot high ceilings? The logic behind a cathedral goes far, far beyond the mere need for shelter.

8

Depending on how you want to define “sentient”, the life form which has spent the most time as the dominant species is not hominids. The dinosaurs spent 160 million years as the dominant life form on our planet, but sadly there are very few photographs. Humanoids have spent, what- 3.5 million years? And that’s only if you go all the way back to Lucy.

So I would say we have the answer almost at our fingertips.

Hmmm… how about Stegosaurus?

Hmmm… that’s a toughie. I think gravity & a sense of equilibrium will almost certainly force bilateral symmerty as organisms grow. Then again, most things have some line of symmetry if properly oriented.

Amorphous, like an amoeba? I guess an amorphous being would be more controlled by his environment, such as water currents in a pond might distort the shape on an amoeba. Something so under the control of his environment would probably have a hard time becoming a dominant species. As for multiple brains, I believe certain dinos had rudamentary neural nodes in their hind quarters that acted as backup brains.

9

Didn’t Carl Sagan in Cosmos toss off some ideas about what life would be life, if it could be at all, on Jupiter? They weren’t sentient, however.

The big problem here, I think, is that if we consider evolution to be a physical fact valid to all organizing structures then by the time a group of molecules becomes sentient it has been a loooong time on a different planet. I’m afraid to say that this may be an impossible guess.

But, if Carbon really is the stuff of life as I suspect then perhaps it won’t be very different at all (well, from life on earth; trees aren’t genetically that different from people).

10

Attrayant: I’m choosing to define sentient in the sense of “self-aware”. I had never heard any other definition used, but I am pretty sure that dinosaurs were not sentient. Also, organisms that live underwater can exhibit radial symmetry (e.g., a starfish, or sea urchin).

The amorphous being with the distributed brain could be a self-aware computer process spread out across a whole network. Of the three I mentioned, that’s probably the one we’re most likely to encounter (assuming AI research isn’t completely off-base).

11

It will most likely be chemically similar; however, who knows what different selection pressures can create?

12
  1. This is the one I’ve got the most problems envisioning. Why would a naturally-armored critter with nasty claws and deadly poison, who was the size of a minivan, ever evolve sentience in the first place?

After all, take homo sapiens, without brainpower and tool use, and we’re pretty poor specimens. Our young are essentially helpless for a very long period of time, we’ve got no natural defenses to speak of–claws? Heh. Our teeth do the job, but a saber-toothed critter would just laugh at them. Plus, we maneuver in a way that constantly exposes our soft underbellies. Intelligence definitely conferred one heckuva survival edge as we spread out.

Ah ha, so maybe the giant scorpions are similarly relatively ill-prepared to survive on their world? I think the problem there lies in, while people are pretty vulnerable, by the same token our surroundings weren’t overly deadly. Sure, big cats and weather and sickness and such, but in species-survival terms, brainpower and the more advanced tools were a giant edge, not a true necessity. We wouldn’t have coated the entire planet without it, but we’d do about as well as most big apes, I think.

Probably earth-centric, but this critter-type is something I’ve difficulty suspending my disbelief about.

2: Radial symmetry. I think it would be possible for a land-dweller to get that way. Starfish-like, with an internal skeleton, ball-and-socket jointing. Let’s say four evenly-spaced legs, with four smaller ones spaced between that evolved out of legwork and into manual tool-using work. Terminating in four fingers, all of which are of course opposed.

More brain would be taken up with sensory processing, I would expect. Dolphins have giant brains to handle their sonar, and I’m not sure if that functions as full 360 degree field. However, it could have evolved more compactly; gravity and walking would provide selection pressure that way that an aquatic life doesn’t give.

Psychology is fun to guess at. Say their vision and hearing is on four or eight radially-spaced stalks, that can swivel and twist about to gain depth perception versus an all-around view as needed. I think their architecture would favor open spaces; when you evolve with a continual unavoidable blind spot to your rear, an enclosing structure is comforting, but these guys never had that problem. They might tend towards claustrophobia. Being detail-oriented might be much more of a fluke for them, the average member preferring broader “big pictures”. They might not have the intricate facileness with tools that we have for pretty much that reason–that stone adze is sharp enough, no psychological push to make it even sharper.

3: Even further into the realm of guesswork. I would guess its sense of self would be less strongly defined. It’s quite possible for people to experience modes of consciousness where the usual boundary of self at the skin dissolves away; such a state might be more commonplace for M. Distributed. “Individuals” in its race are probably rather a hazy concept; they might tend to blur into each other at points of contact. Injury and pain to whatever made up its substrate probably not so intense.

Interesting stuff to think about. I would love to see more science fiction treat its aliens as truly alien, rather than just as people with funny bone structure to their skulls.

13

In Harry Turtledove’s * WordWar* series, Earth is invaded by Reptiloid creatures. They refer to themselves simply as “The Race”, and every other species they’ve conquered/encountered had a pyshiology similar to their own. They were greatly shocked when they found out humans didn’t have mating seasons, and how Humanity had advanced so quickly after “Only” 800 yrs since the last probe was sent.