Writing about aliens — feedback?

[NoriMori]

(Be forewarned that this post is rather long. I’m quite verbose.)

I’m writing a science fiction story about aliens visiting Earth who are from a tidally locked planet. Most of these aliens have been living in sunlight their whole lives, both as individuals and as a species. The exceptions are a few tribes that migrated to the dark side thousands (perhaps tens of thousands or millions, I haven’t decided) of years ago, and those living in tropical substellar regions where the sun is mostly blocked out by a thick canopy of plants.

I thought I might make the “day-dwellers” (the ones who are in the sun all the time) primally afraid of darkness — significantly more so than human children are. It’s unnatural to them because it’s something they don’t experience, ever. They evolved for life in the sun, and darkness is an utterly alien thing to them, and therefore terrifying, in the same way an “eldritch abomination” like Cthulhu would be for humans. By the time they started building shelters that had the potential to block out light, their brains were already hard-wired in this way, so they either built their shelters in ways that let light filter in, or they used whatever artificial light they could find or make. That’s how much they fear the dark. The type of fear depends on the kind of darkness, though; being in a small, dark room would just cause claustrophobia and anxiety, while travelling to the dark side of the planet and finding yourself entirely surrounded by darkness, gazing at a vast expanse of barren terrain (or ice), with millions of stars overhead, would have a pretty good chance of causing something akin to an existential crisis (i.e. it’s so majestic and alien and traumatizing at the same time that it causes an intense psychological reaction similar to a spiritual experience).

I also thought it would be pretty reasonable that my aliens, and all the other organisms on their planet, don’t sleep. There’s no particular reason why they should have to become unconscious whenever they got tired the way Earth animals do. They can just rest. Plus, it’s still not entirely understood why we need to sleep anyway, so I figure it’s not unrealistic that my aliens simply don’t have whatever needs sleep fulfills in Earth organisms, or that they’re able to fulfill said needs in other ways.

What do you think of these ideas? (To recap, the ideas are that my aliens are terrified of the dark, and that they don’t sleep.)

Next question: On a planet that doesn’t have day-night cycles or seasonal cycles, or any obvious zeitgebers that I can think of, how in the hell would all the organisms keep time, biologically and psychologically? I thought that perhaps they’d use the planet’s sidereal year (which is approximately 37 Earth days), but they can’t see the stars on the day side to keep track of this (unless red dwarf stars are “dark” enough that you can see stars during the day. Are they? I don’t know). Even if they could see the stars, chances are not all the organisms would be able to keep track of them instinctively (after all, not all Earth organisms can). Then I thought perhaps they keep time by a comet that passes by periodically, but again, there’s the problem with seeing it past the sun, and then what happens when the comet breaks up? And the planet doesn’t have a moon, so that’s out, too.

Really, they could use anything they wanted, because without days or seasons, things like years are essentially meaningless and could have any value. But the way they kept time would have to start out as an external cue, and it would have to be relatively consistent, not just some random occurrence like a solar flare. Any ideas as to what I can use that would be fairly consistent (like, about as consistent as our astronomically-based zeitgebers) and wouldn’t take hundreds or thousands of years to occur (geomagnetic reversals are out for this reason and others). I’m seriously drawing a blank. If anyone has any blinding insights, they would be majorly appreciated.

Another question: How big can a spaceship be and still enter Earth and land safely? I don’t know much about spaceships. I was originally going to have 150 aliens on the crew, because Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale, which is something I’m really trying to avoid. Some cursory research has revealed to me that the record for the largest simultaneous crew on a human spacecraft is 8 people. Considering how big a spaceship has to be just to accommodate that many people, I’m starting to seriously wonder just how enormous a spaceship would have to be to accommodate 150 aliens, and whether this would be realistic for safely entering the Earth’s atmosphere and, importantly, landing safely and without attracting immediate notice from the government (or whoever). Does anyone know enough about space travel to tell me how realistic this would be? For help in visualizing how much space the aliens would take up on a ship: In my current conception, the aliens are quadrupedal and about the size of a large dog, but about twice as wide and not quite as tall (they look kind of like giant beetles, with bodies very short and low to the ground and their legs being more so horizontal and therefore hardly adding anything to their height). Individually they don’t need much space for personal accommodations. Also, as far as fuel goes, they’re travelling here from approximately 20 lightyears away, and also have fuel stored for the trip back, and fuel for other things like powering the equipment, and feeding people and all that other stuff that fuel is directly or indirectly used for. (Wow, this spaceship is gonna be frackin’ HUGE… Assume for a moment that they’re in suspension for most of the trip and therefore only need food for departure and arrival… :P)

Ignoring, for a moment, the problem its enormous size might pose (I can make it smaller), if the ship were to enter and land in a very remote area, would there be even the slightest chance of it going unnoticed and/or unrecognized by the government or NASA or whoever the hell’s looking at the sky and space, as well as the humans near the landing sight? (Remember that it’s a remote area, so the humans aren’t close by.) And if, hypothetically, they managed to deposit some kind of satellite in Earth’s orbit before landing, without attracting notice, and then landed, what’s the longest amount of time that could pass before the satellite was noticed? (The satellite is so they can map the Earth’s surface and make coordinates, and I want to know if I can realistically include this.)

Basically, the beginning of the story so far depends on the aliens going for a fairly long while without being noticed by the general public. (They do very quickly encounter some humans, but the humans don’t go running to the press/government/police/whatever right away.) But I’ve always thought, in the back of my head, “Seriously, how realistic is that? Wouldn’t people notice a ball of fire entering the atmosphere? Wouldn’t government satellites and/or telescopes or whatever they use to monitor stuff up there see it? This doesn’t sound very realistic.” And it’s been bugging me more and more over the past few days/weeks, so I’m looking for some feedback, from people who know more about this stuff than I do.

[Turek]

The “scared of the dark because they never experience it” is straight out of Asimov’s Nightfall. If I were reading your book, I’d find that distracting. I don’t think it would be a deal-breaker, but I’d notice it. You’ll have to be really careful of that, since it’s such a well-known work.

For something external from the planet that could be used to note the passage of time, how about a moon or two? Those would have fixed periods, and they’d be visible even in full daylight. If you had two moons, you could even have two “major” named time periods, one for each moon’s period (ie, a “month” and something else).

Not sleeping- that sounds reasonable, or at least something I’d be willing to suspend disbelief about.

[rhysf]

I think you have some interesting ideas. I think, to be plausible, it would help to have explicit biological or cultural reasons for the day-dwellers’ pathological fear of the dark. Given that they can experience night by simply travelling to the other hemisphere, it seems more akin to the way humans experience being under the surface of the ocean - strange and unsettling but not necessarily terrifying.

I had a similar idea to this a few months ago but in reverse - a human envoy visiting an alien civilisation devoid of night or sleep. In that context, the idea of entering a highly vulnerable state for a third of the day, every day of your life would seem like a weird and potentially risky thing to do.

I agree with Turek that you’d need to avoid too many similarities with Nightfall but your plot seems sufficiently different (for such a highly regarded work, I found Nightfall very disappointing but I feel that way about Asimov in general).

[Kaio]

Does tidal locking mean that the planet’s axis is always tipped (for example) north pole toward the sun? I’m really tired and have tried to visualize it about five times and keep confusing myself. If not and the axis is fixed, you could use the seasonal movement of the sun northward and southward in the sky as your obvious external cycle, even if there aren’t apparent seasonal changes in weather/climate.

The only other thing I could think of, aside from a moon, is another nearby star. Not necessarily a binary star system, but one that’s close enough to be visible as a secondary sun, which would move around in the sky (and sometimes disappear as it moved to the dark side) as the planet moved through its orbit.

Anyway, I asked a friend and he suggested that if it’s not in astronomy, look at biology. The aliens can look at their own lifecycle or that of other organisms and use that for timekeeping. For example, how long it takes to reach puberty (or if they are insectoid, how long is the larval stage) as a unit of measurement. Or a flowering plant that they particularly rely on for food, that flowers in predictable cycles.

The problem I see with this is that biology tends to be a bit mushier with time (not every pregnancy is exactly the same length, nor does everyone hit puberty at the same age). Also, would a flowering plant flower in regular cycles when there are no external cycles to synchronize to? I don’t know.

[jjimm]

Minor point: if fear of the darkness is so primally terrifying, what would have motivated the first tribes to explore? How would they have been able to stand it? If those tribes could stand it, why wouldn’t others?

The spaceship landing, you could take advantage of the massive skepticism that exists towards such phenomena. If we take it as true that governments don’t have any crazy secrets about aliens, which I think we can, then a craft landing in a remote area (say the Gobi Desert or the steppes of Mongolia), even if witnessed by hundreds or thousands of people, may not actually excite any official necessity to explore. It would probably just be dismissed as a meteor/bolide event, or the burnup of an old Soviet spy satellite. Maybe a couple of amateurs or scientists would go looking for the meteorite or whatever, but they wouldn’t necessarily expect to find anything.

ETA: how about the race of aliens actually having no concept of time as we understand it? The only way they can measure time is in terms of their lifetimes or significant events like reaching puberty. Thus their comprehension of time would be irregular, and their references would be like “when X’twningg came of age” or “when granma Liuroddxiueo died”; future could be only referenced by things like “when Ptyurtye has children”.

[TriPolar]

Agree that the Nightfall similarity is distracting, and likely to encur the wrath of science fiction fans.

Why does common time need to be tracked? It wasn’t that big a deal in increments less than a day for most of human history. They would eventually develop clocks in an arbitrary time increment. But they don’t need concepts like days, months, or years. It would be interesting to observe a society that wasn’t obsessed with time.

Entering earth’s atmosphere isn’t that big of a deal. They have a level of technology that exceeds our own if they made it here, so you can make up a technology that allows a 150 person craft to land on Earth. If you want to limit the technology, it’s still not too big of a deal. The space shuttle could have had a lot more people on board. A dedicated landing craft makes it a lot easier since the main ship would have to be very large to maintain life support for 150 aliens over a very long time and distance, unless you go back to the advanced technology approach. Also, do the aliens have to be human sized? If the aliens are the size of housecats, 150 of then would easily fit in a space shuttle.

Being noticed? A large main ship in orbit would almost certainly be detected since we’re now scanning constantly for objects on a collision course and orbiting space flight debris. A smaller craft heading straight in could look like an asteroid entering the atmosphere, and if it hit the ocean there might not be major efforts to locate the mystery object (which would probably be assumed to be in a smithereen state).

[Balance]

If the aliens’ world remained habitable long enough for them to evolve adaptations to constant daylight, it must somehow have a stable water cycle–otherwise, all the water would end up in a frozen waste on the night side while the day side became an uninhabitable desert. I imagine that would require massive, constant circulation in the atmosphere. The twilight regions would likely be home to enormous, permanent storm systems. That could play into some interesting quirks in their mythology, featuring a dark, frozen hell that lies beyond incredibly violent storms.

On the bright side…maybe they could power their whole planetside civilization with wind farms around the edges.

Another point: given their profound fear of the dark, their ships would presumably be completely opaque, and flown entirely by instruments. You wouldn’t want your pilots looking into the depths of space and flipping out. EVA would be the worst sort of punishment duty, and most external maintenance and repairs would be handled remotely via robots.

[TriPolar]

Forgot to mention this: I don’t buy a pathological fear of the dark. Not in Nightfall, or this story. It makes no sense. I can understand people or aliens panic at their first exposure to darkness, but it wouldn’t be some kind of instinctual behavior. And any sufficiently advanced society would be exploring and experimenting a situation that could be so easily produced.

[NoriMori]

@Turek

The “scared of the dark because they never experience it” is straight out of Asimov’s Nightfall. If I were reading your book, I’d find that distracting. I don’t think it would be a deal-breaker, but I’d notice it. You’ll have to be really careful of that, since it’s such a well-known work.

Funny, I’m a fan of Asimov and have never heard of it. That kinda sucks. I hate when that happens. But then again, just because someone else has also thought of it doesn’t mean it’s now off-limits. I might still use it. Who knows.

Wait… Is that the one where the aliens go on murderous rampages whenever there’s a solar eclipse because they can see all the stars and it makes them feel small? Because if it is, that’s not really all that similar to my idea. My aliens are afraid of the dark because it’s DARK, not because it makes them feel small. But I dunno, maybe it’s more similar than I imagine. I haven’t read Nightfall.

@Turek

For something external from the planet that could be used to note the passage of time, how about a moon or two?

It doesn’t have a moon. I might give it a moon just to solve this problem, though…

@Turek

Not sleeping- that sounds reasonable, or at least something I’d be willing to suspend disbelief about.

That’s good.

@rhysf

I think you have some interesting ideas. I think, to be plausible, it would help to have explicit biological or cultural reasons for the day-dwellers’ pathological fear of the dark. Given that they can experience night by simply travelling to the other hemisphere, it seems more akin to the way humans experience being under the surface of the ocean - strange and unsettling but not necessarily terrifying.

Well, the thing is, most of them hadn’t travelled to the other side of the hemisphere ever before. Kind of like how we used to not know about North America. And even after they started going there, it was only for astronomical purposes. And as Balance points out, they would mostly be prevented from checking it out anyway because of permanent storms at the terminator. Whereas water on Earth is pretty ubiquitous, and even if humans themselves didn’t go into it often, their evolutionary ancestors did. Whereas early organisms on my planet have always been used to light, so it’s about as ingrained as something can reasonably be.

@rhysf

I had a similar idea to this a few months ago but in reverse - a human envoy visiting an alien civilisation devoid of night or sleep. In that context, the idea of entering a highly vulnerable state for a third of the day, every day of your life would seem like a weird and potentially risky thing to do.

I’m actually exploring that as well. XD When humans explain to them about sleeping, they think it’s weird and bemoan all the time they lose. XD That’s part of why my aliens are farther advanced than humans, because they just keep going, all the time. Not that they don’t get tired, but when they rest they can still be productive in other ways.

@rhysf

I agree with Turek that you’d need to avoid too many similarities with Nightfall but your plot seems sufficiently different (for such a highly regarded work, I found Nightfall very disappointing but I feel that way about Asimov in general).

Okay, now I’m starting to worry. Are there any similarities aside from tidal locking and the “afraid of the dark” thing?

@Kaio

Does tidal locking mean that the planet’s axis is always tipped (for example) north pole toward the sun?

No. Interesting idea though.

@Kaio

The only other thing I could think of, aside from a moon, is another nearby star. Not necessarily a binary star system, but one that’s close enough to be visible as a secondary sun, which would move around in the sky (and sometimes disappear as it moved to the dark side) as the planet moved through its orbit.

I’ll look into that. I don’t know how close the nearest star is. I’ll look it up. I guess I’ll just have to decide for myself whether it’s close enough or not.

@Kaio

Anyway, I asked a friend and he suggested that if it’s not in astronomy, look at biology. The aliens can look at their own lifecycle or that of other organisms and use that for timekeeping. For example, how long it takes to reach puberty (or if they are insectoid, how long is the larval stage) as a unit of measurement. Or a flowering plant that they particularly rely on for food, that flowers in predictable cycles.

Yeah, I thought of that, but as you point out…

@Kaio

The problem I see with this is that biology tends to be a bit mushier with time (not every pregnancy is exactly the same length, nor does everyone hit puberty at the same age). Also, would a flowering plant flower in regular cycles when there are no external cycles to synchronize to? I don’t know.

Exactly. Exactly. That’s why I’m about ready to pull my hair out.

@jjimm

Minor point: if fear of the darkness is so primally terrifying, what would have motivated the first tribes to explore? How would they have been able to stand it? If those tribes could stand it, why wouldn’t others?

The reaction varies from person to person. Some find it a positive experience. And there could be any number of reasons, just as there can be any number of reasons that humans decide to go anywhere unfamiliar and potentially scary. Why would any humans migrate to the Arctic, for example? It’s really frackin’ cold there.

For my aliens, it was a very long time ago. Maybe, as a species, they weren’t as afraid, and some of them decided to check it out. Or perhaps they went there for astronomical purposes and when they were done the expedition some of them either got stranded or they stayed voluntarily. Perhaps it was a spiritual thing, kind of like how monks or whatever go live in the mountains, spiritual aliens went to live on the dark side of the planet, and ended up with enough followers to found colonies.

@jjimm

The spaceship landing, you could take advantage of the massive skepticism that exists towards such phenomena. If we take it as true that governments don’t have any crazy secrets about aliens, which I think we can, then a craft landing in a remote area (say the Gobi Desert or the steppes of Mongolia), even if witnessed by hundreds or thousands of people, may not actually excite any official necessity to explore.

Really? Oh.

The area my ship is landing isn’t quite THAT remote, though… It lands in Angel Canyon, Utah, somewhere north of Kanab. XD I consider that remote, but when you start trying to land alien spaceships there, it suddenly doesn’t seem quite so remote…

@jjimm

It would probably just be dismissed as a meteor/bolide event, or the burnup of an old Soviet spy satellite.

What’s hilarious is I just finished watching the first episode of “Pioneer One”, where they use that as an excuse for a capsule that fell to Earth with a man inside and spread deadly radiation. That’s actually part of why I feel so skeptical that the government wouldn’t investigate. In Pioneer One, even without the radiation, the capsule was very much noticed as it was falling to Earth, and I think it either exploded or broke the sound barrier — or did something that shook up the area around it. And that was just a capsule that held one person. Imagine a massive ship with quite a few aliens on it. O.o

@jjimm

Maybe a couple of amateurs or scientists would go looking for the meteorite or whatever, but they wouldn’t necessarily expect to find anything.

Hmm. How long do you think it would take for them to find it if it landed in Angel Canyon?

@jjimm

ETA: how about the race of aliens actually having no concept of time as we understand it? The only way they can measure time is in terms of their lifetimes or significant events like reaching puberty. Thus their comprehension of time would be irregular, and their references would be like “when X’twningg came of age” or “when granma Liuroddxiueo died”; future could be only referenced by things like “when Ptyurtye has children”.

I thought of that, but they need a concept of time, and a precise way of measuring it. How would they do science, otherwise?

Those are interesting names! XD

@TriPolar

Agree that the Nightfall similarity is distracting, and likely to encur the wrath of science fiction fans.

Oh great. Why do my ideas always turn out to have been done before by someone a million times more awesome than I am?

@TriPolar

Why does common time need to be tracked? It wasn’t that big a deal in increments less than a day for most of human history.

Yeah, but it is now. And you’re actually proving my point — even early humans dealt in time increments of less than a day. My aliens may not need months or years, but they still need something.

@TriPolar

They would eventually develop clocks in an arbitrary time increment.

By the time my story starts, they have done that, but what about before they had the knowledge or intelligence to make something like that? What would they have done then?

@TriPolar

But they don’t need concepts like days, months, or years. It would be interesting to observe a society that wasn’t obsessed with time.

Well, if they’re not doing science, then they aren’t usually that obsessed with time, at least not on a day-to-day basis, especially since they don’t sleep. They also live a really long time, which is part of the reason they don’t care as much about time. But their bodies still would have needed to be able to measure time, even if they themselves didn’t care. And eventually they would start to have reasons why keeping time might be important, like agriculture or something like that. And even for building a timekeeping device, unless it was a light- or atom-based clock, they’d have no way of knowing if it was consistent, so it would be pretty useless.

@TriPolar

Entering earth’s atmosphere isn’t that big of a deal. They have a level of technology that exceeds our own if they made it here, so you can make up a technology that allows a 150 person craft to land on Earth.

I’m trying not to make up anything. I might use technology that is implausible (I was thinking of using an Alcubierre drive to get them here, but I’ve more or less scrapped that idea, though I might come back to it), but I don’t want to just pull something out of my butt and fall back on technobabble.

@TriPolar

If you want to limit the technology, it’s still not too big of a deal. The space shuttle could have had a lot more people on board.

Really? How many, would you say?

@TriPolar

A dedicated landing craft makes it a lot easier since the main ship would have to be very large to maintain life support for 150 aliens over a very long time and distance, unless you go back to the advanced technology approach.

Well, yesterday I was starting to think that maybe I could have them in suspended animation for most of the trip.

I’m not sure I understand this: “A dedicated landing craft makes it a lot easier.” What does it make easier? Entering the atmosphere? Why does it make it easier?

@TriPolar

Also, do the aliens have to be human sized? If the aliens are the size of housecats, 150 of then would easily fit in a space shuttle.

I can make them smaller, but they’re definitely bigger than house cats. And they’re not nearly as “squishy” or agile as house cats, so I can’t just cram them in. (Lol. I keep picturing a hundred house cats all crammed into a space shuttle, meowing. XD) Once they get there, they’re going to be very active collecting and analyzing samples, remotely controlling little exploration probes, doing astronomy stuff, just basically using computers and equipment and stuff, like they do on manned spacecraft. They’re going to be busy and they’ll need to move around. They’re kind of bulky — not large, per se, but heavy and unwieldy. Although, I do keep forgetting that Earth’s gravity is about a third of theirs, so they’ll weigh a lot less, which might help with the moving around thing.

Actually, that’s another question I’ve been meaning to ask: In a planet with gravity three times ours, is a bulky, quadrupedal dog-sized alien realistic? I know about the square/cube law, and I know that the heavier the gravity, the smaller the organisms are gonna be to compensate. But on Earth we have organisms ranging from single-celled organisms to elephants, so I figure even in three times the gravity you’ll still have something as large as a big dog every once in a while. They look bulky, but maybe they’re actually pretty light for their size by Earth standards, which might help with the triple gravity at home… ><

@TriPolar

Being noticed? A large main ship in orbit would almost certainly be detected since we’re now scanning constantly for objects on a collision course and orbiting space flight debris.

I’m not talking about the ship being in orbit, but a satellite they’re depositing before entering. Just a garden variety satellite. Would that be noticed? If so, how long would it take? If the fact that they have to stop and position the satellite would get them noticed way too easily, I can scrap that. It’s something I only just thought of yesterday. The satellite is for mapping the Earth.

@TriPolar

A smaller craft heading straight in could look like an asteroid entering the atmosphere, and if it hit the ocean there might not be major efforts to locate the mystery object (which would probably be assumed to be in a smithereen state).

Well, it’s not hitting the ocean. I might change that, but where I’ve got it now, it’s not anywhere near any large body of water. And what about a large craft heading straight in? Could that look like an asteroid? What if it came in at night, would that make it more or less likely for it be noticed and/or recognized?

@Balance

If the aliens’ world remained habitable long enough for them to evolve adaptations to constant daylight, it must somehow have a stable water cycle–otherwise, all the water would end up in a frozen waste on the night side while the day side became an uninhabitable desert. I imagine that would require massive, constant circulation in the atmosphere. The twilight regions would likely be home to enormous, permanent storm systems. That could play into some interesting quirks in their mythology, featuring a dark, frozen hell that lies beyond incredibly violent storms.

That’s actually a really good idea. It would explain why they hardly ever went there in ancient times. Can I use that? This is why I love coming on here, because people who know more about this kind of thing than I do can tell me how my planet would work, which really helps with the worldbuilding.

I don’t know how much mythology they have, though. They’re pretty pragmatic. Not that they wouldn’t have mythology in ancient times, but it probably wouldn’t be as fantastical as ours, or as widespread. They’re not big on making up explanations for things they don’t understand.

@Balance

On the bright side…maybe they could power their whole planetside civilization with wind farms around the edges.

That’s a good idea, too.

@Balance

Another point: given their profound fear of the dark, their ships would presumably be completely opaque, and flown entirely by instruments. You wouldn’t want your pilots looking into the depths of space and flipping out.

Yeah, I thought of that. Although I will point out that looking out at space through a window from inside a lighted room isn’t quite the same. If that were enough to freak them out, they could get nervous just from looking at anything that’s black in colour. XD It would still make them pretty uncomfortable, though. I might just have them be in suspended animation for most of the trip anyway, and anything that required anyone to look outside would probably be handled by astronomers, who are used to it (and many of whom are from the dark side anyway), or by people from those tropical regions I mentioned who are also not really afraid of the dark.

@Balance

EVA would be the worst sort of punishment duty, and most external maintenance and repairs would be handled remotely via robots.

Yeah, probably. Especially if the aliens were in suspended animation. XD

@TriPolar

Forgot to mention this: I don’t buy a pathological fear of the dark. Not in Nightfall, or this story. It makes no sense. I can understand people or aliens panic at their first exposure to darkness, but it wouldn’t be some kind of instinctual behavior. And any sufficiently advanced society would be exploring and experimenting a situation that could be so easily produced.

That’s a good point. I just thought it might be interesting. As far as exploring and experimenting, yes, they’d be doing that, but that doesn’t mean they’ve succeeded in overcoming their fear of the dark, as a species. By your logic, humans having any instinctive fears doesn’t make any sense either. In fact, it makes even less sense, because humans are exposed to darkness all the time, yet many are still afraid of it. I just figured I’d take that to its logical extreme, and darkness-fearing aliens is what I got. I understand what you’re saying though. Maybe I’ll scrap it, especially since so many people brought up a similarity to Nightfall. (God that pisses me off when that happens. Often I think of an idea and then find out someone famous has used it. Then I feel like I’m ripping them off, even though I came up with the idea independently. Grr.) No big loss, I guess, except that it was an interesting concept that could be played with in interesting ways.

I need to figure out more about my aliens’ history and their level of technology in various areas, I guess. Then I can decide what their fears would be, and how and why some of them might have migrated to the dark side, et cetera.

———

Phew. Okay. Thanks for the feedback, everyone! Keep it coming!

[Nava]

The daylocked folk could also have a greater physiological need for light than earth lifeforms; thus, those who lived near penumbra areas might be more able than most to brave the dark psychologically - but they would still need the light, they wouldn’t physically be able to stay in it for too long. The frequency range they need should be within or close enough to the visible spectrum for this dependency to be solvable relatively easily, but there could still be instances where certain kinds of lighting just don’t work for them in this respect (for example, if the range they need is at the edge of the UV-vis spectrum, a bluish light will work better than a yellowish one).

[TriPolar]

@NoriMori

Yeah, but it is now. And you’re actually proving my point — even early humans dealt in time increments of less than a day. My aliens may not need months or years, but they still need something.

By the time my story starts, they have done that, but what about before they had the knowledge or intelligence to make something like that? What would they have done then?

Well, if they’re not doing science, then they aren’t usually that obsessed with time, at least not on a day-to-day basis, especially since they don’t sleep. They also live a really long time, which is part of the reason they don’t care as much about time. But their bodies still would have needed to be able to measure time, even if they themselves didn’t care. And eventually they would start to have reasons why keeping time might be important, like agriculture or something like that. And even for building a timekeeping device, unless it was a light- or atom-based clock, they’d have no way of knowing if it was consistent, so it would be pretty useless.

That is sort of a human-centric view. When they develop science, they’ll find many ways to time things, like just some basic chemical reactions. In a world with no days, no seasons, no years, they may not care until they advance to scientific investigation. I assume there are no consistent seasons on this planet, so there wouldn’t be a need for an agricultural consideration.

Really? How many, would you say?

Well I think the shuttle can land carrying a 10,000 pound satellite. I think it could easily land with 50 more humans crammed in. Look up the specs for the shuttle. It should give you the dimensions of the payload bay. The main cabin would have more room in it also.

I’m not sure I understand this: “A dedicated landing craft makes it a lot easier.” What does it make easier? Entering the atmosphere? Why does it make it easier?

A dedicated craft could be much smaller than an interstellar ship because it doesn’t need all the fuel and life support equipment and supplies. This would mean less area to face the heat of re-entry caused by air resistance.

Actually, that’s another question I’ve been meaning to ask: In a planet with gravity three times ours, is a bulky, quadrupedal dog-sized alien realistic? I know about the square/cube law, and I know that the heavier the gravity, the smaller the organisms are gonna be to compensate. But on Earth we have organisms ranging from single-celled organisms to elephants, so I figure even in three times the gravity you’ll still have something as large as a big dog every once in a while. They look bulky, but maybe they’re actually pretty light for their size by Earth standards, which might help with the triple gravity at home… ><

I don’t think we can say that greater gravity would prevent the evolution of larger or smaller creatures than ourselves. This book, the Great Mambo Chicken…might give you some info and ideas along those lines.

I’m not talking about the ship being in orbit, but a satellite they’re depositing before entering. Just a garden variety satellite. Would that be noticed? If so, how long would it take? If the fact that they have to stop and position the satellite would get them noticed way too easily, I can scrap that. It’s something I only just thought of yesterday. The satellite is for mapping the Earth.

I think we’d notice any new satellite. Maybe not though, if we weren’t specifically looking for it.

Well, it’s not hitting the ocean. I might change that, but where I’ve got it now, it’s not anywhere near any large body of water. And what about a large craft heading straight in? Could that look like an asteroid? What if it came in at night, would that make it more or less likely for it be noticed and/or recognized?

If it’s coming ‘straight in’, meaning not spending time in a parking orbit, it might look like an asteroid. I think the idea of a ship hiding behind an asteroid has been used before. If it’s an unpowered landing like the space shuttle, the apparent fireball would certainly be noticed if the entry path covered populated areas. So something arcing over the Pacific that reaches land in the lower atmosphere might not be noticed. You are creating fiction, so you have some license to allow the ship to land unnoticed just because nobody was paying attention at the right time or place.

That’s a good point. I just thought it might be interesting. As far as exploring and experimenting, yes, they’d be doing that, but that doesn’t mean they’ve succeeded in overcoming their fear of the dark, as a species. By your logic, humans having any instinctive fears doesn’t make any sense either. In fact, it makes even less sense, because humans are exposed to darkness all the time, yet many are still afraid of it. I just figured I’d take that to its logical extreme, and darkness-fearing aliens is what I got. I understand what you’re saying though.

I just don’t see an evolutionary reason for a pathological fear of the dark. I can see prejudice against those who live in the dark, or some social taboos.

[GrandWino]

I’m not much of a sci-fi guy, so this may or may not be helpful, but if this species is so afraid of the dark that they won’t even travel to the other side of their own planet, why would they hop in a spaceship and travel into space? And why would they land on a planet which is dark half the time? I don’t think exploration works that way (meaning, I think they’d explore their own planet before heading out to check out others).

[Balance]

For time references, bear in mind that a tidally locked planet isn’t necessarily (or even probably) completely fixed relative to its star. There would almost certainly be some measure of libration, which would result in the day/night terminator shifting in a consistent pattern. In regions near the terminator, you’d get “seasons” of a sort, as the storms follow the terminator. I would guess that you’d get periods you might describe as seasons of Calm, Winds, and Storms. It’s plausible that most of the civilization would experience these seasons, because I suspect that the sunward regions farthest from the terminator would remain inhospitable deserts. Prime territory on the world would be in a band between the deserts and the storms, I would imagine. A mountain range (or glaciers) near the terminator might you give your natives a visible reference point with higher granularity–the shadows “eating” the mountains.

If you want a different problematic fear for your aliens, how about fear of heights/falling? Since you’ve defined it as a high-grav planet, falls would presumably be more dangerous. Achieving flight/space travel would have been much more difficult for them, both for practical and psychological reasons.

[I_Know_Nothing]

For time keeping, the planet could have regular measurable fluctuations in its magnetic field. Or you could have a plant species that responds to these fluctuations. I’m thinking along the lines of Paleomagnetismbut with plants.

Someone already mentioned axis tilt where the sun would basically move in a circle in the sky. You could tell what time a day it was by the position of the sun on that circle. You could add a little axis wobble(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession) which would mean the diameter of the sun circle would be constantly shrinking and expanding. You could tell what time of “year/insert invented unit of time here” it was by the size of the circle.

[Kevbo]

They could base some time measurements on their own physiology…we pretty much based the second on the human heartbeat after all.

[I_Know_Nothing]

Oh. I also think the no sleep thing is pretty major and would require many, potentially fascinating, work-arounds. I would definitely not just gloss over this point. Hereis a recent news story about dreams in PTSD patients that touches a little on the science or REM sleep, FWIW.

[TriPolar]

@I_Know_Nothing

Oh. I also think the no sleep thing is pretty major and would require many, potentially fascinating, work-arounds. I would definitely not just gloss over this point. Hereis a recent news story about dreams in PTSD patients that touches a little on the science or REM sleep, FWIW.

Well they are aliens, evolved in a different environment. I like science fiction that doesn’t try to project humanity or earth biology onto every alien species. I could see some very different philosophical beliefs arising in a society that doesn’t sleep, and only keeps track of time for scientific purposes. This is just my preference though.

I think the OP has some good ideas here. Some maybe not so good, but that’s the process of creating many things, start with a shotgun approach, then throw out what doesn’t work, and refine what does.

[Nava]

@TriPolar

I just don’t see an evolutionary reason for a pathological fear of the dark. I can see prejudice against those who live in the dark, or some social taboos.

Why should there be an evolutionary reason? Is there an evolutionary reason for “freaking out when the number 13 is mentioned”? Not as far as I can tell, yet there’s many human societies where that behavior is normal enough. What’s pathological from our PoV is not necessarily from theirs. To me at least, the interesting thing about aliens isn’t the different looks, it’s the different mindset.

[NoriMori]

@TriPolar

That is sort of a human-centric view.

You think? I don’t think it is. Time is important to all organisms that I’m aware of; even if they don’t understand the concept of time, their bodies rely on external time cues to function properly. I figured that would be true of life forms on any planet.

I guess I should’ve made it understood in my original post that I’ve already decided that my aliens need a way to keep time, even before science. What I haven’t figured out is how I can make this happen.

@TriPolar

When they develop science, they’ll find many ways to time things, like just some basic chemical reactions.

That’s probably exactly what they’ll do, but I still need external cues they can rely on before that.

@TriPolar

In a world with no days, no seasons, no years, they may not care until they advance to scientific investigation.

They might not consciously care, but their bodies will.

@TriPolar

Well I think the shuttle can land carrying a 10,000 pound satellite. I think it could easily land with 50 more humans crammed in.

Wow. Okay. Just how crammed in are we talking here?

@TriPolar

Look up the specs for the shuttle. It should give you the dimensions of the payload bay. The main cabin would have more room in it also.

I will do that. Thanks!

@TriPolar

A dedicated craft could be much smaller than an interstellar ship because it doesn’t need all the fuel and life support equipment and supplies. This would mean less area to face the heat of re-entry caused by air resistance.

Okay, now I’m not sure if I understand what you mean by “dedicated landing craft”. Do you mean for my aliens to have a separate part of the ship that they use for landing while leaving the rest behind, say, in orbit? Wouldn’t that get them discovered?

@TriPolar

I don’t think we can say that greater gravity would prevent the evolution of larger or smaller creatures than ourselves.

Oh, good. And I might just look into that book you mention, it sounds fascinating.

@TriPolar

I think we’d notice any new satellite. Maybe not though, if we weren’t specifically looking for it.

Hmm. Okay then. I might include it after all, then. Willing suspension of disbelief, and all that jazz. Ah, but then you mention a parking orbit, which I assume the ship would have to go into in order to position the satellite anyway. Sooooo maybe not…

@TriPolar

If it’s coming ‘straight in’, meaning not spending time in a parking orbit, it might look like an asteroid. I think the idea of a ship hiding behind an asteroid has been used before. If it’s an unpowered landing like the space shuttle, the apparent fireball would certainly be noticed if the entry path covered populated areas. So something arcing over the Pacific that reaches land in the lower atmosphere might not be noticed. You are creating fiction, so you have some license to allow the ship to land unnoticed just because nobody was paying attention at the right time or place.

Well, I’m glad you think I have some license there. Hopefully that means future readers (if there are any) will think so too.

@TriPolar

I just don’t see an evolutionary reason for a pathological fear of the dark. I can see prejudice against those who live in the dark, or some social taboos.

See Nava’s last post, right above mine, and my response to them, at the end of this post.

@Bob Ducca

I’m not much of a sci-fi guy, so this may or may not be helpful, but if this species is so afraid of the dark that they won’t even travel to the other side of their own planet, why would they hop in a spaceship and travel into space? And why would they land on a planet which is dark half the time? I don’t think exploration works that way (meaning, I think they’d explore their own planet before heading out to check out others).

They have explored their own planet, about as much as we have. And they do travel to the dark side. It’s just that they generally avoid it unless they have a reason to.

And as for why they’d go into space and land on a planet that’s dark half the time — well, for the same reason we would. To find intelligent life. They’re very curious. Besides, they have artificial light. Travelling into space, or to a planet that’s dark half the time, really isn’t that big a deal.

@Balance

For time references, bear in mind that a tidally locked planet isn’t necessarily (or even probably) completely fixed relative to its star. There would almost certainly be some measure of libration, which would result in the day/night terminator shifting in a consistent pattern.

Wow, I didn’t even think of that at all. Thanks! (I can use that, right? Even though I came here partly for ideas, I feel weird using things other people have suggested…)

@Balance

In regions near the terminator, you’d get “seasons” of a sort, as the storms follow the terminator. I would guess that you’d get periods you might describe as seasons of Calm, Winds, and Storms.

That’s brilliant. Can I use that?

@Balance

It’s plausible that most of the civilization would experience these seasons, because I suspect that the sunward regions farthest from the terminator would remain inhospitable deserts.

I read that the sunward region would most likely experience permanent torrential rains. Now I’m confused.

@Balance

Prime territory on the world would be in a band between the deserts and the storms, I would imagine.

That’s what I thought, too, although for somewhat different reasons.

@Balance

A mountain range (or glaciers) near the terminator might you give your natives a visible reference point with higher granularity–the shadows “eating” the mountains.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean here.

@Balance

If you want a different problematic fear for your aliens, how about fear of heights/falling? Since you’ve defined it as a high-grav planet, falls would presumably be more dangerous.

Hmm. I didn’t think of that. That’s an interesting idea. Although I never really thought of my aliens as encountering heights that often. They aren’t big on tall structures, and I suck at visualizing things in my head so I keep picturing their planet as one big flat landscape. Now that I think about it, though, there are definitely going to be cliffs and stuff. I’ll definitely consider making them afraid of heights.

@Balance

Achieving flight/space travel would have been much more difficult for them, both for practical and psychological reasons.

Funnily enough, a few hours ago when I posted my first response and mentioned the higher gravity, I realized that they’d need a higher escape velocity for their spaceship. XD

@I_Know_Nothing

For time keeping, the planet could have regular measurable fluctuations in its magnetic field.

I’m not sure if my planet has a magnetic field or not. There’s nothing saying it can’t, but if I’ve understood the things I’ve read correctly, it requires conditions that I’m not sure the planet has. I guess I’ll just have to guess and just say it does have those conditions, for the sake of my sanity. Although I might just use Balance’s libration idea.

@I_Know_Nothing

Or you could have a plant species that responds to these fluctuations.

I think I actually entertained that idea yesterday… XD I might do that…

@I_Know_Nothing

I’m thinking along the lines of Paleomagnetismbut with plants.

That looks interesting. I’m in class so I don’t have time to look into it in detail, but I will read that later.

@I_Know_Nothing

Someone already mentioned axis tilt where the sun would basically move in a circle in the sky. You could tell what time a day it was by the position of the sun on that circle. You could add a little axis wobble(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession) which would mean the diameter of the sun circle would be constantly shrinking and expanding. You could tell what time of “year/insert invented unit of time here” it was by the size of the circle.

Don’t you need axial tilt for that? I’m not sure if I understood the article. It only really talked about Earth’s precession as far as I could tell from a cursory reading, and that part of the cause of Earth’s precession was the Earth not being a perfect sphere. But it seemed to suggest that axial tilt is a factor as well. My planet doesn’t have any axial tilt. It doesn’t say anything about precession, although it’s possible that they just don’t know enough about it to say if there might be any or not. Does anyone here know if you need axial tilt for noticeable precession?

And before anyone mentions orbital eccentricity, it doesn’t have that, either, unfortunately. Otherwise I’d just use that. (Not that they’d be likely to notice it even if it did, unless the sun is really close in the sky. It’s a lot closer than our sun is to us, but I don’t know how noticeable an eccentric orbit would be from their perspective regardless. But it’s a moot point anyway.)

@Kevbo

They could base some time measurements on their own physiology…we pretty much based the second on the human heartbeat after all.

I thought of that, too, and they probably would have done that, for short stuff. But what about longer stuff?

@TriPolar

Well they are aliens, evolved in a different environment. I like science fiction that doesn’t try to project humanity or earth biology onto every alien species.

That’s basically what I’m trying to go for. I know you think my need for them to value and keep time is “human-centric”, but I’m actually trying really hard to give them non-human psychology and society. The time thing is just an exception. And they are going to be like humans in some ways. I don’t want them to be so different that it’s impossible for us to relate to each other.

Usually I try to give them traits that are either a) probably required for all life (e.g. DNA and carbon-based organisms; I know we don’t know for sure if they’re actually required, but everything I’ve read suggests that the conditions for something else working just as well are not all that likely), b) probably required for intelligent life, c) don’t occur in ANY known life, or d) are known to occur only in non-sentient organisms or even non-plant/animal organisms, or only in a very small number of organisms, preferably really strange ones. For instance, their reproductive system is kind of a mix of several different Earth varieties. Oh, and my aliens are sexless. I am going to have so much fun with the implications of that, as far as them trying to wrap their heads around human society. evil laughter

@TriPolar

I think the OP has some good ideas here.

Thanks!

@TriPolar

Some maybe not so good, but that’s the process of creating many things, start with a shotgun approach, then throw out what doesn’t work, and refine what does.

Yep. Only problem is I often get ahead of myself coming up with ideas, and I have a tendency to fall in love with them quickly and have trouble letting go of them. Then I end up jumping through hoops trying to keep them. But I always let go of them eventually, if they honestly just don’t work.

@Nava

Why should there be an evolutionary reason? Is there an evolutionary reason for “freaking out when the number 13 is mentioned”? Not as far as I can tell, yet there’s many human societies where that behavior is normal enough.

Well, I myself thought of it as partly an evolutionary thing, and I think TriPolar picked up on that. But in response to TriPolar’s skepticism, I think it’s reasonable that they’d be afraid of the dark simply because it’s so unfamiliar. It’s natural to be afraid of what’s unfamiliar. That’s how we stay safe. And I figure, the more unfamiliar something is, the more afraid you’ll be. And, within the confines of their planet, there’s not much of anything that’s more unfamiliar than darkness. It’s a black swan. It’s partly nature, and partly nurture. Obviously if they were raised to be used to the darkness, they’d be less afraid, and perhaps not afraid at all, but psychologically they have a propensity for it.

But, like I said, I might scrap it after all, especially since a similarity to Nightfall has been mentioned. Although I’d like to point out that their fear of darkness isn’t a major plot point, the way I presume it is in Nightfall. It’s just one fact about them among thousands. I might use it as a plot device or do fun things with it, but in the grand scheme of my story, it’s really not that significant. Plus, I’m trying to communicate their point of view at least as much as the humans’ if not more; so when it gets mention from their perspective it’ll usually be in such a casual way that you might not even realize it has any connection, such as the fact that the lights are always on, or something. It does get explained in the beginning, but aside from them explaining it to the humans (eventually), that’s basically the only explicit mention I have planned right now. If I do decide to keep it, I’d like to hope that potential readers wouldn’t flay me just for that.

@Nava

What’s pathological from our PoV is not necessarily from theirs. To me at least, the interesting thing about aliens isn’t the different looks, it’s the different mindset.

Well, they do find it pathological as far as being way, way stronger than their other instinctive fears. I agree about the fascination with different mindsets rather than just different looks. That’s part of what my story is about, is the difference between us and the aliens as far as how we think and how we see the world.

———

Phew again. Okay. Good info, you guys! I really appreciate it! I love the idea about libration and migrating storms, so thanks for that, Balance! I’d also like to ask again if I can use this idea:

@Balance

The twilight regions would likely be home to enormous, permanent storm systems. That could play into some interesting quirks in their mythology, featuring a dark, frozen hell that lies beyond incredibly violent storms.

[TriPolar]

Not sure if your satellite is the landing craft or something different. The smaller it is, the less noticeable it would be, to some extent. Depending on it’s purpose, it doesn’t have to be that close. You could have an enormous mother ship that remains in the asteroid belt while a smaller landing craft debarks for earth entry without ever going into orbit. There’s going to be some physics to work out that I can’t help you with. You could work up a more detailed explanation of the process and pose some questions in GQ. You’ll get some incredibly detailed analysis of the orbital and entry problems there. Good luck with your book!