Science Fiction Concepts

Was actually thinking something more along the lines of a parasite/symbiote type critter. Say one thing eats it the parasite takes over the body and experiences life in a new form kinda deal. So essentially a reincarnation species.

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Read about Thinking Rocks in one game book or another. So slow their cognitive functions they were overlooked until a highly sensitive ESP human spent enough time around them. Slow to communicate with and content with the sedentary life.

Makes for poor action film, however, unless you count more active races using them to throw at each other.

Read a comic about a race that looked like a blob-like monster but was very benign, but in need of help to repair its ship. Dated long before E.T., by the way. Had limited touch telepathy and great wisdom.

Traveller, the RPG, have many fascinating aliens, such as the K’kree, militant centaur-like vegans determined to wipe out meat-eaters and terrified of change since many millennia. Almost wiped out the Hivers until a clever move by this peace-loving race stopped the K’kree cold in their tracks.

Sounds a little bit like both Trill (Star Trek, symbiotic, personalities blend) and Goa’uld (Star Gate, parasitic mostly, personalities usually suppressed or even wiped). :relaxed:

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Less snake or worm more like cancer.

BUT there is one thing I’m not sure exists. Now it’ll prolly make you laugh at first but bear with me… Space Wizards!

Why can’t the supernatural take to the stars?? Not in a goofy magic schoolboys way but a sci-fi fantasy merger.

You mean, like in Warhammer 40,000? Orcs in Space! Elves too. And so on. Powered by both magic and tech, I believe, but I am no fan of it, so that is all I really know. :blush:

[quote=“Snoe, post:23, topic:14442”]
BUT there is one thing I’m not sure exists. Now it’ll prolly make you laugh at first but bear with me… Space Wizards!
[/quote]Nope, not at all :wink: Like for example, my very non-canon ending of ME involved vampires and other non-human sentient beings from Earth wiping out the reapers :smiling_imp:

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Lol
Now I’ve got the image of Gandalf standing in front of a Predator or xenonorph queen going “You shall not pass!!!”

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:astonished::confused::scream::hushed::neutral_face:

Now there’s a non-canon work of fiction if ever I heard one. :smile:

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Well, technically it’s not a work of fiction until I’ve written it down somewhere :wink: (and just imagine the amounts of sun-block space-faring vampires’d need just to be able to withstand all the unfiltered UV-radiation :scream:)

Head-cannon then, ah, canon. :stuck_out_tongue:


Sentient pencils, come to sign a peace treaty but their first envoys ends up tortured and killed over time through a horrible device called pencil sharpener, their lead-like blood used to doodle and what not. :scream:

This.
Means.
WAR!
:rage:

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Space wizards? Isn’t that what the jedi are meant to be?

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You guys done engaged my beast mode now…

Some good questions raised here, but I’d like to take a little umbrage with the central conceit, that science-fiction shies away from unique alien lifeforms and archetypes. Off the top of my head, I would direct people to places like: http://www.orionsarm.com/ a hard sci-fi worldbuilding project that goes into exhaustive detail about a great variety of species and technologies and approaches many of them from a very unique vantage point.

To answer an earlier idea about ‘magma aliens’ what you are describing are Silicon-Based lifeforms, a form of life that cannot grow on Earth, but is entirely possible scientifically speaking. The key thing about silicon based life is that it needs lots of heat to work. Imagine a silicon-based man wandering through a desert of burning sands, the temperature more than 800 degrees, desperately wishing for a glass of molten plasma to drink.

We tend to imbue alien cultures with motivations we recognize as a way to facilitate understanding between them and us, but that has more to do with the human-centrism inherent in most sci-fi. Most books are about humans directly, usually placing humans as deeply important in Galactic Society. Some exceptions to this are the Xeelee books by Stephen Baxter, in which the undisputed masters of Baryonic-Matter based life (Hint: you are this) are the Titular Xeelee, who are entirely unconcerned with Humanity as an antagonist, entrenched as they are in a much deeper conflict with dark-matter beings that suck the marrow out of suns in an attempt to ‘terraform’ the universe in such a way as to render it uninhabitable for the likes of you and me.

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Also, how a species collects and processes data is a very important thing that could be expanded upon more. When we think of a computer, we tend to think of a metal or plastic box with wires, diodes, circuits etc… When we write science fiction, we tend to only be able to think about computers in those terms, evolving the circuits and diodes and wires to create more impressive potential computers.

But does that have to define what a computer is?

To explain what I mean, picture the following:

You disembark from your shuttle onto a world that is one great, long meadow. Covering most of the planet’s land-mass is a hardy strain of long-grass that has a unique leaf-pattern at its top. The leaf has three triangles that turn and twist in the wind. The wind that howls across the open plains hits the grass and creates a susurrus, a wall of white noise that sounds somewhat like a crowd whispering to each other just below the level of consciousness.

If you felt inclined to stay there for many years, taking careful notes all the while, you would notice that the triangles at the top of the leaves move in such a way as to create specific sounds and notes as the wind whistles through them.

After more years of careful note-taking, you would discover that a note played on one stalk of grass alters the movements and pitches of the grass stalks around it.

After many more years you are old, and you have watched the patterns in the grass change and shift and repeat for most of your life.

You have come to realize something. This entire planet (that is to say the grass that covers it) is an enormous computer. Data is stored and processed here in enormous volumes, but slowly. There is enough computational power here to hold the minds of billions of people, and as the centuries move on they slowly play out their virtual lifes in this unique computational matrix. Indeed their thought process is so slow that you will have been dead for centuries before anyone realizes you were even there.

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That reminds me of a story about sentient ‘trees’, but at the moment the title and author both escapes me.


If a mind is truly alien I doubt we can even begin to understand it, or even recognise it as sentient. It may not have the same motivations, concepts or anything else in common with us. No common ground on emotions or logic, not as we see them. Hence, I believe, the ‘alien in a mask’ approach, so we can relate as well as reflect over our own nature through them.

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Just so, which leads us to ask some important questions.

Are there any motivations, behaviours or philosophical positions that would be universal to sapient life? Are notions of Good and Evil reached by similar means by other sapient species? Even those which have evolved under very different circumstances? Notions of religion? The rights of the individual? The Social Contract?

Are these things merely a human affectation? Or are they as fundamentally important as we have always believed them to be?

Hard questions.

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It is all we have and since we cannot truly see ourselves without these things, I feel we need to be our best within our confines. Not to stop trying to improve and understand, but to do our best. Be excellent to each other, in other words. :grin:

This topic is starting to escape the limited bounds of my comprehension, very close to getting lost :neutral_face:

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Some of those could be answered by looking at the animals of our own planet.

The idea of individual rights is a very modern concept. Slavery was only properly stopped in the past 200 years and even now many individuals are seen as inferior to others. Looking at things like ants, termites and bees you can see that the individual has no importance and this allows an effective society for them.

Religion was designed to answer unanswered questions at the time. As more questions have found more likely answers this has reduced religions central place in a lot of society. Depending on an aliens understanding of the universe and it’s own existence as to how important religion would be in it.

Concepts like xenophobia are more likely as they are based within the struggle for superiority and survival that all living things are based on. Anything alive aims to continue it’s life (in our case through genetics) and therefore prioritises itself or its own society over others.

All creatures are defined by their construction and a differently constructed creature would probably face different challenges.

What if they were eternal beings like jellyfish, able to reconstruct themselves over time. Then the idea of self would be of great importance, if time isn’t a threat then everything else becomes a bigger threat. Who needs a society when you don’t need others to continue your existence?

Worth considering if you do try to create a unique species.

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All good points, particularly the point on xenophobia, however I would like to note that world philosophies have tended to follow certain paths once ‘civilization’ takes hold.

For example the old Greek masters convened and determined things such as good and evil, and held to those beliefs even when society didn’t bear them out (pacifism takes a pounding when you’re staring down the armies of Xerxes).

We have all come to share certain moral and ethical stances that seem to reach across boundaries of culture, even if they don’t translate perfectly in some areas. Murder is universally bad, to the point where we aren’t exactly happy when we ask soldiers to do it for us (protests, soul-searching, speeches by world leaders trying to ‘win us over’), stealing from others is a universal no-no, even those who steal from the wealthy and give to the poor can only morally absolve themselves by equating the actions of their targets to even larger theft.

My point is that all of the things we inherently know to be wrong are as you say, a fairly recent invention. That is to say they could only be invented and accepted by an advanced civilization.

We have no idea what another advanced civilization looks like, we only have other animals to watch. We don’t know if sapience demands that values like tolerance and personal liberty be explored, because we’ve never seen an animal smart enough to ask the question (although there are plenty of interesting things our primate and cetacean cousins are doing that would make an excellent sidebar to this discussion.)

We have reached the conclusion that murder is bad not precisely from an animalistic, instinct-driven place but from rational discourse. Somebody sat down and logically hashed out precisely what the pros and cons of murder are, and turned the resulting data into a maxim we all live by.

The question then is not “Are aliens like us”, but instead “Is Logic Universal?” When we find that alien race, will they have progressed along that same path of cause-and-effect logic that we have?

As an aside, regarding ‘immortal’ jellyfish, when the jellyfish revert back to a youthful phase, I understand that they basically revert to a mass of undifferentiated protoplasm, thereby erasing any characteristics particular to that jellyfish. In layman’s terms it would be a death as we understand it, memories, ideas and concepts would all be flushed away to prepare for the rebirth.

I don’t think that necessarily detracts from your point, but imagine the kind of culture such a species would create. Imagine sharing with them the Six Cycles of Reincarnation, and their reaction to it. It wouldn’t be esoteric religious knowledge to them, it would be hard fact. You would staff the embassies exclusively with Hindu priests and Buddhist monks. Imagine how those faiths would grow and change and be taken up by such a species.

Sorry… Got carried away there…

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Actually things like good and evil are based in the cultures that were connected (Europe and Asia) and then brought to places like the Americas and Australia where the native beliefs were then translated into something similar. Just because something is widely believed doesn’t mean it’s the right belief, just that it was shouted louder and became ingrained in many societies.

The concept of good and evil is purely a human construct designed to separate “them” (the bad ones) from “us” (the good ones). And it’s designed for cultures that needed a way to explain the inability for different people and cultures cooperate all of the time.

For example:
Blorg are a species of sentient magma blobs, silicon based that live within great volcanos within Venus. They are formed blobs and are able to experience the world around them through organs that sense x-rays which allows them to see the silicon structure of other creatures in the magma which they eat. Instead of reproducing they break down their forms (like you said about jellyfish) whilst maintaining their tungsten nervous system (unlike jellyfish). Their new form is then created sometimes identical, sometimes with mutations. This allow for them to evolve from the smaller creatures that populate the volcano.

For these creatures everything is “them”. Theres no reason for society as everything is a threat or a meal. There’s no specific species as everyone evolves independently. Their goal in existence is to maintain their environment, maybe to find out what exists outside of the volcano (a bright world with all the radiation flaying around). How would they interprete the strange cold creatures that look like they shouldn’t hold together (transparent sacks of bones).

Edit: Are we heading off topic here? Sorry if we are

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