4.10.2008

Will an original alien please stand up?

I'm so sick of alien species in science fiction looking vaguely humanoid. It makes little sense to me that any sort of sentient species would be a lizard-person or a insect-person. Star Trek is the worst at this suggesting that a completely separate race would look like a person with some bumps on their heads, or longer ears.

Alan Moore came up with brilliantly original ideas just for the background of one Green Lantern story. One alien was a super intelligent smallpox virus. (This made them difficult to socialize with.) Another sentient being was an "abstract mathematical progression." Now THAT is clever alien design, a mathematical theory so complex it becomes self aware. The main character in that story was a being named Mogo which was an intelligent planet sized ecosystem. Essentially a sentient planet.

With all the various environments for life to evolve in it just makes sense that alien races would look nothing like humans. For example, life that evolved on a gas giant planet like Jupiter might be shaped like long thin jellyfish types. The incredible gravity and lack of a solid crust would create much different lifeforms. Can you imagine what type of structures a civilization shaped this way would come up with? Or what their spaceships would look like? Can you?

1 comment:

TUFFY! said...

so the ad to click for this page is 'controlling psoriasis'. if that's not a message to think about...is google telling me that psoriasis is sentient.

in any case, i'd rather not have psoriasis.