I keep seeing criticisms of science fiction alien design by various sources, scientific and otherwise, that intelligent alien species across the genre are fairly universally anthropoid and fail to take into account the myriad of other possibilities of the universe, and then there will be some discussion about how life forms one earth don’t all follow this pattern. Eventually, it winds up at the concept of beings comprised entirely of energy. Take this article as reference.
There is a sub-argument I’d like to address, that of telepathic communication. It seems the same people who deride the currently paranormal ability of telepathic communication while then hypothesizing aliens may communicate directly mind to mind.
Now perhaps I have a anthropoid centered point of view, but I’m not buying any of it.
Let’s start with an easy one, bilateral symmetry. Most aliens in most movies are bilaterally symmetrical for a very practical reason, before CGI became believable and affordable, prosthetics were the way to go, and well, you’re sticking a costume onto a bilaterally symmetrical entity. There was no good way to, say, add a third leg. But we can learn quite a bit from earth. There’s really three types of creatures on the earth in the higher life forms category, things that walk (or scuttle or crawl), things that swim, and things that fly. Of the things that walk or crawl, the predominant means of doing so is by legs. There is that whole gastropod thing, but moving along on your belly floating on a trail of slime isn’t really an evolutionary fast track.
There are many different schema for legs, two, four, six, eight, or many. Never three. Can we imagine an environment where it is so significantly different from our own that having three sides would be a significant advantage? What sort of environment would do this? There are all sorts of ecosystems around, and all sorts of niches, all sorts of temperature ranges. Certainly one of these would have produced a creature of other than bilateral symmetry if it was an evolutionary advantage. There’s a reason we have bilateral symmetry, and it isn’t just that a successful ancestor species somewhere a long way ago happened to make it work, and if it had turned left instead of right, we’d all have three legs. There has been plenty of opportunity, and we haven’t yet seen such a creature.
As we think also about those other things, things that fly and swim, we notice the same thing. There are some odd means of propulsion in water, from jet propulsion to the full body writhe, but the most dominant by far is one tail fin and two side flippers. For flying creatures, two wings, two legs. There are a couple experiments with four wings, but they were evolutionary dead ends.
I’m all for creativity, but the overwhelming evidence tells me the predominant creature design features bilateral symmetry with legs and arms in pairs, more likely fewer rather than more. No conceptual artist has ever been able to show me a practical model for trilateral symmetry, so as a realistic fiction device, I have to reject it. The argument is, just because we can’t prove it doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean it doesn’t, but as a practical reality, I’m not convinced of any life beyond the bilateral.
Then there are the more far-reaching visions of this criticism, things where we’d have to redefine what we mean as “life”. We rely on our world of carbon-based life forms as a basis for what we should expect. Carbon is in every bit of life, and in every bit of DNA, I suspect this due to carbon’s flexibility in its chemical properties to chain together in so many forms and in so many molecules. It is structural and chemical, and I have yet to see evidence that any other atom is so flexible in its uses. We aren’t making nanotubes and buckyballs of hydrogen or iron or uranium. Even crystalline structured molecules are useful in only a couple ways each. Sure they’re pretty to look at, but diamonds and sapphires and quartz all have their own industrial and technological uses.
At the same time there are viruses, rogue bits of DNA which can replicate and evolve, but have no organs, no brains, no cell walls, just a code. Our way of killing them is to break them up so the code cannot replicate, which is an astonishingly difficult thing to do. Do we consider these molecules, or alive (or merely inconvenient)?
Minerals have evolved over time, in the natural world becoming more complex, and while they are a complex union of atoms, and while the unions can replicate, they aren’t a virus, and we don’t consider them living, so a virus, which is after all just a large molecule, should fall into this category as well, right? There is a side argument in the article mentioned above against life being necessarily complex, so I also have to conclude complexity is not a defining characteristic of life, but complexity is an important characteristic of character and writing.
What a virus has over a mineral is code. The code of DNA provides instructions for the molecule to do what it does in certain environment, which is a step from intelligence, and unless you’re doing an Outbreak/Andromeda Strain story, a virus as a character doesn’t make sense, and a virus with decision making intelligence doesn’t make sense, remember we’re really talking about writing interesting narratives here, and character is a big part of that task. I can’t call code living either, otherwise computer programs would be living entities by definition, and I always had problems with this, even in the transplant consciousness into computers storylines. I do have to say that this code is one of the things that is a requisite for the definition of life, but not a definition of life. So maybe at this point we could conclude code a precursor to life, which leaves open the possibilities of computers one day coming alive.
But this also precludes the idea of an energy field being alive for me, even though scientists will caution us that life may exist as energy fields of some sort or some way, I’m not convinced. It strikes me that Douglas Adams was criticizing this concept with an off hand line about “super intelligent shades of the color blue.” Thing is, energy fields are unorganized clouds of plasma, i.e. a cloud of electrons, or the side effects of the flow of some sort of energy, like the magnetic field of flowing electrons. There is no coded information, nothing that can self-replicate. When the source is gone, so is the energy field. I have never seen any scientific evidence that energy fields can store data, especially without an external power source.
This reminds me, if “paranormal investigators” say ghosts are made up of electromagnetic fields, and scientists say ghosts don’t and can’t exist, but they point to the possibilities of “life” existing as an energy field, how do you justify that cognitive dissonance? Energy fields are disorganized, and carry no code. We know from our study of DNA how it affects our views on life in surprisingly specific ways. The needle on nature vs. nurture is shifting ever towards nature as we study the coding in our DNA. This is not to say we are simply a product of coded information. We are more complex than that, we can make decisions based on stimuli that are beyond what is coded in our DNA.
This goes for telepathy as well. My aliens will not speak via telepathy without the support of some technology to justify it. Scientists have found no means for direct brain to brain communication, and yet scientists describe aliens who could do it. Maybe there is a split in the generic group of “scientists,” and scientists who believe in telepathic aliens also believe in telepathic humans, but I don’t see a lot of evidence this is the case, it seems like another cognitive dissonance in science moments. For me there must be a medium for that broadcast.
I guess this leads me to my conclusion, life begins at response, for me as a fiction writer. I see very little reason why life shouldn’t be some sort of organic being, be it based on carbon or not, but corporeal. This doesn’t mean I won’t write ghost stories, or stories using magic or anything else, these are based on established tradition, but I’d doubt I ever write a character who appears as an energy field.
One of the hallmarks of characters who appear solely as energy fields is a detachment from concern about those of us unfortunately stuck in a body. The last story where there were hyper intelligent shades of blue I read was The Last Theorum by Arthur C. Clarke and Fred Pohl, in which galactic overlords decided to wipe us out in their own sweet time because we had nuclear weapons, so they should probably take care of us before go were a nuisance to other galactic neighbors. This is a general trend among energy field beings. They feel so elite and godlike, they have no qualms of destroying us because we looked at them wrong, or fed them a tuna salad sandwich that had gone bad. Thing is, I can write characters with the same detachment, and more importantly I can make a better back story for a character’s detachment, make a better story by doing more work as a writer than having a species with corporeal body envy. Just once I’d like to see an alien energy field who is struggling in life in a dead end job, or is the underdog to humans, or just wants to pop in the diner for a bite to eat on its day as an interstellar trucker. That would be a change of perspective at least.
So that’s how I’m calling it. There may be times to deviate from this I don’t foresee, but right now, I can’t imagine a reason why I should have to.
It was evening where I was when they made themselves known. The sun was setting across the Arizona sky, and the clouds on the horizon were small, purple-blue and broken apart into sparse bunches against the orange-peach background of the mountains to the east. I was at the grill, cooking dinner for the rest of the shift at the fire house. It was my turn, and I didn’t mind doing it. The day had been quiet, not even a single call, and in six hours, we’d be going home from our shift.
“What is that?” Javier asked.
I turned around and saw it, a cloud that was much more regular in shape than the rest, it was something, I couldn’t tell what. Then it dawned on me that it was a spaceship, and not one of this world. I tried to come up with a verbal response, an expletive that was adequate, but my mind was blank. By the time I came up with one, it was much too late.
It looked like a cloud, dark blue, fairly round, but as the wind blew the clouds away, the ship remained, still. You could call it vaguely saucer-ish from the right view, but not like in the movies, not like that at all. You could tell this craft was real, you could see panel lines on its skin, irregularities and flaws, like ships which had just crossed the ocean in a storm, and they hadn’t caught up on painting over the corrosion.
“Hey come take a look at this,” he yelled into the firehouse. Some of the other members of the crew came out. They stood there for a silent minute before any of them even moved.
The silence was interrupted by sonic booms. We knew what those were, the Air Force had scrambled F-16’s from Luke. They went full throttle overhead, direct intercept path and the ship was just over the edge of Apache Junction. The thing itself was silent as a cloud, you couldn’t hear it, at least not as far away as we were. Sound carries a long way out here, we heard the F-16’s from Luke all over the place, from all directions; it bounced off the taller buildings in Phoenix back to us. There wasn’t anything in the desert to absorb sound either. We’d have heard something if it was making any amount of sound.
Some of the others had gone into the station to watch what was happening on the television.
“Rick, Javier get in here,” they called to us. “You can see it better.”
I never did finish cooking the hamburgers. They turned to solid bricks of carbon on the grill.
There were local reporters on TV, broadcasting from the tallest buildings in Phoenix, they had crews rushing out to get just below the alien ships to report from the scene, but this view was enough to put on the air for the moment. They were quickly switching to affiliates all over the country, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tampa. The ships seemed to be everywhere. They even had shots from Paris, Beunos Aires, Berlin, Tokyo. They weren’t all the same ship, it was a fleet, lots of different shapes and sizes. They were all hovering, doing nothing.
You forgot everything at times like these. Your life, your job, where you were, your name. It was just too far out of comprehension to grasp. I stood there just watching, not a thought passing through my head. You’d think you could come up with a thought of absolute wonder, but no, nothing. Years of training, of running into burning buildings, of dealing with life and death emergencies was just gone. What else could you do? A couple of the guys called their wives and kids, their girlfriends, but it was hard to get through, the switchboards were jammed. And when they did get through, there wasn’t much to say. “I know, can you believe it?” was about all they could get out. The world was never so silent as right then. The roads were empty and clear, you couldn’t hear any traffic noise. Most airliners had been turned around, ordered to the ground, so the skies were clear, except for those ships and the Air Force.
For the first half hour, things went just this way, and nobody could say anything. The news reporters did their job, which was to keep talking. They had nothing that they could say, other than the ships were there, which we could all observe for ourselves. The only new thing they could report was another confirmed ship outside another city. Boston, Madrid, Jakarta, New Delhi, Moscow.
We got bored watching it, so we turned the TV all the way up, left the windows open, and climbed up on the roof. The surface was still hot, even though the sun had long since reached its apex in the sky and crawled back down into evening. We brought up blankets, whatever we could find that would insulate us from the heat. We were so far out from the city that there was an unobstructed view for us all.
My thoughts had collected into something resembling coherence by then. I thought of being a kid, seeing Star Wars, and all the creatures. I wondered what they looked like. Were they bigger than us, smaller, did they have two arms and two legs? Of all things, I remembered an assignment when I was in fifth grade, when my teacher asked me to invent and describe an alien, but I couldn’t remember what I had written anymore, not now.
At one point, they mentioned that a special session of Congress was being called, the President was meeting with his advisers. The stations tried to tap into C-SPAN, but the feed got cut off. They said the government did it, but that was it, no other reason was given.
So far nothing indicated any hostile intent, but nobody was taking any chances. The F-16’s circled, everybody else waited. We were afraid, no doubt about it. We’d seen Independence Day, we’d seen all those movies. They just waited until things were quiet and we let our guard down and they open fired. In the movies we always won, and none of us thought that was really possible with something like this, not with what their technology must be like.
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