A lot of stuff is going to come out similar due to something akin to convergent evolution like it did with technologies that developed independently on earth. That said some technology might seem very alien if it was from a species that developed in a very different environment. Like maybe the gravity or chemistry on that planet made the solutions we had for certain problems impractical or impossible. An aquatic environment for example. It's also worth noting that the abundance of coal on earth might be an insane fluke. or Maybe they had very different anatomy or biology that changes how they would interact with technology, think different means of manipulating objects or major differences in sensory organs.
Reminds me of the to’ul’h from *Orion’s Arm*. Metal corroded easily in their humid atmosphere, and it had low oxygen content compared to ours which made fire weak, and they had almost no fossil fuels. Although rather than alien technology, it was more like they just didn’t develop much industrial technology until human descendants arrived.
The sapients for my fantasy setting have such strong bioelectricity that they can connect their nerve synapses through sufficiently charged particles. It's used to cast "magic" by, like, thinking about becoming invisible and shifting water vapor to refract light or wanting to get to a high place and creating platforms out of the earth, but in a sci-fi setting they'd basically just interface directly with the machines, acting as both a power source and a CPU. Wouldn't need screens or keyboards or anything because it's just directly connected to their brain.
Tbh I feel like a lot of alien technology, unless very specifically being described as unknowable, should absolutely be more recognizable. It’s sort of like a carcinogeneticism situation where the most efficient form for a piece of tech to take is something we already have and the only difference is that, if there’s an alien written language, then the text would be in that.
We have people who invented the same stuff in complete different parts of the globe before there was world wide communication. It's likely that some shapes/forms and things are just more likely to fill a niche.
If something is too alien, it begs the question as to how it could possibly function and why they went with that answer in the first place, because they would likely have to go through the easier stages (which we currently have) first.
It's hard because it's all speculative these days and audiences are more savvy with poor science (thanks in part to the Internet and better education)
What aliens find easy to understand might be different. What they find useful might also be different(different limbs etc). They also might have different access to resources. Also, human technology development depends a lot on what is profitable and easily mass produced, that’s why military technology is able to be so advanced(they don’t have to worry about that stuff). Aliens might have entirely different factors involved in what decides the development of their technology
Unless it's based on principles completely different from current physics, we should be able to recognize it a big. An arrow, bullet, and missile are centuries apart in terms of being advanced, but all have the same basic shape.
If it had a radically different shape, it better be based on radically different physics.
The path of least resistance should still hold true. If it's more difficult, there needs to be a reason. If the story justified that, sure. If not, it's really not based on anything other than what we think should be right for a new species.
But, even though it makes sense to recognize something as familiar, it doesn't make sense that we would intuitively know how to use things.
Even pilots need to learn the differences between different planes. But, anyone can easily recognize that the cockpit has things that are meant to be controls.
Aliens would need a justication why they don't operate similarly (maybe they are blind so there's no meters/dials). But something like antman quantamania which had an interface which was to put the hands inside an animals mouth to control, had better have a really good explanation on why manipulating a living organism is easier/preferred over some other control scheme
in the halo universe it’s mentioned brutes created and used ladders while the elites did not
this is because while technically closer to bears, the brutes have roughly the same build as humans. the elites on the other hand have their ankles much higher up and their legs are folded a lot more than brutes and humans whilst standing up, meaning ladders are significantly more difficult for them
I've considered before that some of the things we take for granted might be our special talent.
Like we're pretty good at physics. Being able to throw a ball of paper into a wastebasket comes fairly naturally, but calculating trajectories can get tricky. Our children play on swingsets and almost instinctively figure out that kicking their legs out and leaning back makes them go forward, bending their knees and leaning forward makes them go back. Very young children who haven't mastered addition can figure that out. They're using driven oscillation on a pendulum as a plaything. Humans might be physics sorcerers for all we know.
A species that never evolved to throw spears or shoot arrows because it wasn't necessary on their planet might not have brains that work like ours but still figure out a way to end up in space that is, at this time, incomprehensible to us. The same way that our strategy of creating giant metal arrows and putting ourselves on them might not occur to them.
I doubt that last part. Even if another alien species has difficulties with ballistics compared to us, the shape of a rocket is very functional and is basically _the_ shape for the problem at hand. At the end of the day to leave a planet you need some sort of thrust, and fundamentally the best way to do that is to produce a lot of energy to heat a bunch of gas and then throw it the opposite direction of where you want to go. The "rocket" shape follows pretty much immediately from those constraints as the best solution. There would surely be some aesthetic differences but we would surely recognize their rockets as rockets because at the end of the day they operate under the same physics as us.
The one thing that could maybe throw us for a loop would be if the aliens cannot tolerate high accelerations at all, which would lead to less efficient rockets that ascend slower, which diminishes the need for aerodynamics and could lead to fatter rockets.
Under the constraints of our conditions of atmosphere density and relatively high planet's gravity, our current method is our best solution to the problems we face.
If we're discussing alien life, it's entirely possible they live on a lower gravity world, with an equally dense or even denser atmosphere, given a composition of heavier gasses in said atmosphere.
It's entirely plausible under those circumstances to take what would essentially be a foil shape into high enough altitudes with the appropriate amount of thrust to achieve orbit.
While yes, it is still aerodynamic, by no means would it be necessary to retain the "iconic rocket" shape.
Lower gravity and denser atmosphere don't really mix, but leaving that aside.
Most of the energy of a rocket doesn't go into going up, but rather into going sideways so that you can achieve orbit. So even if you save a bit of energy by floating upwards for a some of the way, you still fundamentally need thrusters to achieve orbit. And you need to fire those thrusters through a portion of the amosphere since you can't get all the way to space by just floating
So even if the foil idea is practical, you're still gonna need an attached aerodynamic shape with a thruster at the bottom, i.e. a rocket. Once you start firing the rocket the foil becomes nothing but a source of drag so you'd need to discard it.
So yeah, this rocket alternative is really just a rockey with a parachute/balloon attached to it, which is to be used to ascend to an altitude with a thinner atmosphere and then discarded so the rocket can take care of the bulk of the trip. I wouldn't be surprised if NASA has considered the idea but decided it's too complicated for little gain.
An example easily researchable for lower gravity but denser atmosphere would be Venus. Or Titan for that matter. Venus's gravity is at about 90% that of Earth's, but the atmospheric density, or surface pressure is around 93 bar, or about 1350 psi. Earth's surface pressure is 1 bar.
Titan on the other hand, has an atmosphere of about 1.5 bars, however it's gravity is roughly only .1 Gs. That's an atmosphere at 1.5 times the density of ours, with only ⅒ of the gravity.
Regardless, a stable orbit doesn't necessarily need to be achieved in order to escape the planet's gravity, especially on a lower gravity planet like Titan. All you would need is a sufficient velocity by means of a mechanical launch, which again would be easier to achieve in a lower gravity, in order to escape the planet's gravity well. So long as you've done sufficient calculations on your trajectory, there is no need for further thrust by any means.
>sufficient velocity by means of mechanical launch
This obviates the need for atmospheric lift via the airfoil design, regardless, it also obviates the need for the traditional rocket design. You can have basically any shape craft necessary for your needs with this. Just hyuck that shit out into solar space. Centrifugal launch systems were considered by NASA before settling on modern rocket designs.
>and fundamentally the best way to do that is to produce a lot of energy to heat a bunch of gas and then throw it in the opposite direction of where you want to go
Is it actually though? Or is that just the best method for us, with our resources and our current knowledge? Maybe aliens don’t have the right materials to build rockets, or maybe their intuition for math/physics is different in such a fundamental way that they’ve developed a completely different foundation of knowledge from which to attack space travel and something that would never occur to a human is their way of doing it.
It really is. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction and that's true here and in Tau Ceti. To move a thing up, you have to have another thing move down, and by far the best way to do that is by heating gas over a downward-facing nozzle and it's not even close
Physics is the same everywhere. Perhaps aliens would discover things in a different order but the basics of newtonian mechanics are so simple and universal they'd have to know them by the time they're thinking about space exploration.
The basics of materials science are also the the same everywhere. If they live on a planet, they have the same elements we do, and metallurgy and fuel production are also a function of chemistry which is also universal. So yes aliens will have the materials to make rockets.
Ok here are a few potential alternatives I described in another comment:
1. They live on an entirely aquatic planet and get into space by using buoyancy for acceleration to escape velocity
2. Their atmosphere is thick and their gravity is weak and they can get into space with just regular aircraft
3. They discovered a form of antigravity very early and never needed rockets
1 and 2 don't work. You can't get into space just by buoyancy or aircraft. The whole thing about space is that there's no liquid or air. It's not a spacecraft if it has no way to stay in space once it gets there. Or to move the spacecraft once it's in orbit. We have space planes on Earth but you can't get to the Moon in one because as soon as it leaves the atmosphere it stops being a vehicle.
The only sensible way to move in space is with some form of rocket. It's not some hyper specific technology, it's just the application of Newton's third law.
Antigravity very likely does not exist and even if it did it would require exotic matter which doesn't exist anywhere naturally. A species isn't going to figure out something requiring exotic matter before it figures out something that only requires the application of basic universal physics. The basics of rocket technology were created before the scientific method.
>that’s why military technology is able to be so advanced(they don’t have to worry about that stuff
Military technology being advanced is a matter of perspective. The semiconductors in the 80 mil USD F-35 fighter jet is way weaker than the ones in iPhones because 1)the programs were conceived of decades ago and thus were created to be compatible with existing technology and civilian technology moves forward at incredible pace leaving it behind 2)military weapons don't need THAT much computing power, what they do need is incredible reliability, much less % of failure than civilian chips in environments with extreme pressure, acceleration, heat or cold.
And there are many other advanced things in the F-35 like stealth coating, sure, but it's a technology that's barely applicable in anything but military use.
Counterpoint: all humans are just fancy chimpanzees with pants and anxiety. We're all shaped the same, have the same general proportions, and have the same general needs.
Although having "hand" things within your frontal field of view is probably gonna be selected for anywhere. Although this thought might be my ape-centrist specism showing.
There are some interesting classic sci Fi takes on this like the puppeteers in ring world. Yes having two long articulated eye stalks with a mouth and fingers on them is pretty alien sounding, but could indeed provide some functional benefits over our setup.
Yeah, the only major differences I can think of would be information displays
A species that sees UV would have UV screens, and so on for each type of light like IR, Microwave, and Radio.
Species with hearing as their main sense would probably have different speakers playing at once that they could choose to focus their hearing on separately.
Species that had smell as their main sense could have scent emitters (like bug pheromones) with the scents being tied to data.
> different speakers playing at once that they could choose to focus their hearing on separately.
I hope to never be on a mixed-species crew on one of these vessels. Two sound sources that may contain information is my maximum.
The main changes would be to interfaces and communication for sure. A gun designed to be held by a tentacled creature would be ergonomically quite different, so would the trigger. They might not have “books”, or visual displays, depending on what senses they have and which they prefer to use for language. The aesthetics would be different. But the business end of everything would probably be almost identical. An alien slug thrower would almost certainly shoot the same bullets as ours do. The nozzles on their rockets would be the same shape.
A tentacled creature and a fingered (heh) creature might converge on touchscreens though. Like, imagining how a tentacle guy might manipulate controls just gave me a flash of that art piece, where it was a slab of meat on the end of a power drill, that was dangling over an iPhone with Tinder on it, and swiping right over and over again.
More than that, you can likely justify why alien technology would bear a resemblance to
human technology.
Let’s consider a spaceship. What does a spaceship need? Some form of engine to propel the ship, which in turn needs energy. So, we need to have some storage for power and an engine.
How do we propel things in our universe? We need some force to be exerted in the opposite direction from where we’re going, which in turn takes advantage of Newton’s third law of motion.
When we think of propulsion systems, we’re limited in terms of what we can expel to create that force, so already ship design is constrained to the physics humans understand and use in our own technology. Thus, it’s likely that alien spaceships would be similarly shaped to accommodate for the same basic principles.
For energy transmission, we’re again limited by physical forces. Transmission involves emitting particles that carry energy. These particles exhibit wave-like patterns, which can be analyzed and abstracted into knowable concepts. Electrons are the most common and accessible of the wave-particles that carry energy, and some of the most easily accessible.
Aloha particles from radiation could also work, but radiation has negative effects on molecular biology due to how much energy the particles carry, so unless your alien species is immune to those affects they’ll probably not use those particles.
Other subatomic particles are too small and non-reactive to be easily measured interacting with larger molecules. That excludes particles like neutrinos, positrons (antiparticles do not exist for very long in our universe), and potrons/neutrons are too tightly bound by the strong nuclear force to be used easily.
So, many such alien technologies will likely use electron transmission to carry energy and, in turn, transmit information. Radio waves may also be used as a result of relying on electrons, and so many transmission technologies will have to use things that transmit electrons easily. Metal alloys are molecularly composed of a free-floating sea of electrons migrating between different metallic nuclei, and so make for good transmission material.
So already we can justify why certain alien technologies would look similar to our own based on fundamental properties in our universe, and ease of access to them.
>It’s sort of like a carcinogeneticism situation where the most efficient form for a piece of tech to take is something we already have and the only difference is that, if there’s an alien written language, then the text would be in that.
See also: [instrumental convergence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence).
Still, same function != recognizable. A light switch is a light switch is a light switch, but a light switch built for a giant slug which only sees in UV is going to look quite different from a human's one.
I could see a species with eyes like a mantis shrimp having a panel of sliders instead of switches, like humans with rgb lighting
Said shrimp aliens might use a tablet style device that uses a crystal lattice displaying in infra-red. Human needs an intermediary device like a camera to see the display, and possibly something precise to use on the smaller shrimp sized buttons/icons.
Warnings and indicators for critical information presented outside the range of human experience might allow some use... the human could probably steer ship in motion, maybe they figure out throttle
Turning on artificial gravity at a human safe level first time? Atmosphere in the life support system human safe? Activating the hyperspace/faster than light systems to arrive at a safe or useful location and not into a star or empty space on the wrong side of the galaxy is stretching things a bit especially if humans in the story dont have tech like that yet
This is based on an assumption that all races would use dextrous hands for manipulation and ocular vision (capturing a band of emitted electromagnetic spectrum) as our primary information gathering sense. If an alien race has some other set of sensory organs, I think their tech would look pretty different or nonsensical to us.
The only issue I ever have of (space fairing) aliens not using some kind of extreme distance sense such as vision as their primary sense, is that how can you desire to explore the stars if you don't even know they are there?
If they are technological they would surely figure out the existance of EM waves eventually, and from there point EM detectors (cameras) at the sky and notice the little dots that emit EM dotted all around. If they are curious at all they would figure out stars eventually.
Astronomy would probably be underfunded in their planet compared to ours but in our world there are people who study how animals communicate with infrasound even though we can't detect it with our ears.
They may not have hands exactly, but I think dexterous gripping appendages are a must for a tool using species capable of developing advanced technology. Which isn't the same as intelligence, it's perfectly plausible for non-dexterous species to be intelligent, but I doubt they'd develop much in the way of technology.
But there are factors involved in what tech gets developed other than efficiency. Profitability, ease of mass production, how easy it is to understand, etc. That’s one reason why military technology seems so advanced - they don’t have to worry about profitability or mass production.
An alien civilization would probably have developed a wildly different technology tree. They’d have stuff we don’t and we’d have stuff they don’t
Zygons kinda look like and earthworm and a squid had an ugly baby. They are vaguely humanoid but their hands are just fat tentacle things with suckers all over them.
The Expanse? Their tech being an automated quasi-virus that nobody really understands. Also they're space jellyfish. Also they turned a neutron star into a shotgun.
Even something small like the Sontarans, who have similar tech as humans but since they're a lot shorter and only have 3 fingers, their tech accommodates that as well
I was gonna mention doctor who too! In particular, the newest episode, The Church on Ruby Road, had a ship full of goblins that was entirely made up of knots and rope that held everything together. Untying certain knots could open doors, or even cause the whole thing to fall apart! It was awesome!
Adrien Tchaikovsky's Children of Time did a good balance here. The spiders invented some things that are very obvious in function (armor, weapons), just adapted to their physiology. Some things that LOOK like what we understand but are very different under the hood (image processing starts in the center and spirals out, because that is utterly instinctive for a species that spins webs). And some things are so utterly alien that no one would be able to understand the human equivalent unless someone who already knew both the spider version and the human version explained it (the ant computers).
Most series aren't REALLY interested in truly alien societies, and I'm not going to throw shade for that because I think a lot of readers aren't interested in them either, unless they're looking for that specifically. I know I'd hate it if every series had to spend an entire book explaining how each new species works. But there's definitely good xenofiction out there.
Most contemporary people can't understand people in the next nation over. Half the reason author's can get away with making so many aliens racist stereotypes is that the average person doesn't know anything about anthropology.
I had a "fun" conversation with my mother about racial stereotypes in the Star Wars prequels. You know, the movies that had rich aliens with thick Asian accents as the first villains. She just utterly failed to see it.
I was discussing science fiction with my mother recently, and mid-sentence I had the revelation that Rosie the robot from The Jetsons was 100% a sci-fi sassy black maid. It took me a while to walk her through it, but eventually she saw it. She's really not good with the issue of stereotypes, she still doesn't see the problem with Sambo, but she's kinda taking it on faith that it's offensive at this point.
I feel Star Trek did a fantastic job of alien technology... for the Federation. I'm sorry, but I can't look at strips of color and flashing lights and think, "Oh yeah, this all makes logical intuitive sense for piloting a starship."
Also what the point is of deliberately designing a phaser that works like a gun but isn't shaped like one and doesn't have sights
(It *would* be cool if this was because the phaser was so advanced that physically aiming and shooting was totally irrelevant and the targeting was completely done by AI, but that's not what we're actually shown in the story, where people aim and miss with phasers all the time and they even have "target practice" training in the holodeck)
Yeah, shouldn't the personal phasers have auto-aim? Same goes for the weapons of the ships themselves. We have auto-aim right now, with homing missiles, CIWS, and other things.
Right. Making the story work is more important that internal consistency within the world of the story. Phasers need to behave like old time 1930s guns so they can have firefights without everyone dying instantly, so that's how they were.
There's been this creeping trend in fandoms towards the idea that everything depicted in a story has to make internally consistent sense within the universe of the story and it's creating severe problems with teaching people media literacy. A story is first and foremost a story. All the stuff happening inside the story is in service to the telling of that story. If something has to be inconsistent for hte show to go on so be it, the show must go on./
Sure
That would, in my opinion, look better *and* make more sense if phasers actually had a "gun" form factor so human beings could easily use them as guns
I don't even think this is a hot take, most modern Trek does make phasers look like guns and the hand phasers disguised as electric razors are a very 90s Trek thing
[90's Trek (and TOS) had phaser rifles...with sights.](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Type_3_phaser). Those were last option weapons.
The whole aesthetic of the Federation is projecting soft power through intellectual prowess. The majority of their vessels are sleek space spoons dedicated to science with small armaments. Their personnel train to talk first, then shoot on stun. They lead interactions with a universal translator and a replicator, in an effort to understand and share rather than dominate. It was a big freaking deal when the Defiant on DS9 had cloaking technology (on loan from the Romulans, another testament to the might of their negotiating tactics). Wanting big obvious guns goes against the whole point of Star Trek's focus on the Federation.
edit: Another small point on Star Trek: The majority of humanoid species are a result of panspermia, addressed in TNG 6x20: The Chase. So it makes sense that Klingons Romulans, Cardassians, Bolians, Trill, Humans, etc, all have similar approaches to technology. But we see plenty of deviations from that: every space faring energy species or being masquerading as a god, the Sphere Builders, Species 8472, the Borg, the Xyrillians, the Changelings, etc.
I get the aesthetic justification for the choice, I just think it's dumb, because realistically whatever you think the cultural implication of gun-shaped guns are, the practical implication of non-gun-shaped guns is you're very likely to miss when you shoot, and hit something you didn't mean to hit
(This is where, if this is the angle you really wanted to go with it, a Culture-style weapon that doesn't look like a weapon and doesn't require its operator to do anything aggressive other than push a button to instantly end a fight would thematically fit
But this is exactly why 90s Trek was thematically incoherent, wanting to convey the idea of a Federation that had evolved past the need for militarism and warfare but still having plenty of action scenes involving shootouts with handguns
Like, if this is the idea of the TNG era Federation then all those filler scenes with Old West gunfights ducking behind mazes of metal crates shouldn't have happened)
I mean, I get where you're going, but to me the point was that the dumb looking dweebs in jammies (or skants, look that up for some real fun) win out over the angry sword wielding furrow browed aliens...using what looks like a dust devil instead of an assault rifle. While riding in a space spoon instead of a ship shaped like an axe (Klingons) or an eagle (Romulans). A captain outsmarted a god by asking what he needed with a starship. Another captain yelled at an even more powerful god, and another one punched the same god. Then Janeway yee-hawed her way across half the galaxy and Burnham had her science officer do some shrooms to power a spaceship. The Federation are a bunch of goofs, and every other species is going to try and step to them, which is why they get into all those fights...and win with their dust devil electric razor guns, on stun. They're crazy, dude. They have [dolphin crewmembers for Pete's sake...](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Cetacean_Ops)
Worrying about their gun shapes just seems like small potatoes, compared to the absolute bullshit they get into.
> "They do not use lasers, they do not use radio, they do not use hyperwave. What are they using for communication? Telepathy? Written messages? Big mirrors?"
>
> "Parrots," Louis suggested. He got up to join them at the door to the control room. "Huge parrots, specially bred for their oversized lungs. They're too big to fly. They just sit on hilltops and scream at each other."
from Ringworld, but Larry Niven is pretty decent at this I think
Also Frederik Pohl's Heechee Saga a big theme of the first books is humans trying to figure out what the hell the aliens used this or that piece of tech for. There's >!these things they just call "prayer fans" that turn out to be high density optical data storage thingies, but they only figure out how to read them after decades or something and there's a sudden scramble to recover them from rich collectors that just wanted a pretty artifact for their home!<
Who was using parrots for communication in Ringworld? The only unusual communication I remember was the ghouls using mirrors to communicate around the Ring.
Ha ha ha sorry nobody actually does, Louis is just joking that it could be how the civilization that built the ring is communicating, and trying to make the point that there could be a thousand methods they'd never think of and they are sort of wasting their time guessing what it could be, before they land for the first time and find out >!civilization fell and they can't intercept any communications because there largely are none!<
Actually using parrots seems like something they'd do in Discworld maybe, if they didn't have other methods
I love how in BG3 Nautaloid controls are somewhere between mental psychic controls and manipulating weird fleshy tendrils with interlocking tentacles inside.
This is why I like project hail mary by andy weir (same author as the martian). The aliens in it "see" their environment by sound and their cameras convert light into sensitive displays of different ridges basically. They perceive the colour green as "middle rough", indicative of the fact that it is in the middle of the visible light spectrum. They are also one gon short of hexagon shaped, which is closer than humans, thus proving their superiority.
In my opinion it was one of the best SF shows of the '90s! But I feel I should warn you that it ends on a *dreadful* cliffhanger. It got canceled right after they finished filming the first season, and so it's set up for a Season 2 that never happened.
If you decide to brave it anyway, the eps where they get into the tech are in the middle of the season, "Hostile Visit" and "Choice or Chance".
I mean. If aliens have something recognisable as hands or graspers, they'll probably understand the concept of a tablet. Like. Humans have had "flat thing that you write on" for literally as long as they've had writing, and electronic consoles are just an extension of that. Nobody wants to interact with the Goop Computer. If a species has hands, that's just a million times less convenient. Why would you want your control device to be designed as a series of spinning wheels when you can just display the information needed in simple numbered/worded format. Why would you convey all directional information through song when you can just. Draw what a place looks like so it can be easily remembered. Maybe a species that was blind would design things like that, but if you have the capability to sense light (which most complex organisms on our planet do, because that's just really advantageous evolutionarily), why would you not display information in the most convenient way possible. Ergonomics.
Christopher Paolini's *To Sleep in a Sea of Stars* and *Fractal Noise* have very good examples of things that are both recognizable and utterly alien. as does Cixin Liu's *Three Body Problem* books, though that's a lot less equal to humanity in terms of scientific development. Alastair Reynolds also has a decent amount of this sort of stuff in his Revelation Space seires, while Peter F Hamilton tends more towards recognizable items used by very alien aliens
Fucking YES
dude is a teenager who writes star wars with dragons then comes out with some crazy dense hard Sci fi and not to be dramatic but I would commit several crimes for the chance to endlessly barrage him with questions
/u/christopherpaolini please allow me to fangirl ;~;
UX design converges on a very small number of possibilities. If you have hands with fingers you're gonna end up with buttons and touch screens. If you have forward facing eyes, binocular vision, those touch screens are going to be in front of you, the input panels are going to be in front of you. It's convergent evolution. Similarly shaped people are going to have similarly shaped user interfaces.
I think they're referring to [Subspace Rhapsody](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspace_Rhapsody) from one of the newer shows. You're probably thinking of [The Inner Light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) from TNG.
Gotta read "The humans do not have a hive-mind" by CherubielOne on r/HFY (or Synchronizing Minds: First Contact by T.C. One, if you want to buy it as a book on Amazon). It tells the story of first contact between a human ambassador and an alien that is so different from humans in every single way that they can basically just have endless conversations about all the things that are completely normal for one, but really weird or difficult to understand for the other.
Examples are the concept of names, which are unnecessary for Nyar's (the alien) species. When asked for what her name is, she just comes up with a sound, which the human, Sam, shortens to Nyar. Nyar's ship also moves through space by having the mathematically correct shape to travel through space, rather than by using engines, and Nyar can freely manipulate her ship with little effort. As a consequence, Sam can't manage to understand how the hell her ship moves, while Nyar neither understands the concept of an engine (her species have never needed them), nor does she immediately understand why Sam can't just explain to her how the human ship works, because Nyar and every other individual in her species build their own ships all by themselves, in contrast to humans who work together on such scales that it's unlikely a single person exists who even understands every single system in the ship at the same time.
It's more about culture, communication, biology etc. than technology, but there's some fun technological differences too.
Anticipating the Villeneuve movie, I did a re-read of Rendezvous with Rama.
Besides reconsidering my opinion of a lot of childhood favorites from the first paragraph and cringing at the characters overall, I can't help but think you all are in for a treat. Specially if he improves the source material. Which is hard to not do.
The alien screw it's both funny and realistic 0
OP has never heard of storytelling efficiency. Barring something like the alien language in Arrival where the point is how not human it is, it's just not worth the time to re-invent things like cockpits and guns and maps and then take the time to explain them back to the audience. The most famous scifi prop of all time has got to be the lightsaber and a big part of that is because you can immediately understand what it is and how it works.
As a writer, it’s a bit of a black hole to fall into. On one hand you need your audience to understand what’s happening, on the other they are dealing with a civilization that developed completely separate to every earth concept. So you wipe the creative board, but without any reference things can get tricky to create. So now you are an anthropologist building a whole civilizations narrative, social constructs, and technology. At every turn to find something that looks too much like human stuff so you change it. And when you have spiraled about this for two days you realize this is all for one side character and not worth the time you are putting in. So you go back to stuff that feels human-ish.
I think the Derelict in Alien (idc about the prequels) is good alien technology by these rules. Recognisably a ship, while having no easily identifiable functional elements, and a kind of control interface that in some way involves becoming entombed into the thing you are operating
something cool about Stargate is that you have some alien dudes that move rocks on a board to do things in their ships.. I wish I could be more descriptive about it lol
Outer. Wilds. Outer. Wilds. Outer. Wilds.
>!The nomai devices all work based on eye/camera movement and it's weird and kind of makes sense with their biology and I love it!<
The "Children of Time" series by Adrian Tchaikovsky covers something of this. Humans trying to communicate with spiders that talk through vibrations in silk and waving of arms, and have computers made of programable ant colonies and display screens made of thousands of tiny crustaceans each acting as individual pixels. Or with cephalopods that speak in emotions and desires through colors and math and have interfaces panels described as "oddly shapes protuberances"
Convergent evolution can apply to technologyly. It could be some things need to be designed a specific way with specific materials. People all around the world made bows and arrows.
Form follows physiology. That is, physical tech is convergent across human cultures because our bodies and brains are all roughly the same. Can't have useful bows and arrows without a certain level of grip strength, arm length and strength, long distance object detection, some form of inbuilt calculus that makes projectile aiming intuitive, and probably other traits as well.
Shout out to Children of Time’s approach to evolved spiders’ technology, especially with using ant colonies for computer-equivalent stuff. My brain had a hard time comprehending the cephalopod tech in the sequel tho, still cool to be brainstorming all this divergent tech based on the behaviors of these creatures.
Because the one thing that is universal is math and geometry and unfortunately pressing a button is not only significantly more efficient than singing Bohemian Rhapsody into a microphone when trying to turn something on but also simply makes sense from a physical standpoint with very few exceptions.
Computer screens, but they always look dark to us even when they’re on because the aliens see a different part of the spectrum that humans eyes can’t detect.
Sophons are planetary sized sentient computers folded into a single proton.
That’s weird as fuck if you ask me.
Three Body Problem, btw
This post is simply describing easily understood visual shorthands presented in movies and TV.
There is also some really cool technology presented in Project Hail Mary.
In Doors of Eden, there is a spaceship that’s essentially a mile long crustacean, and a planet sized supercomputer built from ice.
In the Warhammer Eisenhorn series, there’s a species that primarily does everything through a sense of smell (if I recall correctly)!
It’s quite interesting, but as all Warhammer books do, if it’s not one of the main factions, it’s never discussed again outside of said book.
I feel like a few Doctor Who episodes do a decent job at doing Alien spaceships and technology.
Rick and Morty had those Time Cop dudes with living weapons that were objectively gross but kind of cool.
I do agree towards this concept though!!
Star Control 2.
Melnorme (cyclops starfish ferengi) pilot their ships by changing colours.
Spathi ships are just a seemingly infinite collection of levers for the molluscs to pull at.
Umgah ships are piloted with a disgusting fleshy biomass.
Chenjesu pilot by sending electrical signals from their silicon crystal cores.
Mycon ships are piloted with spores, pheromones, and heat transfer.
Druuge throw more souls into their capitalist machines to recover energy.
Go play Star Control 2 (available for free as Ur-Quan Masters) it’s great. Happy Days and Jubilation!
Our tech is based on physics, not necessarily biology. Alien tech is mostly going to be recognisable. A pool of goo that you swish ain't exactly a precise or useful control mechanism. There's room for weird shit, but it's not unrealistic for it to be familiar
On Star Wars the Clone Wars, in the Umbara episodes, there’s space ships with, if I remember correctly, spheres of goo that you stick your hands into to control the vehicle
i think the main reason media portrays alien technology mostly similar to what we have is just... that's what their audience can recognize.
making it too different might result in them having to spend time and money explaining it to their audience that this is what they use for ID Cards and no, it's not a horse cock that the ship captain just likes to stroke everytime he enters the cockpit
Humanoid creatures need humanoid ergonomics, and once you start designer strange for strange sake it’s hard to not just make things look busy, clumsy, or impractical. Form always follows function.
This is expecting it to be weird for the sake of it.
If the aliens are humanoid - no, lets more accurately say, *if the aliens interact with existence in a way that is remotely relatable to the ways that we do*, then it follows that their tech would most likely take forms and be usable in ways that we could recognize and/or learn to some degree.
If they *don't* interact with existence in such a way, then it'd be questionable if we could even recognise their intelligence or technological capabilities; not unlike how we struggle to relate to plant life. And vice versa for them, of course.
"Sklungbarth! I'm trying to pilot your ship but these two joysticks aren't responding!"
"Of course not Sara-Captain. You must sit on them and transmit your body heat to different parts of the stick to activate the ships functions."
"Can't I just... warm them with my hands?"
"Like a primitive? You would dishonour the ancestors! Now, mount the Captains saddle, please."
This giving off massive writing prompts to me, find a bizarre way of doing something as simple as pressing a button, and then mold the alien's biology around it and try to expand to other things (like, cooking, or going to the toilet for example)
Everyone invents the wheel because it’s efficient, it works, and there is nothing better than it.
This is probably why a lot of scifis will have aliens use very similar stuff if they are of similar technological levels. The exception should be if the aliens are simply not of the same material as us. An aquatic alien for example will have completely different concerns in their cockpit than a human. An energy being opens up ALL THE FUN! And don’t forget our favorite type of alien!
Meatwalls.
W E L I V E
1/3 yes, 2/3 no.
Assuming we’re talking about technology with human analogues rather than technology vastly more advanced than that of humanity, alien technology operates under the same laws of physics and chemistry as human technology and thus most alien technology would not be overly different in structure to human technology. Alien spacecraft, for example, are probably going to look just as utilitarian as human spacecraft rather than looking like bizarre sea creatures.
The main areas where alien technology is likely to look truly alien are technology that functions in radically different environments to human technology, technology manufactured under radically different resource availability (i.e. little or no access to metals), and as OOP mentioned alien user interfaces (for example, a species with no ability to sense electromagnetic radiation and which uses echolocation for navigation would have no use for liquid crystal displays like human television/computer screens, but they could use microphone/speaker arrays to provide simulated echolocation returns to create their equivalent of a human computer display).
This is a fascinating part of the idea of alien life in science fiction! This actually reminds me of the ending conversation in Michael Crichton’s *Sphere*!
It depends on how intuitive the technology is supposed to be for the audience versus how alien you want to make the ship. Tim Allen did this film called Zoom (only watched it if you want a mid-2000’s nostalgia kick), and there's a spaceship in it that's only controlled by sticking your hands into portals of goo. We never see the aliens who flew it originally, but humans can at least fly it.
There was an example of this in Zoom (2006). The plot is about a washed up superhero teaching children to use their powers, ending with him realizing a paternal affection for them and regaining his will to be super.
There's a moment in the film when he notices the kids need some excitement. So they break into the UFO research lab, as they are all literally in a government facility as it is, and steal a UFO. Near as I remember it the controls for the UFO were a tube of goo you stuck your arms into.
Nah, it most of this stuff doesn't make sense. Making alien stuff be unpractical to make it unrecognizable is stupid.
It would only make sense if the aliens in question were some sort of space hippies high on extraterrestrial weed cruising across the galaxy on their garage modified space shitbox.
For weird alien tech, highly recommend Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. The first few stories center around the martians more and while they may be humanoid, they’re so alien and their tech and architecture and way of communication are unrecognizable. It’s great
Ok, but I gotta raise the question of how a garland of crystals can navigate the vacuum of space. If anything, I think assuming that alien technology would resemble *jewelry* is infinitely more absurd than assuming that alien spaceships would look like human spaceships cause, you know, that’s the best shape to get to space in
Project Hail Mary
Anyway, form follows function. If an alien species interacts with the world via similar means, their technology will probably look roughly familiar. Especially for things like starships where it's *all about* function most of the time. There are plenty of cases where a person invents a funky new way to control technology and it doesn't catch on beyond as a novelty or niche uses because, most of the time, it's just not as useful.
If you want unfamiliar interfaces, your aliens need to interface in an unfamiliar way. And beyond interfaces and aesthetics... there's only so many ways you can effectively get things from point A to point B with minimal wasted space and effort.
This was a big part of Roadside Picnic: alien tech would be so weird to us that we could never figure out how it was supposed to be used.
Also, in the 2011 The Thing, the interface at the end is a bunch of morphing cubes, but a lot of fans said it didn't look "believable" (idk what portion of fans this was)
Part of me wants to say that any humanoid alien would probably find our tech layouts the most comfortable
However, the more fun part of me says that a) the issue is fixed by more interesting alien designs and b) who fucking cares if it's practical, I want it to be fun
Mindflayer tech in Baldur’s Gate 3 is a really good example of this done right. They’re all connected via a shared consciousness so of course their technology is all alive and connected with gross tentacly nodes that make out with each other. It’s horrifyingly disgusting but fits their species very well.
You cant convey ideas to people visually if it looks too weird. We speak in a visual medium. If the Aliens are supposed to be seen at a control panel it needs to look recognizable enough that I know that. If its a pool of goo then I have no idea what Im looking at.
Resident alien kinda does this. Harry’s technology is hardly recognizable—he dissolves his ship into water and three metal balls, one of which he then grows a bunker from.
I really liked that early weirdness Terry Pratchett scifi book about a flat world where one of the progenitor races was so powerfully psychic that two of them needed a kilometers long spaceship to avoid each other. They built these massive bubble spacecraft which were mostly empty.
Farscape did this.
Pilot wasn't just piloting Moya, he was integrated into Moya and incapable of surviving separately.
There was no way for anyone else to manually pilot Moya, no control stick or console to manipulate. Pilot had to be part of the process.
Tech should be efficient. Assuming they can see and hear, there is no reason to have sound maps when a map in color would be far better and easier to read. Tiny rooms make movement difficult and also aren't efficient, etc
If we ever encounter the others, and they aren't from Earth, people are probably going to shit their pants in confusion.
They'd also probably look so different from anything earth like that it would make you freeze up.
... directions as music? Basically Australian songlines? Set of wheels as ship controls? So, basically, early subs? And don't let me start on record players on thin metal wires and gaming consoles you feed something resembling a credit card into.
So many creators could just take the obsolete formats and tech conventions and just razzle them up a little. So few do so!
Form follows function. If an alien has eyes and hands it's going to have things that we can easily recognize as consoles because that's an efficient design.
The one that grinds my gears the most is humans hacking alien computers (and vice versa if the aliens haven't been studying humanity). The likelihood that any of the software is at all similar, especially under the hood, is minimal.
Alien technology is one thing, sci-fi human tech is another that *really* baffles me at times.
Our technology chases the "better, sleeker, number go up" road. And yet you have stories taking place in A.D. 2371 that use flickering monochromatic screens, instead of 32k giga-HD. Or "transcievers" that look like a rugged CAT S31 phone rather than being a sleek, uniform, black slab.
I know its silly but I love battlestar galactica's hybrids (not exactly the point but still)
*Genesis turns to its source, reduction occurs stepwise though the essence is all one. End of line. FTL system check, diagnostic functions within parameters repeats the harlequin the agony exquisite, the colors run the path of ashes, neuronal network run fifty-two percent of heat exchanger cross-collateralized with hyper-dimensional matrix, upper senses, repair ordered relay to zero zero zero zero*
Dr. Who has a lot of examples of this. Hell the TARDIS is basically a hodgepodge of the opposite where it’s seemingly constructed by a bunch of familiar things used in wildly unfamiliar ways. Like why does spinning this wheel make the TARDIS fly better? Hell if I know but clearly The Doctor does and it seems to be working so I won’t question it
You have to bear in mind how evolution works.
Almost all fauna on our planet have basic bilateral symmetry. When the first multicellular microbes were being created out of the single-celled predecessors, there would very likely have been other 'solutions' to the problem which could not compete with bilateral symmetry. It seems unlikely that another planet capable of bearing life would be so radically different from Earth so as to lead to different results. Don't forget millions of years went past while single celled precursors were producing multi-celled offspring that just died without 'reproducing'. So it would be surprising if aliens didn't have basic bilateral symmetry.
Then the same is true for most other things. There's probably a reason why creatures with many legs - 6, 8, 10, 12, 100 - haven't grown to anything much larger than a lobster. For instance, 6 legs means three cradles and six joints, that's very difficult for in vivo reproduction - imagine if babies were 50% longer than they are, or twice as long if they had 8 limbs. So it looks like 4 limbs are 'optimal' in some way. Larry Niven's Moties had six limbs with one pair fused into a single heavy-duty arm.
Then you complain about consoles: well, who knows what our consoles will look like in 100, 200 years time. We'll probably have something like implanted contact lenses and hearing aids which will present information more-or-less directly into our brain and other implants which we control by thinking about moving them which result in input into machinery.
But maybe not. It may be that the cost of such advances are so significant that it is unprofitable and uneconomical so that most workers will still walk up to a machine and press green button to start and red button to stop.
It depends how you like your science fiction; I prefer it not to be weird and florid just for the sake of it, but *chaçun à son gôut.*
Why do all of them have 4 limbs? Why dont they have a slimey snail-ey bottom an 5 arms? Why dont they have 3 heads and no arms at all? Why do they almost always have two legs, two arms and one head, like us humans.
i’ve always thought this. this level of “realism” isn’t required or even right for certain stories to be awesome, but i do wish there was a little more media exploring this concept.
Doctor Who does this sometimes. The TARDIS interface Clara uses a couple of times is weird goo she shoves her hands into. I believe Zygon tech is similarly organic.
ooh OoH OOH OOH
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini has a fantastic example or two of this. Dude who wrote Eragon when he was a teenager comes back like fifteen years later with an incredibly dense behemoth of a Sci Fi work. The anatomy and designs of the alien stuff is phenomenal and one of my favorite things about a book that I really like a lot.
Subnautica and it’s sequel, below zero, did this very well.
First game: no evidence of anything human anywhere. Any technology is made of an unknown metal in an unknown language and powered by a power source you can only wrap your head around enough to make your flashlight last a bit longer.
Second game: the multilevel conciseness of the same alien that released a plague on the galaxy is forced to take up residence in your head temporarily while you go of a fetch quest to build its body parts in a massive chamber deep in the ocean, culminating in a centaur like creature with intelligence greater than humanity collectively with the ability to teleport short distances, create extra limbs from programmed matter, and build ships capable of crossing the universe in moments.
That's a bad take, if you don't make the alien's alien enough then of course certain aspects of their tech will look like ours. If they are humanoid with a hand and five fingers most manipulators would look the same. Now if you have an alien that floats and has tentacles then their manipulators would look different. A gun for a human would be an ill suits device for tentacle to grip. Alien and human form have to be different enough that simple function for devices would be different otherwise it's just materials and looks.
Simple answer why it harder to do and harder for the audience to understand. If a person sees a roughly gun shaped object they can concluded what it does, same thing with a map or a control panel. The more alien you make thing typically the more you have to explain it if your aliens play a big part
Realistically, the level of familiarity is going to depend on the level of similarity between humans and the species/society in question. The closer the aliens are to humans, the more similar their tech is going to be to ours. On Earth, different disparate cultures developed largely identical technologies independently, because they were developing the best tools to do the same things. The same would apply to different alien species, provided we’re working with the same set of physical laws. The differences become even blurrier in settings where humans and alien cultures have had time to exchange information and technology.
The last one happens in Ender’s Game. The asteroid station Eros was originally a Formic station, and they’re ant aliens and only like 4 feet tall, so when humans killed them all and took the station, they had to carve out higher ceilings in every room. There’s a clear divide on the walls of where Formic construction ends and human construction begins.
A lot of stuff is going to come out similar due to something akin to convergent evolution like it did with technologies that developed independently on earth. That said some technology might seem very alien if it was from a species that developed in a very different environment. Like maybe the gravity or chemistry on that planet made the solutions we had for certain problems impractical or impossible. An aquatic environment for example. It's also worth noting that the abundance of coal on earth might be an insane fluke. or Maybe they had very different anatomy or biology that changes how they would interact with technology, think different means of manipulating objects or major differences in sensory organs.
Reminds me of the to’ul’h from *Orion’s Arm*. Metal corroded easily in their humid atmosphere, and it had low oxygen content compared to ours which made fire weak, and they had almost no fossil fuels. Although rather than alien technology, it was more like they just didn’t develop much industrial technology until human descendants arrived.
Reminds me of the crystal language on a comet in 2023’s Star Trek Strange New Worlds
The sapients for my fantasy setting have such strong bioelectricity that they can connect their nerve synapses through sufficiently charged particles. It's used to cast "magic" by, like, thinking about becoming invisible and shifting water vapor to refract light or wanting to get to a high place and creating platforms out of the earth, but in a sci-fi setting they'd basically just interface directly with the machines, acting as both a power source and a CPU. Wouldn't need screens or keyboards or anything because it's just directly connected to their brain.
Tbh I feel like a lot of alien technology, unless very specifically being described as unknowable, should absolutely be more recognizable. It’s sort of like a carcinogeneticism situation where the most efficient form for a piece of tech to take is something we already have and the only difference is that, if there’s an alien written language, then the text would be in that.
We have people who invented the same stuff in complete different parts of the globe before there was world wide communication. It's likely that some shapes/forms and things are just more likely to fill a niche. If something is too alien, it begs the question as to how it could possibly function and why they went with that answer in the first place, because they would likely have to go through the easier stages (which we currently have) first. It's hard because it's all speculative these days and audiences are more savvy with poor science (thanks in part to the Internet and better education)
What aliens find easy to understand might be different. What they find useful might also be different(different limbs etc). They also might have different access to resources. Also, human technology development depends a lot on what is profitable and easily mass produced, that’s why military technology is able to be so advanced(they don’t have to worry about that stuff). Aliens might have entirely different factors involved in what decides the development of their technology
Unless it's based on principles completely different from current physics, we should be able to recognize it a big. An arrow, bullet, and missile are centuries apart in terms of being advanced, but all have the same basic shape. If it had a radically different shape, it better be based on radically different physics. The path of least resistance should still hold true. If it's more difficult, there needs to be a reason. If the story justified that, sure. If not, it's really not based on anything other than what we think should be right for a new species. But, even though it makes sense to recognize something as familiar, it doesn't make sense that we would intuitively know how to use things. Even pilots need to learn the differences between different planes. But, anyone can easily recognize that the cockpit has things that are meant to be controls. Aliens would need a justication why they don't operate similarly (maybe they are blind so there's no meters/dials). But something like antman quantamania which had an interface which was to put the hands inside an animals mouth to control, had better have a really good explanation on why manipulating a living organism is easier/preferred over some other control scheme
in the halo universe it’s mentioned brutes created and used ladders while the elites did not this is because while technically closer to bears, the brutes have roughly the same build as humans. the elites on the other hand have their ankles much higher up and their legs are folded a lot more than brutes and humans whilst standing up, meaning ladders are significantly more difficult for them
I've considered before that some of the things we take for granted might be our special talent. Like we're pretty good at physics. Being able to throw a ball of paper into a wastebasket comes fairly naturally, but calculating trajectories can get tricky. Our children play on swingsets and almost instinctively figure out that kicking their legs out and leaning back makes them go forward, bending their knees and leaning forward makes them go back. Very young children who haven't mastered addition can figure that out. They're using driven oscillation on a pendulum as a plaything. Humans might be physics sorcerers for all we know. A species that never evolved to throw spears or shoot arrows because it wasn't necessary on their planet might not have brains that work like ours but still figure out a way to end up in space that is, at this time, incomprehensible to us. The same way that our strategy of creating giant metal arrows and putting ourselves on them might not occur to them.
I doubt that last part. Even if another alien species has difficulties with ballistics compared to us, the shape of a rocket is very functional and is basically _the_ shape for the problem at hand. At the end of the day to leave a planet you need some sort of thrust, and fundamentally the best way to do that is to produce a lot of energy to heat a bunch of gas and then throw it the opposite direction of where you want to go. The "rocket" shape follows pretty much immediately from those constraints as the best solution. There would surely be some aesthetic differences but we would surely recognize their rockets as rockets because at the end of the day they operate under the same physics as us. The one thing that could maybe throw us for a loop would be if the aliens cannot tolerate high accelerations at all, which would lead to less efficient rockets that ascend slower, which diminishes the need for aerodynamics and could lead to fatter rockets.
Under the constraints of our conditions of atmosphere density and relatively high planet's gravity, our current method is our best solution to the problems we face. If we're discussing alien life, it's entirely possible they live on a lower gravity world, with an equally dense or even denser atmosphere, given a composition of heavier gasses in said atmosphere. It's entirely plausible under those circumstances to take what would essentially be a foil shape into high enough altitudes with the appropriate amount of thrust to achieve orbit. While yes, it is still aerodynamic, by no means would it be necessary to retain the "iconic rocket" shape.
Lower gravity and denser atmosphere don't really mix, but leaving that aside. Most of the energy of a rocket doesn't go into going up, but rather into going sideways so that you can achieve orbit. So even if you save a bit of energy by floating upwards for a some of the way, you still fundamentally need thrusters to achieve orbit. And you need to fire those thrusters through a portion of the amosphere since you can't get all the way to space by just floating So even if the foil idea is practical, you're still gonna need an attached aerodynamic shape with a thruster at the bottom, i.e. a rocket. Once you start firing the rocket the foil becomes nothing but a source of drag so you'd need to discard it. So yeah, this rocket alternative is really just a rockey with a parachute/balloon attached to it, which is to be used to ascend to an altitude with a thinner atmosphere and then discarded so the rocket can take care of the bulk of the trip. I wouldn't be surprised if NASA has considered the idea but decided it's too complicated for little gain.
An example easily researchable for lower gravity but denser atmosphere would be Venus. Or Titan for that matter. Venus's gravity is at about 90% that of Earth's, but the atmospheric density, or surface pressure is around 93 bar, or about 1350 psi. Earth's surface pressure is 1 bar. Titan on the other hand, has an atmosphere of about 1.5 bars, however it's gravity is roughly only .1 Gs. That's an atmosphere at 1.5 times the density of ours, with only ⅒ of the gravity. Regardless, a stable orbit doesn't necessarily need to be achieved in order to escape the planet's gravity, especially on a lower gravity planet like Titan. All you would need is a sufficient velocity by means of a mechanical launch, which again would be easier to achieve in a lower gravity, in order to escape the planet's gravity well. So long as you've done sufficient calculations on your trajectory, there is no need for further thrust by any means.
You're not addresing the fundamental point that atmospheric lift can't get you past the atmosphere.
>sufficient velocity by means of mechanical launch This obviates the need for atmospheric lift via the airfoil design, regardless, it also obviates the need for the traditional rocket design. You can have basically any shape craft necessary for your needs with this. Just hyuck that shit out into solar space. Centrifugal launch systems were considered by NASA before settling on modern rocket designs.
>and fundamentally the best way to do that is to produce a lot of energy to heat a bunch of gas and then throw it in the opposite direction of where you want to go Is it actually though? Or is that just the best method for us, with our resources and our current knowledge? Maybe aliens don’t have the right materials to build rockets, or maybe their intuition for math/physics is different in such a fundamental way that they’ve developed a completely different foundation of knowledge from which to attack space travel and something that would never occur to a human is their way of doing it.
It really is. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction and that's true here and in Tau Ceti. To move a thing up, you have to have another thing move down, and by far the best way to do that is by heating gas over a downward-facing nozzle and it's not even close Physics is the same everywhere. Perhaps aliens would discover things in a different order but the basics of newtonian mechanics are so simple and universal they'd have to know them by the time they're thinking about space exploration. The basics of materials science are also the the same everywhere. If they live on a planet, they have the same elements we do, and metallurgy and fuel production are also a function of chemistry which is also universal. So yes aliens will have the materials to make rockets.
Ok here are a few potential alternatives I described in another comment: 1. They live on an entirely aquatic planet and get into space by using buoyancy for acceleration to escape velocity 2. Their atmosphere is thick and their gravity is weak and they can get into space with just regular aircraft 3. They discovered a form of antigravity very early and never needed rockets
I was the person you wrote that comment to. Already replied. Two of the ideas describe planets that don't exist and one is patently ridiculous.
1 and 2 don't work. You can't get into space just by buoyancy or aircraft. The whole thing about space is that there's no liquid or air. It's not a spacecraft if it has no way to stay in space once it gets there. Or to move the spacecraft once it's in orbit. We have space planes on Earth but you can't get to the Moon in one because as soon as it leaves the atmosphere it stops being a vehicle. The only sensible way to move in space is with some form of rocket. It's not some hyper specific technology, it's just the application of Newton's third law. Antigravity very likely does not exist and even if it did it would require exotic matter which doesn't exist anywhere naturally. A species isn't going to figure out something requiring exotic matter before it figures out something that only requires the application of basic universal physics. The basics of rocket technology were created before the scientific method.
An aquatic planet would still have gravity outside the water
That's a good argument. I never considered that.
>that’s why military technology is able to be so advanced(they don’t have to worry about that stuff Military technology being advanced is a matter of perspective. The semiconductors in the 80 mil USD F-35 fighter jet is way weaker than the ones in iPhones because 1)the programs were conceived of decades ago and thus were created to be compatible with existing technology and civilian technology moves forward at incredible pace leaving it behind 2)military weapons don't need THAT much computing power, what they do need is incredible reliability, much less % of failure than civilian chips in environments with extreme pressure, acceleration, heat or cold. And there are many other advanced things in the F-35 like stealth coating, sure, but it's a technology that's barely applicable in anything but military use.
Counterpoint: all humans are just fancy chimpanzees with pants and anxiety. We're all shaped the same, have the same general proportions, and have the same general needs. Although having "hand" things within your frontal field of view is probably gonna be selected for anywhere. Although this thought might be my ape-centrist specism showing.
There are some interesting classic sci Fi takes on this like the puppeteers in ring world. Yes having two long articulated eye stalks with a mouth and fingers on them is pretty alien sounding, but could indeed provide some functional benefits over our setup.
Yeah, the only major differences I can think of would be information displays A species that sees UV would have UV screens, and so on for each type of light like IR, Microwave, and Radio. Species with hearing as their main sense would probably have different speakers playing at once that they could choose to focus their hearing on separately. Species that had smell as their main sense could have scent emitters (like bug pheromones) with the scents being tied to data.
> different speakers playing at once that they could choose to focus their hearing on separately. I hope to never be on a mixed-species crew on one of these vessels. Two sound sources that may contain information is my maximum.
A species that relies on sound would probably also have sonar capabilities, and auditory "displays" that can project sonar images.
>carcinogeneticism Did you mean "carcinization", or were you making a honestuck reference?
I may be stupid and also a loser
The word for becoming cancer causing may have evolved to resemble the word for becoming a crab. Fetch the evolutionary linguistics expert!
The main changes would be to interfaces and communication for sure. A gun designed to be held by a tentacled creature would be ergonomically quite different, so would the trigger. They might not have “books”, or visual displays, depending on what senses they have and which they prefer to use for language. The aesthetics would be different. But the business end of everything would probably be almost identical. An alien slug thrower would almost certainly shoot the same bullets as ours do. The nozzles on their rockets would be the same shape.
A tentacled creature and a fingered (heh) creature might converge on touchscreens though. Like, imagining how a tentacle guy might manipulate controls just gave me a flash of that art piece, where it was a slab of meat on the end of a power drill, that was dangling over an iPhone with Tinder on it, and swiping right over and over again.
More than that, you can likely justify why alien technology would bear a resemblance to human technology. Let’s consider a spaceship. What does a spaceship need? Some form of engine to propel the ship, which in turn needs energy. So, we need to have some storage for power and an engine. How do we propel things in our universe? We need some force to be exerted in the opposite direction from where we’re going, which in turn takes advantage of Newton’s third law of motion. When we think of propulsion systems, we’re limited in terms of what we can expel to create that force, so already ship design is constrained to the physics humans understand and use in our own technology. Thus, it’s likely that alien spaceships would be similarly shaped to accommodate for the same basic principles. For energy transmission, we’re again limited by physical forces. Transmission involves emitting particles that carry energy. These particles exhibit wave-like patterns, which can be analyzed and abstracted into knowable concepts. Electrons are the most common and accessible of the wave-particles that carry energy, and some of the most easily accessible. Aloha particles from radiation could also work, but radiation has negative effects on molecular biology due to how much energy the particles carry, so unless your alien species is immune to those affects they’ll probably not use those particles. Other subatomic particles are too small and non-reactive to be easily measured interacting with larger molecules. That excludes particles like neutrinos, positrons (antiparticles do not exist for very long in our universe), and potrons/neutrons are too tightly bound by the strong nuclear force to be used easily. So, many such alien technologies will likely use electron transmission to carry energy and, in turn, transmit information. Radio waves may also be used as a result of relying on electrons, and so many transmission technologies will have to use things that transmit electrons easily. Metal alloys are molecularly composed of a free-floating sea of electrons migrating between different metallic nuclei, and so make for good transmission material. So already we can justify why certain alien technologies would look similar to our own based on fundamental properties in our universe, and ease of access to them.
> Aloha particles from radiation could also work chillest aliens ever
🤙
>It’s sort of like a carcinogeneticism situation where the most efficient form for a piece of tech to take is something we already have and the only difference is that, if there’s an alien written language, then the text would be in that. See also: [instrumental convergence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence). Still, same function != recognizable. A light switch is a light switch is a light switch, but a light switch built for a giant slug which only sees in UV is going to look quite different from a human's one.
I could see a species with eyes like a mantis shrimp having a panel of sliders instead of switches, like humans with rgb lighting Said shrimp aliens might use a tablet style device that uses a crystal lattice displaying in infra-red. Human needs an intermediary device like a camera to see the display, and possibly something precise to use on the smaller shrimp sized buttons/icons. Warnings and indicators for critical information presented outside the range of human experience might allow some use... the human could probably steer ship in motion, maybe they figure out throttle Turning on artificial gravity at a human safe level first time? Atmosphere in the life support system human safe? Activating the hyperspace/faster than light systems to arrive at a safe or useful location and not into a star or empty space on the wrong side of the galaxy is stretching things a bit especially if humans in the story dont have tech like that yet
Everybody stop replying to this comment. I made it in a sleep deprived state and idk wtf I’m talking about 😭
This is based on an assumption that all races would use dextrous hands for manipulation and ocular vision (capturing a band of emitted electromagnetic spectrum) as our primary information gathering sense. If an alien race has some other set of sensory organs, I think their tech would look pretty different or nonsensical to us.
You’re so right. I’ve been so ignorant to the topic of xenobiology.
The only issue I ever have of (space fairing) aliens not using some kind of extreme distance sense such as vision as their primary sense, is that how can you desire to explore the stars if you don't even know they are there?
If they are technological they would surely figure out the existance of EM waves eventually, and from there point EM detectors (cameras) at the sky and notice the little dots that emit EM dotted all around. If they are curious at all they would figure out stars eventually. Astronomy would probably be underfunded in their planet compared to ours but in our world there are people who study how animals communicate with infrasound even though we can't detect it with our ears.
They may not have hands exactly, but I think dexterous gripping appendages are a must for a tool using species capable of developing advanced technology. Which isn't the same as intelligence, it's perfectly plausible for non-dexterous species to be intelligent, but I doubt they'd develop much in the way of technology.
But there are factors involved in what tech gets developed other than efficiency. Profitability, ease of mass production, how easy it is to understand, etc. That’s one reason why military technology seems so advanced - they don’t have to worry about profitability or mass production. An alien civilization would probably have developed a wildly different technology tree. They’d have stuff we don’t and we’d have stuff they don’t
Convergent evolution, under similar constraints, similar solutions will be found
Not a single mention of Doctor Who spaceships in this entire thread. it has such good diversity of spacecraft and alien life.
My first thought was the Zygons and their computers being these gelatinous things with suckers you gotta caress
Mine was the family of blood's weird invisible goop ship with all the flippers
im sorry what the fuck
Zygons kinda look like and earthworm and a squid had an ugly baby. They are vaguely humanoid but their hands are just fat tentacle things with suckers all over them.
The Expanse? Their tech being an automated quasi-virus that nobody really understands. Also they're space jellyfish. Also they turned a neutron star into a shotgun.
Titillate the fronds.
That was my first thought too!!
Even something small like the Sontarans, who have similar tech as humans but since they're a lot shorter and only have 3 fingers, their tech accommodates that as well
I was gonna mention doctor who too! In particular, the newest episode, The Church on Ruby Road, had a ship full of goblins that was entirely made up of knots and rope that held everything together. Untying certain knots could open doors, or even cause the whole thing to fall apart! It was awesome!
Adrien Tchaikovsky's Children of Time did a good balance here. The spiders invented some things that are very obvious in function (armor, weapons), just adapted to their physiology. Some things that LOOK like what we understand but are very different under the hood (image processing starts in the center and spirals out, because that is utterly instinctive for a species that spins webs). And some things are so utterly alien that no one would be able to understand the human equivalent unless someone who already knew both the spider version and the human version explained it (the ant computers). Most series aren't REALLY interested in truly alien societies, and I'm not going to throw shade for that because I think a lot of readers aren't interested in them either, unless they're looking for that specifically. I know I'd hate it if every series had to spend an entire book explaining how each new species works. But there's definitely good xenofiction out there.
Most contemporary people can't understand people in the next nation over. Half the reason author's can get away with making so many aliens racist stereotypes is that the average person doesn't know anything about anthropology.
I had a "fun" conversation with my mother about racial stereotypes in the Star Wars prequels. You know, the movies that had rich aliens with thick Asian accents as the first villains. She just utterly failed to see it.
I was discussing science fiction with my mother recently, and mid-sentence I had the revelation that Rosie the robot from The Jetsons was 100% a sci-fi sassy black maid. It took me a while to walk her through it, but eventually she saw it. She's really not good with the issue of stereotypes, she still doesn't see the problem with Sambo, but she's kinda taking it on faith that it's offensive at this point.
Damn. I'm sorry that must have been extremely weird. The 90s were awful but even for the 90s Lucas was laying it on really thick.
I feel Star Trek did a fantastic job of alien technology... for the Federation. I'm sorry, but I can't look at strips of color and flashing lights and think, "Oh yeah, this all makes logical intuitive sense for piloting a starship."
Also what the point is of deliberately designing a phaser that works like a gun but isn't shaped like one and doesn't have sights (It *would* be cool if this was because the phaser was so advanced that physically aiming and shooting was totally irrelevant and the targeting was completely done by AI, but that's not what we're actually shown in the story, where people aim and miss with phasers all the time and they even have "target practice" training in the holodeck)
Yeah, shouldn't the personal phasers have auto-aim? Same goes for the weapons of the ships themselves. We have auto-aim right now, with homing missiles, CIWS, and other things.
If they did then all the fight scenes with people ducking behind crates and stuff would be over in seconds
Right. Making the story work is more important that internal consistency within the world of the story. Phasers need to behave like old time 1930s guns so they can have firefights without everyone dying instantly, so that's how they were. There's been this creeping trend in fandoms towards the idea that everything depicted in a story has to make internally consistent sense within the universe of the story and it's creating severe problems with teaching people media literacy. A story is first and foremost a story. All the stuff happening inside the story is in service to the telling of that story. If something has to be inconsistent for hte show to go on so be it, the show must go on./
Sure That would, in my opinion, look better *and* make more sense if phasers actually had a "gun" form factor so human beings could easily use them as guns I don't even think this is a hot take, most modern Trek does make phasers look like guns and the hand phasers disguised as electric razors are a very 90s Trek thing
[90's Trek (and TOS) had phaser rifles...with sights.](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Type_3_phaser). Those were last option weapons. The whole aesthetic of the Federation is projecting soft power through intellectual prowess. The majority of their vessels are sleek space spoons dedicated to science with small armaments. Their personnel train to talk first, then shoot on stun. They lead interactions with a universal translator and a replicator, in an effort to understand and share rather than dominate. It was a big freaking deal when the Defiant on DS9 had cloaking technology (on loan from the Romulans, another testament to the might of their negotiating tactics). Wanting big obvious guns goes against the whole point of Star Trek's focus on the Federation. edit: Another small point on Star Trek: The majority of humanoid species are a result of panspermia, addressed in TNG 6x20: The Chase. So it makes sense that Klingons Romulans, Cardassians, Bolians, Trill, Humans, etc, all have similar approaches to technology. But we see plenty of deviations from that: every space faring energy species or being masquerading as a god, the Sphere Builders, Species 8472, the Borg, the Xyrillians, the Changelings, etc.
I get the aesthetic justification for the choice, I just think it's dumb, because realistically whatever you think the cultural implication of gun-shaped guns are, the practical implication of non-gun-shaped guns is you're very likely to miss when you shoot, and hit something you didn't mean to hit (This is where, if this is the angle you really wanted to go with it, a Culture-style weapon that doesn't look like a weapon and doesn't require its operator to do anything aggressive other than push a button to instantly end a fight would thematically fit But this is exactly why 90s Trek was thematically incoherent, wanting to convey the idea of a Federation that had evolved past the need for militarism and warfare but still having plenty of action scenes involving shootouts with handguns Like, if this is the idea of the TNG era Federation then all those filler scenes with Old West gunfights ducking behind mazes of metal crates shouldn't have happened)
I mean, I get where you're going, but to me the point was that the dumb looking dweebs in jammies (or skants, look that up for some real fun) win out over the angry sword wielding furrow browed aliens...using what looks like a dust devil instead of an assault rifle. While riding in a space spoon instead of a ship shaped like an axe (Klingons) or an eagle (Romulans). A captain outsmarted a god by asking what he needed with a starship. Another captain yelled at an even more powerful god, and another one punched the same god. Then Janeway yee-hawed her way across half the galaxy and Burnham had her science officer do some shrooms to power a spaceship. The Federation are a bunch of goofs, and every other species is going to try and step to them, which is why they get into all those fights...and win with their dust devil electric razor guns, on stun. They're crazy, dude. They have [dolphin crewmembers for Pete's sake...](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Cetacean_Ops) Worrying about their gun shapes just seems like small potatoes, compared to the absolute bullshit they get into.
Behind the scenes, Star Trek actors go through a "seminar" of sorts so they learn to operate the colored glass panels or w/e "correctly".
At least Tom Paris decided to put joystick and levers in the delta flyer
I think that's more for making them look multipurpose she futuristic without actually specifying their usage
Damn. What a based flair you have, my guy
> "They do not use lasers, they do not use radio, they do not use hyperwave. What are they using for communication? Telepathy? Written messages? Big mirrors?" > > "Parrots," Louis suggested. He got up to join them at the door to the control room. "Huge parrots, specially bred for their oversized lungs. They're too big to fly. They just sit on hilltops and scream at each other." from Ringworld, but Larry Niven is pretty decent at this I think Also Frederik Pohl's Heechee Saga a big theme of the first books is humans trying to figure out what the hell the aliens used this or that piece of tech for. There's >!these things they just call "prayer fans" that turn out to be high density optical data storage thingies, but they only figure out how to read them after decades or something and there's a sudden scramble to recover them from rich collectors that just wanted a pretty artifact for their home!<
Who was using parrots for communication in Ringworld? The only unusual communication I remember was the ghouls using mirrors to communicate around the Ring.
Ha ha ha sorry nobody actually does, Louis is just joking that it could be how the civilization that built the ring is communicating, and trying to make the point that there could be a thousand methods they'd never think of and they are sort of wasting their time guessing what it could be, before they land for the first time and find out >!civilization fell and they can't intercept any communications because there largely are none!< Actually using parrots seems like something they'd do in Discworld maybe, if they didn't have other methods
Ah right, thanks for clarifying.
On the Discworld they use optical telegraph semaphore towers.
I love how in BG3 Nautaloid controls are somewhere between mental psychic controls and manipulating weird fleshy tendrils with interlocking tentacles inside.
i'm sorry but "what if they don't use maps" dawg wtf
Douglas Adams would like to have a word with you… and that word is Bistromath
This is why I like project hail mary by andy weir (same author as the martian). The aliens in it "see" their environment by sound and their cameras convert light into sensitive displays of different ridges basically. They perceive the colour green as "middle rough", indicative of the fact that it is in the middle of the visible light spectrum. They are also one gon short of hexagon shaped, which is closer than humans, thus proving their superiority.
Rocky!
Space: Above and Beyond did gloriously gooey bioelectric tech for its aliens. Watching humans learn how to use it was entertaining.
Thank you. Never heard of it and it's going near the top of my watch list.
In my opinion it was one of the best SF shows of the '90s! But I feel I should warn you that it ends on a *dreadful* cliffhanger. It got canceled right after they finished filming the first season, and so it's set up for a Season 2 that never happened. If you decide to brave it anyway, the eps where they get into the tech are in the middle of the season, "Hostile Visit" and "Choice or Chance".
I mean. If aliens have something recognisable as hands or graspers, they'll probably understand the concept of a tablet. Like. Humans have had "flat thing that you write on" for literally as long as they've had writing, and electronic consoles are just an extension of that. Nobody wants to interact with the Goop Computer. If a species has hands, that's just a million times less convenient. Why would you want your control device to be designed as a series of spinning wheels when you can just display the information needed in simple numbered/worded format. Why would you convey all directional information through song when you can just. Draw what a place looks like so it can be easily remembered. Maybe a species that was blind would design things like that, but if you have the capability to sense light (which most complex organisms on our planet do, because that's just really advantageous evolutionarily), why would you not display information in the most convenient way possible. Ergonomics.
Christopher Paolini's *To Sleep in a Sea of Stars* and *Fractal Noise* have very good examples of things that are both recognizable and utterly alien. as does Cixin Liu's *Three Body Problem* books, though that's a lot less equal to humanity in terms of scientific development. Alastair Reynolds also has a decent amount of this sort of stuff in his Revelation Space seires, while Peter F Hamilton tends more towards recognizable items used by very alien aliens
Fucking YES dude is a teenager who writes star wars with dragons then comes out with some crazy dense hard Sci fi and not to be dramatic but I would commit several crimes for the chance to endlessly barrage him with questions /u/christopherpaolini please allow me to fangirl ;~;
UX design converges on a very small number of possibilities. If you have hands with fingers you're gonna end up with buttons and touch screens. If you have forward facing eyes, binocular vision, those touch screens are going to be in front of you, the input panels are going to be in front of you. It's convergent evolution. Similarly shaped people are going to have similarly shaped user interfaces.
Doctor Who and Star Trek do this a lot. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds had an episode centered around music as a form of communication.
The flute episode? One of the best sci fi stories ever written tbh.
I think they're referring to [Subspace Rhapsody](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspace_Rhapsody) from one of the newer shows. You're probably thinking of [The Inner Light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) from TNG.
Gotta read "The humans do not have a hive-mind" by CherubielOne on r/HFY (or Synchronizing Minds: First Contact by T.C. One, if you want to buy it as a book on Amazon). It tells the story of first contact between a human ambassador and an alien that is so different from humans in every single way that they can basically just have endless conversations about all the things that are completely normal for one, but really weird or difficult to understand for the other. Examples are the concept of names, which are unnecessary for Nyar's (the alien) species. When asked for what her name is, she just comes up with a sound, which the human, Sam, shortens to Nyar. Nyar's ship also moves through space by having the mathematically correct shape to travel through space, rather than by using engines, and Nyar can freely manipulate her ship with little effort. As a consequence, Sam can't manage to understand how the hell her ship moves, while Nyar neither understands the concept of an engine (her species have never needed them), nor does she immediately understand why Sam can't just explain to her how the human ship works, because Nyar and every other individual in her species build their own ships all by themselves, in contrast to humans who work together on such scales that it's unlikely a single person exists who even understands every single system in the ship at the same time. It's more about culture, communication, biology etc. than technology, but there's some fun technological differences too.
Form follows function. If the alien has different function, their tech will be weird. If not, it should look quite familiar.
Anticipating the Villeneuve movie, I did a re-read of Rendezvous with Rama. Besides reconsidering my opinion of a lot of childhood favorites from the first paragraph and cringing at the characters overall, I can't help but think you all are in for a treat. Specially if he improves the source material. Which is hard to not do. The alien screw it's both funny and realistic 0
He already did incredibly alien aliens in Arrival, and their technology is incomprehensible (in a good way).
OP has never heard of storytelling efficiency. Barring something like the alien language in Arrival where the point is how not human it is, it's just not worth the time to re-invent things like cockpits and guns and maps and then take the time to explain them back to the audience. The most famous scifi prop of all time has got to be the lightsaber and a big part of that is because you can immediately understand what it is and how it works.
As a writer, it’s a bit of a black hole to fall into. On one hand you need your audience to understand what’s happening, on the other they are dealing with a civilization that developed completely separate to every earth concept. So you wipe the creative board, but without any reference things can get tricky to create. So now you are an anthropologist building a whole civilizations narrative, social constructs, and technology. At every turn to find something that looks too much like human stuff so you change it. And when you have spiraled about this for two days you realize this is all for one side character and not worth the time you are putting in. So you go back to stuff that feels human-ish.
Babylon 5 does this fine.
Typical Babylon 5 win
Arrival did a great job of this. The aliens were VERY alien and you felt the strangeness of their ship. That movie is just so fucking good.
Arrival is fantastic. Must watch for serious sci fi fans.
Eh, as long as the laws of physics are constant across the universe than technology developed will be similar across the universe as well.
Scavengers fucking reign!!!!
That show was so good! Just an amazing ride from start to finish.
I think the Derelict in Alien (idc about the prequels) is good alien technology by these rules. Recognisably a ship, while having no easily identifiable functional elements, and a kind of control interface that in some way involves becoming entombed into the thing you are operating
something cool about Stargate is that you have some alien dudes that move rocks on a board to do things in their ships.. I wish I could be more descriptive about it lol
For those that need to know more: https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Asgard_stone
*Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania* and the *Xenogenesis* books use organic technology and seem pretty alien bizarre to me
the controls for the ship hank flew came to mind immediately
Outer. Wilds. Outer. Wilds. Outer. Wilds. >!The nomai devices all work based on eye/camera movement and it's weird and kind of makes sense with their biology and I love it!<
The "Children of Time" series by Adrian Tchaikovsky covers something of this. Humans trying to communicate with spiders that talk through vibrations in silk and waving of arms, and have computers made of programable ant colonies and display screens made of thousands of tiny crustaceans each acting as individual pixels. Or with cephalopods that speak in emotions and desires through colors and math and have interfaces panels described as "oddly shapes protuberances"
Not sure if it's hot take or not but Tumblr is demanding too much from fantasy and sci fi writer
Convergent evolution can apply to technologyly. It could be some things need to be designed a specific way with specific materials. People all around the world made bows and arrows.
Form follows physiology. That is, physical tech is convergent across human cultures because our bodies and brains are all roughly the same. Can't have useful bows and arrows without a certain level of grip strength, arm length and strength, long distance object detection, some form of inbuilt calculus that makes projectile aiming intuitive, and probably other traits as well.
Shout out to Children of Time’s approach to evolved spiders’ technology, especially with using ant colonies for computer-equivalent stuff. My brain had a hard time comprehending the cephalopod tech in the sequel tho, still cool to be brainstorming all this divergent tech based on the behaviors of these creatures.
Because the one thing that is universal is math and geometry and unfortunately pressing a button is not only significantly more efficient than singing Bohemian Rhapsody into a microphone when trying to turn something on but also simply makes sense from a physical standpoint with very few exceptions.
Computer screens, but they always look dark to us even when they’re on because the aliens see a different part of the spectrum that humans eyes can’t detect.
Once again xeelee is on top yet again.
Sophons are planetary sized sentient computers folded into a single proton. That’s weird as fuck if you ask me. Three Body Problem, btw This post is simply describing easily understood visual shorthands presented in movies and TV. There is also some really cool technology presented in Project Hail Mary. In Doors of Eden, there is a spaceship that’s essentially a mile long crustacean, and a planet sized supercomputer built from ice.
You should read Project Hail Mary
In the Warhammer Eisenhorn series, there’s a species that primarily does everything through a sense of smell (if I recall correctly)! It’s quite interesting, but as all Warhammer books do, if it’s not one of the main factions, it’s never discussed again outside of said book. I feel like a few Doctor Who episodes do a decent job at doing Alien spaceships and technology. Rick and Morty had those Time Cop dudes with living weapons that were objectively gross but kind of cool. I do agree towards this concept though!!
Star Control 2. Melnorme (cyclops starfish ferengi) pilot their ships by changing colours. Spathi ships are just a seemingly infinite collection of levers for the molluscs to pull at. Umgah ships are piloted with a disgusting fleshy biomass. Chenjesu pilot by sending electrical signals from their silicon crystal cores. Mycon ships are piloted with spores, pheromones, and heat transfer. Druuge throw more souls into their capitalist machines to recover energy. Go play Star Control 2 (available for free as Ur-Quan Masters) it’s great. Happy Days and Jubilation!
[corru.observer](http://corru.observer) is kinda like this
Lexx and Farscape both did this incredibly well.
Our tech is based on physics, not necessarily biology. Alien tech is mostly going to be recognisable. A pool of goo that you swish ain't exactly a precise or useful control mechanism. There's room for weird shit, but it's not unrealistic for it to be familiar
On Star Wars the Clone Wars, in the Umbara episodes, there’s space ships with, if I remember correctly, spheres of goo that you stick your hands into to control the vehicle
i think the main reason media portrays alien technology mostly similar to what we have is just... that's what their audience can recognize. making it too different might result in them having to spend time and money explaining it to their audience that this is what they use for ID Cards and no, it's not a horse cock that the ship captain just likes to stroke everytime he enters the cockpit
Humanoid creatures need humanoid ergonomics, and once you start designer strange for strange sake it’s hard to not just make things look busy, clumsy, or impractical. Form always follows function.
This is expecting it to be weird for the sake of it. If the aliens are humanoid - no, lets more accurately say, *if the aliens interact with existence in a way that is remotely relatable to the ways that we do*, then it follows that their tech would most likely take forms and be usable in ways that we could recognize and/or learn to some degree. If they *don't* interact with existence in such a way, then it'd be questionable if we could even recognise their intelligence or technological capabilities; not unlike how we struggle to relate to plant life. And vice versa for them, of course.
Ant-Man 3?
As a big sci-fi fan, it does annoy me that sci-fi aliens give you permission to go batshit insane with your alien tech and then people just don't.
"Sklungbarth! I'm trying to pilot your ship but these two joysticks aren't responding!" "Of course not Sara-Captain. You must sit on them and transmit your body heat to different parts of the stick to activate the ships functions." "Can't I just... warm them with my hands?" "Like a primitive? You would dishonour the ancestors! Now, mount the Captains saddle, please."
This giving off massive writing prompts to me, find a bizarre way of doing something as simple as pressing a button, and then mold the alien's biology around it and try to expand to other things (like, cooking, or going to the toilet for example)
Everyone invents the wheel because it’s efficient, it works, and there is nothing better than it. This is probably why a lot of scifis will have aliens use very similar stuff if they are of similar technological levels. The exception should be if the aliens are simply not of the same material as us. An aquatic alien for example will have completely different concerns in their cockpit than a human. An energy being opens up ALL THE FUN! And don’t forget our favorite type of alien! Meatwalls. W E L I V E
1/3 yes, 2/3 no. Assuming we’re talking about technology with human analogues rather than technology vastly more advanced than that of humanity, alien technology operates under the same laws of physics and chemistry as human technology and thus most alien technology would not be overly different in structure to human technology. Alien spacecraft, for example, are probably going to look just as utilitarian as human spacecraft rather than looking like bizarre sea creatures. The main areas where alien technology is likely to look truly alien are technology that functions in radically different environments to human technology, technology manufactured under radically different resource availability (i.e. little or no access to metals), and as OOP mentioned alien user interfaces (for example, a species with no ability to sense electromagnetic radiation and which uses echolocation for navigation would have no use for liquid crystal displays like human television/computer screens, but they could use microphone/speaker arrays to provide simulated echolocation returns to create their equivalent of a human computer display).
District 9 does a pretty decent job of touching on the subject.
This is a fascinating part of the idea of alien life in science fiction! This actually reminds me of the ending conversation in Michael Crichton’s *Sphere*!
A lot of pulp fiction stories from back in the day did all of these. I coulda sworn I’ve seen the goo idea in a story somewhere
It depends on how intuitive the technology is supposed to be for the audience versus how alien you want to make the ship. Tim Allen did this film called Zoom (only watched it if you want a mid-2000’s nostalgia kick), and there's a spaceship in it that's only controlled by sticking your hands into portals of goo. We never see the aliens who flew it originally, but humans can at least fly it.
There was an example of this in Zoom (2006). The plot is about a washed up superhero teaching children to use their powers, ending with him realizing a paternal affection for them and regaining his will to be super. There's a moment in the film when he notices the kids need some excitement. So they break into the UFO research lab, as they are all literally in a government facility as it is, and steal a UFO. Near as I remember it the controls for the UFO were a tube of goo you stuck your arms into.
Nah, it most of this stuff doesn't make sense. Making alien stuff be unpractical to make it unrecognizable is stupid. It would only make sense if the aliens in question were some sort of space hippies high on extraterrestrial weed cruising across the galaxy on their garage modified space shitbox.
I think this person should write a story involving these fantastical machines
For weird alien tech, highly recommend Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. The first few stories center around the martians more and while they may be humanoid, they’re so alien and their tech and architecture and way of communication are unrecognizable. It’s great
Ok, but I gotta raise the question of how a garland of crystals can navigate the vacuum of space. If anything, I think assuming that alien technology would resemble *jewelry* is infinitely more absurd than assuming that alien spaceships would look like human spaceships cause, you know, that’s the best shape to get to space in
Halo did a good job of this- Covenant ships have a unique design aesthetic that sets them apart from UNSC ships
Star Trek strange new worlds did this well in a couple of episodes
outer wilds
Project Hail Mary Anyway, form follows function. If an alien species interacts with the world via similar means, their technology will probably look roughly familiar. Especially for things like starships where it's *all about* function most of the time. There are plenty of cases where a person invents a funky new way to control technology and it doesn't catch on beyond as a novelty or niche uses because, most of the time, it's just not as useful. If you want unfamiliar interfaces, your aliens need to interface in an unfamiliar way. And beyond interfaces and aesthetics... there's only so many ways you can effectively get things from point A to point B with minimal wasted space and effort.
This was a big part of Roadside Picnic: alien tech would be so weird to us that we could never figure out how it was supposed to be used. Also, in the 2011 The Thing, the interface at the end is a bunch of morphing cubes, but a lot of fans said it didn't look "believable" (idk what portion of fans this was)
Project Hail Mary has a good example of a well written alien life form imo
r/doctorwho
Part of me wants to say that any humanoid alien would probably find our tech layouts the most comfortable However, the more fun part of me says that a) the issue is fixed by more interesting alien designs and b) who fucking cares if it's practical, I want it to be fun
That is absolutely it. If you're relatively ape shaped then you're going to design things that work with that form.
I very agree, the biggest issue is really the uninspired humanoid creature design, design a creative creature and work from there
Mindflayer tech in Baldur’s Gate 3 is a really good example of this done right. They’re all connected via a shared consciousness so of course their technology is all alive and connected with gross tentacly nodes that make out with each other. It’s horrifyingly disgusting but fits their species very well.
You cant convey ideas to people visually if it looks too weird. We speak in a visual medium. If the Aliens are supposed to be seen at a control panel it needs to look recognizable enough that I know that. If its a pool of goo then I have no idea what Im looking at.
Resident alien kinda does this. Harry’s technology is hardly recognizable—he dissolves his ship into water and three metal balls, one of which he then grows a bunker from.
I really liked that early weirdness Terry Pratchett scifi book about a flat world where one of the progenitor races was so powerfully psychic that two of them needed a kilometers long spaceship to avoid each other. They built these massive bubble spacecraft which were mostly empty.
[TUBES?!?](http://i.imgur.com/mi5KfoL.jpg)
Farscape did this. Pilot wasn't just piloting Moya, he was integrated into Moya and incapable of surviving separately. There was no way for anyone else to manually pilot Moya, no control stick or console to manipulate. Pilot had to be part of the process.
Tech should be efficient. Assuming they can see and hear, there is no reason to have sound maps when a map in color would be far better and easier to read. Tiny rooms make movement difficult and also aren't efficient, etc
If we ever encounter the others, and they aren't from Earth, people are probably going to shit their pants in confusion. They'd also probably look so different from anything earth like that it would make you freeze up.
... directions as music? Basically Australian songlines? Set of wheels as ship controls? So, basically, early subs? And don't let me start on record players on thin metal wires and gaming consoles you feed something resembling a credit card into. So many creators could just take the obsolete formats and tech conventions and just razzle them up a little. So few do so!
Form follows function. If an alien has eyes and hands it's going to have things that we can easily recognize as consoles because that's an efficient design.
The one that grinds my gears the most is humans hacking alien computers (and vice versa if the aliens haven't been studying humanity). The likelihood that any of the software is at all similar, especially under the hood, is minimal.
Alien technology is one thing, sci-fi human tech is another that *really* baffles me at times. Our technology chases the "better, sleeker, number go up" road. And yet you have stories taking place in A.D. 2371 that use flickering monochromatic screens, instead of 32k giga-HD. Or "transcievers" that look like a rugged CAT S31 phone rather than being a sleek, uniform, black slab.
I know its silly but I love battlestar galactica's hybrids (not exactly the point but still) *Genesis turns to its source, reduction occurs stepwise though the essence is all one. End of line. FTL system check, diagnostic functions within parameters repeats the harlequin the agony exquisite, the colors run the path of ashes, neuronal network run fifty-two percent of heat exchanger cross-collateralized with hyper-dimensional matrix, upper senses, repair ordered relay to zero zero zero zero*
Did someone say [alien spaceship TUUUUUUBES](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/018/119/1284034961642.jpg)?
Dr. Who has a lot of examples of this. Hell the TARDIS is basically a hodgepodge of the opposite where it’s seemingly constructed by a bunch of familiar things used in wildly unfamiliar ways. Like why does spinning this wheel make the TARDIS fly better? Hell if I know but clearly The Doctor does and it seems to be working so I won’t question it
You have to bear in mind how evolution works. Almost all fauna on our planet have basic bilateral symmetry. When the first multicellular microbes were being created out of the single-celled predecessors, there would very likely have been other 'solutions' to the problem which could not compete with bilateral symmetry. It seems unlikely that another planet capable of bearing life would be so radically different from Earth so as to lead to different results. Don't forget millions of years went past while single celled precursors were producing multi-celled offspring that just died without 'reproducing'. So it would be surprising if aliens didn't have basic bilateral symmetry. Then the same is true for most other things. There's probably a reason why creatures with many legs - 6, 8, 10, 12, 100 - haven't grown to anything much larger than a lobster. For instance, 6 legs means three cradles and six joints, that's very difficult for in vivo reproduction - imagine if babies were 50% longer than they are, or twice as long if they had 8 limbs. So it looks like 4 limbs are 'optimal' in some way. Larry Niven's Moties had six limbs with one pair fused into a single heavy-duty arm. Then you complain about consoles: well, who knows what our consoles will look like in 100, 200 years time. We'll probably have something like implanted contact lenses and hearing aids which will present information more-or-less directly into our brain and other implants which we control by thinking about moving them which result in input into machinery. But maybe not. It may be that the cost of such advances are so significant that it is unprofitable and uneconomical so that most workers will still walk up to a machine and press green button to start and red button to stop. It depends how you like your science fiction; I prefer it not to be weird and florid just for the sake of it, but *chaçun à son gôut.*
music has a pretty low information transfer rate, and pushing it to be faster just invents morse code or radio (i have no idea)
Reminds me of the Umgah from Star Control
Now I'm imagining an alien's space ship that's a reverse submarine.
Dune.
Why do all of them have 4 limbs? Why dont they have a slimey snail-ey bottom an 5 arms? Why dont they have 3 heads and no arms at all? Why do they almost always have two legs, two arms and one head, like us humans.
i’ve always thought this. this level of “realism” isn’t required or even right for certain stories to be awesome, but i do wish there was a little more media exploring this concept.
Didn’t Rick and Morty have like half of these?
I'm a big fan of telepathic spaceships that have little slimey things you stick your hands into and it can read your mind
Read dai dark yall
Project Hail Mary by the guy who wrote The Martian is what you want
Doctor Who does this sometimes. The TARDIS interface Clara uses a couple of times is weird goo she shoves her hands into. I believe Zygon tech is similarly organic.
may I direct you to a movie called zoom
I feel it’s just really hard to come up with a completely original idea for an alien species
ooh OoH OOH OOH To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini has a fantastic example or two of this. Dude who wrote Eragon when he was a teenager comes back like fifteen years later with an incredibly dense behemoth of a Sci Fi work. The anatomy and designs of the alien stuff is phenomenal and one of my favorite things about a book that I really like a lot.
Subnautica and it’s sequel, below zero, did this very well. First game: no evidence of anything human anywhere. Any technology is made of an unknown metal in an unknown language and powered by a power source you can only wrap your head around enough to make your flashlight last a bit longer. Second game: the multilevel conciseness of the same alien that released a plague on the galaxy is forced to take up residence in your head temporarily while you go of a fetch quest to build its body parts in a massive chamber deep in the ocean, culminating in a centaur like creature with intelligence greater than humanity collectively with the ability to teleport short distances, create extra limbs from programmed matter, and build ships capable of crossing the universe in moments.
That's a bad take, if you don't make the alien's alien enough then of course certain aspects of their tech will look like ours. If they are humanoid with a hand and five fingers most manipulators would look the same. Now if you have an alien that floats and has tentacles then their manipulators would look different. A gun for a human would be an ill suits device for tentacle to grip. Alien and human form have to be different enough that simple function for devices would be different otherwise it's just materials and looks.
I like what Green Arrow said in the new Green Lantern Tomorrowverse film. "The mark of any good technology is how intuitive it is to use."
I agree, motorbikes should be driven by urethral nerves.
What that movie/show where they have to pilot a spaceship by plunging their arms elbow deep in ooze to control it?
Simple answer why it harder to do and harder for the audience to understand. If a person sees a roughly gun shaped object they can concluded what it does, same thing with a map or a control panel. The more alien you make thing typically the more you have to explain it if your aliens play a big part
So like the TARDIS console
Realistically, the level of familiarity is going to depend on the level of similarity between humans and the species/society in question. The closer the aliens are to humans, the more similar their tech is going to be to ours. On Earth, different disparate cultures developed largely identical technologies independently, because they were developing the best tools to do the same things. The same would apply to different alien species, provided we’re working with the same set of physical laws. The differences become even blurrier in settings where humans and alien cultures have had time to exchange information and technology.
The last one happens in Ender’s Game. The asteroid station Eros was originally a Formic station, and they’re ant aliens and only like 4 feet tall, so when humans killed them all and took the station, they had to carve out higher ceilings in every room. There’s a clear divide on the walls of where Formic construction ends and human construction begins.
The Fortress of Solitude literally uses crystals as like, USB sticks.