Creating alien races

[BeRKA]

This is an interesting discussion. My own view is that although two animals filling the same ecological niche might look alike, they might as well look and behave very different.

You can get some interesting ideas by reading After Man or The Future is Wild by Dougal Dixon.

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi !

The goal of evolution may be to fill one niche. Problem is that the nature of the niche is constantly changing, due to the development of adjected biology and overall environment.
That makes evolution hardly predictable in the future but still understandable if you pick one point of development and analyse development and environmental conditions of the past.

One major factor of evolution might be instability.
Analysing one moment of time in an evolutionary process usually reveals aspects, which do not fit to the actual environment and are might appear somehow "unrealistic". Things, that do not fit into a system at a special moment cause instability. Either they disappear or change their environment.
Note, that the variation range of evolutionary instablitity increases if the size of an ecosystem decreases. So, enclosed or separated environments might produce more "strange" things than bigger ones, even if its just for a relative short period of time.

What makes a lifeform at least "realistic" is not mainly the aspect, that it fits to the actual environment, but that its development process could be explained.
This might stretch oppertunities for setting up a Traveller ecosystem a bit, but its really not an easy thing to describe a convincing history of a lifeforms evolutionary development.

Anyway, even a evolutionary highly instable situation might be considered as stable in a typical Traveller adventuring time frame.

Regarding the appearance of lifeform it should be considered, that two basic physical aspects of environment shaped life.
First one is gravity, generally giving a top/down aspect.
Second one is direction, based one sensoring or movement, which are strongly related, because light was the stimulus and movement the reaction. Those things provided the front/back direction aspect.

For non-moving lifeforms or those moving in one media rotational symmetry is just consequential.
Land movement enhances the gravity directional aspect and results into lifeforms shaped by the top/down and front/back difference.
Up to this point, fundamental shape is purely given by gravity and the presence of light/a star.
Going further in evolution simplification and efficency increase of movement results in reduction and specialisations of locomotion facilities (legs). That reduction to the necessaties was done quite early in evolution e.g. spiderlike 8 legs, insects 6 legs... so I sometimes have difficulties with those 6 leg beings in Traveller (except perhaps "birds").
"Technically", a four leg right/left symetric being is kind of consequential step for a diverse, life friendly land environment. Next step is indeed a being with two legs for movement and two for manipulation.
So, planetary conditions shape life. If the conditions are equal the shaping should follow those physical rules, too.

Perhaps a completely water based ecosystem without the impacts of land life might result in really different beings, which keep rotational symetry and proceed to air movement in some strange ways..

Just a few thoughts but many others could be found by googling for "bionics"

Regards,

Mert

 

[Pickles]

Interesting, yes, but before things get too heated, might I point out that with no other point of reference, ANY version of TU with alien life is as valid as any other. No amount of study of life forms on Earth provides any basis for anything other than expostulation of whether similar forms might evolve given the same conditions on other planets.

IMO, the vindication of any alien race in Traveller is whether or not it fills its role-playing niche.

On a related point, IIRC, the much of the indigenous 'lower' life of Foundation universe was destroyed through the introduction of Terran organisms. The same might be true of the OTU, due to the Ancients. This probably reflects a less environmentally-aware approach to SF in the 60s and 70s. Compare the attitudes of the 'Reds' in Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Mars' series.

Current scientific and social attitudes might lead to very different TUs, where colonisation or even access to worlds with indigenous life is highly restricted. Lots more red zones put up by the ISS!

 

[Jamus]

After Man or The Future is Wild

I love these books, the author had a museum here in the orlando area that is pretty darn neat at least when i went a few years back.

I would think most worlds in the 3I and solomani rim area would have been terra-formed and seeded with terran stock in the initial stages of solomani advance ie generation ships or after the fall of the 1stI. seems likely that humans would wish to surround themselves with familiar creatures even on distant worlds. the point being is even in the spinward main chances are people will have pet dogs and cats and probably eat chicken, pork, and beef as well as whatever new animals they might encounter.

So, planetary conditions shape life. If the conditions are equal the shaping should follow those physical rules, too.

couldnt agree more with the post and especeally this bit.

the point being many people feel that because a life form evolved on a distant star it must be radically different than those found here on earth, to that i disagree.

 

[Whipsnade]

Gents,

I had a couple thousand word post chock full of mako sharks, Humboldt squids, black smokers, left and right handed proteins, different sugars, mitochondria, the fossil record, chaos theory, the effect of tool use on human evolution, the seductive perils of anthrocentrism, and oodles of other stuff until I thought: Why bother?

Simply put, the game isn't worth the candle. I'm not to here to correct the defects in other peoples' educations, I'm here to chat about playing a game for fun. So...

- If you believe evolution works towards a goal, so be it.

- If you believe the human form is the only one capable of sentience, so be it.

- If you believe that similar environmental inputs will always produce the same results and chaos theory can go hang, so be it.

Just do me a favor. Don't pooh-pooh those of us who believe none of those things. Okay?

Have fun,
Bill

 

[BeRKA]

Doh, I would have loved to see that mega post.

 

[TheEngineer]

Yep. Sounds like a book Bill Bryson wrote lately...is that You Bill ?

 

[Fritz_Brown]

I am the proud new owner of the JTAS reprints, and (sound of lightbulb coming on) lo and behold, they actually have a BUNCH of stuff about aliens! Now, I have to ask the question: Are these a good point from which to start designing my aliens? Or, is there so much more info in the actual alien supplements that I would need them, also, for a good design?

Boy, you ask a simple question, and you get a 4-page set of dissertations

about the proper way to design aliens for a scifi setting! I LOVE this site!

 

[Golan2072]

Originally posted by Larsen E. Whipsnade:

If your TU is filled with all-but-human sophonts because of your personal, humanocentric preferences so be it.

I don't see a problem with many Human subspecies as long as they all originate from Earth, either by reAL aliens transplanting them on other worlds (OTU) or by Human-made genetic modifications and pre-jump colonization of the stars (IMTU).

 

[archhealer]

Ok folks, I'm just going to toss out a few concepts, really basic ones, that I know from my (Granted, poorly concieved and taught) Xenobiology class at good old UMass, Amherst. (Yeah, THAT Umass)

Given the same environmental demands, life forms will TEND, that is, TEND, to develope parallell features. They will not be the same; one may develope a horn out of bone, and another out of hair, and another out of squigglygoo, but they're still horns and they serve the same purpose.

Now, that's a TENDANCY. They won't always happen that way, it's just ONE method of gaining some evolutionary advantage.

That being said, not all evolutionary mutations will be advantageous. They needn't be. They just need to not be more disadvantageous than they are advantageous. Did I say that right? As in, the same horned beasty could be bright purple, or bright green, and if all the animals on the world were light-blind, it wouldn't make a lick of difference, so you'd probably wind up with even odds of either color, or both colors.

Now, I'm going to toss out another concept that I had trouble with, and disagreed with, and see what you all think:

My professor, who was a flake, I'll admit, was adamant that given the chemicals necessary for life AS WE KNOW IT, the most likely place for life to happen was in debris clouds, not on planets. Microbial life, granted, but life nonetheless.

 

[parmasson]

Why not! I design alien lifeforms from the following system.

1. How dangerous do they need to be? Wounds inflicted and number of attacks.
2. What is the gimmick? Tentacles with poisonous barbs, spits acid, eats metal, psionic.
3. How easy should it be to kill? How many average shotgun blasts will it take to disable it?

Your lifeform in a cloud might be very dangerous and able to live in extreme environments. But from a game /story point of view I would ask what its threat or interest to the players would be?

 

[Maladominus]

Animal Encounters is Supplement Number ummm....

It's the YELLOW one.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Yeah, but you can't make a PC on that basis, Karega. (Well, OK, some people's PCs could be built on that basis.... )

Maladominus, MWM had similar thoughts related to T5 racegen. Can't say more as it was in the playtest area, but it follows that concept in a bit more detail.

 

[SJWaldock]

I remember attending a very interesting lecture by a xenobiologist. While this chap reckoned that we couldn't predict with any certainty what alien lifeforms would be like, there are certain features that would probably develop as they have been done several times independently on Earth. Horns as Archhealer mentioned, flight (developed by insects, birds and mammals), fur (developed by insects and mammals).

 

[Ptah]

Archhealer, not to be unkind but I think your professor was a bit of a flake, or trying to get the class to think. He was probably thinking that with increased ionizing radiation in space that chemical reactions would happen faster and more quickly produce life. I'll give him that I don't know the density of these clouds he was referring to, but an interstellar "cloud" is still hard vacuum conditions by earth standards. This low density really lowers the chance of much happening.

 

[parmasson]

Yeah, but you can't make a PC on that basis, Karega. (Well, OK, some people's PCs could be built on that basis....

Sorry I was thinking of monsters . . .

Alien races would be like the Hivers with a biology and culture that would be totally different. That is the challenge in game terms. Uplifting is an obvious source but real aliens require a real creativity. The racial stats could be generated back form the concept on a case by case basis in absence of rules. The problem is that many of us don’t know enough about chemistry to know what kind of creature a chlorine based lifeform would be. Hell it could look like a gibbering mouther for all I know.

 

[aramis]

It could also be an upright biped with tool using hands, binocular vision and biaural hearing.

Could be fur, skin, scales, feathers... prbably NOT keratin, but probably a related chemical.

This is a case where a first order approximation is more than good enough.... because there is really little known.

 

[Ptah]

Kurega Gikur :

The problem is that many of us don’t know enough about chemistry to know what kind of creature a chlorine based lifeform would be.

Chemist here (about Chem-4) A chlorine-based lifeform could look like anything you might imagine. For the following reasons. When you say chlorine based I imagine you are referring to a life form that lives in a chlroine atmosphere. Such life-forms could certainly be carbon-based, i.e., organic chemical reactions for replication and energy production based on long chain carbon molecules. Thus all the forms we see with our similar fundamental chemistry should be possible.

Whether the life-form uses the atmosphere in its energy generating process (i.e., it breathes) or other biological processes is up to you. The organism probaly needs some sort of exterior to protect some of its internal chemistry from the atmosphere. A first step may be to postulate off of substances we use to proctect ourselves from chlorine,e.g., Teflon (TM). Teflon employs a lot of flourine, something that won't be freely available in a chlorine atmosphere. So here may be a start of the food-chain-biology, how is this essential nutrient obtained. Similar to the questions chlorine based life might ask about us.

"See Xtihrik I'm thinking of a sci-fi life form that lives in oxygen. I know its highly reactive and sustains combustion. This means fires will probably sweep their planet occassionally destroying any chance of an advanced society. But work with me here. They found under the polar ice of our moon a single celled organism that carried oxygen using iron in its blood. Now how would this creature on an oxygen-atmosphere planet get iron? With a little water around it should turn into iron-oxide very fast. I also don't want my creature to just eat ore."

The follow on questions for chlorine based life from a game perspective might be what are the hydrogaphics, if any. I can provide some ideas on that if you give me the temperature and whether water is present. Other questions are whether combustion is possible. But there are many ways to create energy and prodce energy besides combustion.

A more fundamental difference than atmospheres and temperatures, is life based on mainly inorganic reactions. I know of no clear chemistry that such is possible (we didn't know about the life in ocean thermal vents 20 years ago either) but I could postulate/extrapolate from what we do know. The world of inorganic chemistry is also a fascinating and complex place, not easily predicted. No one predicted the "high-temperature" super-conductors we now see and they are based on inorganic chemistry.

I can readily opine further if interest is expressed, or not.

 

[Piper]

I don't know enough chenmistry to even ask the right questions, but are you familiar with "Uller Uprising" by H. Beam Piper?

He describes silicon-based lifeforms evolving from carbon-based ones due to a lack of calcium in the environment. The larger lifeforms went so far as to be armored in quartz and opal.
The planet is oxygen atmosphere, but the water resembles: "a dilute solution of sodium silicate".

It sounded convincing, but I always wondered if it was plausible.

 

[Ptah]

Piper:

I don't know enough chenmistry to even ask the right questions, but are you familiar with "Uller Uprising" by H. Beam Piper?

He describes silicon-based lifeforms evolving from carbon-based ones due to a lack of calcium in the environment. The larger lifeforms went so far as to be armored in quartz and opal.
The planet is oxygen atmosphere, but the water resembles: "a dilute solution of sodium silicate".

It sounded convincing, but I always wondered if it was plausible.

Not familiar with the book, but I've read Piper before and you can be sure I'll try to get this book now.

Sounds very interesting. My first impression is that it sounds very plausible. It also sounds like the underlieing chemistry may be carbon-based but a shortage of calcium drove life to use other more abundant elements. The shortage of calcium may mean that the protein/cell chemistry would be different than our own. We use sodium ions and calcium ions to regulate/mediate an emormous number of chemical reactions (I know a little biochemistry as well Biochem-2?). The size difference, among other things, between these two ions means they are not readily interchangable in the process in which they take part. Biochemistry is a strange thing, if organism can live off of sulphur compounds on the ocean floor at temperatures exceeding boiling, then from a sci-fi perspective organism that live with little or no calcium seem downright mundane .