h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Alien life exists, of course, but we are looking for the wrong thing, and in the wrong place. If you want to see an alien put away the telescope, and go to the park. That's where they are many different aliens hanging out unoticed, performing strange rituals, speaking in a language based on a different grammar to our own, with a culture centered on recreation (their prime directive). They are called dogs.
We are surrounded by thousands of aliens. We share a planet with alien life, species distinct and different from our own.
Look at any film of alien invasion and you'll see these aliens. Lizards in 'V', insects in 'Red Dwarf', amoebas in 'The X-Files'.
Strangely they are bipeds, they are anthropoid. We don't see aliens all around us becasue of anthropomorthic thinking. We look in a mirror and hope to see something other than a reflection.
If we take our planet as a template to imagine life in the universe(and Star trek does this all the time but with geopolitics), then an alien will be as different from us as a dog.
Maybe the reason they haven't visited us, or have but haven't anounced is they aren't interested in colonization. Our culture may be unique in this imperial desire. Maybe they aren't destroying their own eco-system, so the idea of space travel seems ridiculous. They may look up at the stars, seeing an inhospitable enviroment, and think why would we want to travel in that?
Whatever the reason (it could be as simple as the distance) I do think there is alien life on other planets. But I think deep down we are looking for another race of human beings (the mirror problem), now that I have no idea if it is true.

Absolutely. I mean, just because they're evolved for the same niche, doesn't mean they'll look the same. Compare, say, dolphins (mammals) and the ichthyosaurus (dinosaur). I mean, they look .... er... rather similar...

In other words, I feel the idea that an alien capable of getting to Earth and wishing to HAS to look completely different to us is also a fallacy. They're not going to look like women with plasticine on their noses as Star Trek would have us believe, but equally they don't have to have compound eyes, mandibles, and more limbs than a football team.

For the record - I find it highly unlikely that there is no life elsewhere. I find it nearly as unlikely that no self-aware species has evolved anywhere except on Earth. But I find it extremely unlikely that they could go through all the effort to travel the unimaginable distances between their homeworld and ours, merely to (as Douglas Adams once put it) strut up and down in front of some poor unsuspecting soul whom no-one is ever going to believe making silly 'beep beep' noises.

Whether they look like us or not, the problem might be whether they think like us, and thereby hangs a bit of a problem. We can't speak "doggish", even more obviously we can't speak "cattish", and we make a fairly poor job of speaking "monkey-ish", despite the fact that we are closely related to these animals by DNA. Even human societies have created languages that have yet to be properly deciphered. Finally, we don't even know where to start with insects, even though they still share a lot of our DNA, live on the same planet, and get light and sustenance from the same sun.

Now, try to superimpose this on a society, advanced or not, that is not related by DNA to us, possibly lives on a planet with a slightly different angle to it's sun (or suns), has a different atmospheric content, a different mass (and therefore different gravity), a different rotation period, more moons perhaps, possibly a different spectrum of light coming from its star, and you have the conditions for something altogether out of this world - a whole different construct of creature perhaps, and almost certainly a different way of looking at things than us humans.

Well, if we do meet some aliens we could probably learn to talk to them by pointing at things and saying their names.

But with technologically capable aliens we can probably have some idea what they look like. And it seems to me they must obey some different things that will make them appear rather human.

That's assuming of course that pointing makes sense to them. It doesn't make any sense to my cats.

Why do you think aliens must look humanoid / human-like? Can we link advanced techological intelligence to humanoid form? Is there no way intelligence could appear in other forms?

Well, intelligence can appear in loads of forms. But if they are to be technological it is probably different. They would need something for moving around, like legs. They probably would need legs as a waterbased animal probably wouldn't be able to aquire technology. They could of course have other things, but legs seems to be the simplest way of moving around. And they would need something to manipulate things with, to make tools and such. So either arms or tentacles. And they would probably have their senses close to the brain to make sure they had a good reaction time. So a sort of face. And it would probably be on a limb of it's own like a head, so it could be moved around. Works better for sight, sound, and eating. So it seems to me it would probably look humanoid, or maybe like a kentaur with tentacles.

I know there is another thread somewhere about how we still could do with some improving! What is so bad with eyes in the back of your head for instance? Then, you might not need a mobile head so much. Or, the creature could move with no legs and still have a flexible body to manipulate objects like a snake. Or, why not some sort of goo creature that can manipulate its own form and other implements quite easily? It could have a distributed brain so that the processing is close to all points in the body, allowing extremely fast reaction times.

Our present form is a result of our history, and continual adaption to the demanding requirements for life on our planet. We can't make the assumption that these environmental requirement will be the same on other planets, and that creatures will follow a similar evolutionary path.

Eyes in the back of the head would be a good idea. But still you would need to turn your head to pinpoint sound better. And with eating it would be better if you could turn your head, instead of having to walk around all the time. So it would probably be simpler to have a turning head than a face filled with eyes, mouths and ears. But if you had a brain that was distributed evenly in your body, thinking would probably take a long time. Your reaction time would be quite slow.

And I don't know if it is possible to make proper goo-like creature if it also needs internal organs.

What about aliens that look like Octopuses? They meet all your criteria, and are also water based? They don't look much like humans though! Certainly somewhat removed from "Close Encounters" or "ET" or the popular conceptions of what UFO inhabitants are meant to look like --> (although strangely, "The Simpsons" seems to have identified a similar creature!)

Granting that it might be possible to have some generic attributes (which I still think is too connected to our narrow experience of life on this planet)-> a head with one brain and doubled sensory organs, a mouth or similar opening for food, arms, a respiratory, digestive and circulatory system, and some structure such as a skeleton or exo-skeleton for maintaining shape, there are still huge variances in how this creature might look, or how big or small they might be. We as humans, and all of the creatures on this planet are almost perfectly adapted to our environment. Alien beings will be almost perfectly adapted to their environment. Without much doubt, those environments will be different.

An octopus might meet the criteria that's true. But I don't think there are too many prototypes for a being with spaceships. But an octopus actually has it's brain spread out across the the body a bit in the way you mentioned.

Well, technology probably started with some creature hitting another creature over the head with a piece of wood (and then doing it again and again because it had the desired effect ) After generations of incremental achievements like this, maybe octopusses might figure out how to survive in environments unlike their own, and finally to build spacecraft. Any creature looking back at humans 100,000 years ago might be similarly amazed that the same creature would one day walk on the moon.

I think visitors to our planet are using alien technology.

Jacques Vallee and others theorise that the little grey guys and similar, come from other dimensions, not (necessarily) other planets.