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« on: July 21, 2008, 12:08:25 AM » |
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The earth is home to a vast and complex web of life filling almost every nook and cranny. From microscopic viruses to the awesome blue whale, life finds a niche and fills it. We find organisms of all sizes and in all places, even extreme conditions: Tube worms clustering around boiling-hot deep sea vents, flamingos thriving in toxic lakes, ants roaming around in scorching deserts, insects hibernating in ice blocks and spiders living at very high altitudes. If life can thrive somewhere you can bet, given enough time, it will. An interesting fact is that life began approximately three and a half billion years ago, which is around the same time that the earth had cooled sufficiently to allow life. This suggests that the spontaneous creation of life was relatively quick (in geological time) and straight forward. As Michael Crichton wrote in Jurassic Park, "life will find a way". Life wants to be created, it is inevitable, and once it has been there is no stopping it.
There are (at least) nine planets orbiting our sun. In addition, there are countless moons and other enormous celestial bodies zooming around it. Consider that there are approximately two hundred billion stars in our galaxy, there are perhaps over one hundred billion galaxies in the universe, and that the universe is around fifteen billion years old. That is a hell of a lot of time and space for life to emerge. The conclusion: life is almost certainly out there, somewhere.
The forces responsible for the emergence of life are still not well understood. Several theories such a chemical soups, mineral-laced clays, and hypercycles have been proposed, but there is still great contention between scientists. However, the force responsible for drawing life into the many varieties we see today is much better understood: Evolution. The theory of evolution was proposed over 150 years ago by the English naturalist Charles Darwin. Although there seem to be several weak points of the theory, it has stood the test of time and forms the basic theory of all life. Evolution does occur, we have even seen it in process. It is such a simple and powerful idea, but one that is often completely misunderstood by most people.
The reason for writing these articles is to share some knoｗledge and ideas about designing aliens, whether for science fiction, fantasy, roleplaying, art or fun. It is all to easy to do a "startrekism" and design an alien as a human with a funny nose and an extreme personality trait. However, if you want more scientifically-based, realistic aliens, then you need to give some thought to all aspects of the creature such as chemistry, social structure, evolutionary history, environment, biosphere, foodchain, sensory system, life-cycle and many more. At the very least, these articles will offer some "food for thought" and may serve as starting off points for further research related to the design of alien lifeforms. Hopefully, the insights contained within can help you transform your aliens in to much more rounded, believable creatures.
Using various gems of scientific knowlegde, and sometimes some plain old common sense, it is possible to design aliens to seem much more believable. For example, on a planet with much greater gravity, flight would become impossible, right? Actually, this is not the case. Stronger gravity means greater atmospheric pressure, which would make it easier for animals to balance their body densities with the surrounding air pressure, making them much more buoyant. In effect, making the dynamics of the atmosphere closer to that of water. If you didn't already know that you might be thinking "oh yeah, that's a good point, I never though of that". It is aspects like this that can make the difference between believable and silly.
All the tidbits and rules found in these examples are for thinking about aliens on a much deeper level and therefore making them more scienticially believable. First of all, since nobody know what is out there, and since scientific knowledge is often limited and subject to change, everything in these articles is to be taken with a pinch of salt. Use the information here if you want. Second, perhaps your audience does not want scientifically viable aliens. The above example about buoyancy on high gravity world may be useful if you are writing a book and can explain that to the reader. In a film or painting you don't have the luxury of being able to give too much scientific background, therefore relying on what the average viewer already knows. As another example, predators attacking prey is always slightly dangerous for the predator too, therefore they will only do it when they really have to, and once they have eaten they will be very uninterested in other prey. This would not make for an interesting story. Imagine if the creature in Ridley Scott's "Alien" killed and ate one of the crew and then went off to sleep in a quiet cupboard for a few weeks to digest.
That is not to say there is no place for realistic aliens. There are many great science fiction stories centered around aliens and their strange characteristics. In "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem, humans encounter something so alien that they have no way of comprehending it. The aliens in Niven and Pournelle's "The mote in God's eye" are asymetric creatures with a terrifying biological secret. "Lifeform" from Allan Dean Foster contains aliens with strange, believable abilities as does the 2001 series from Arthur C. Clarke.
A particularly frowned-upon way of writing science fiction is to take a well-known story and set it in space. There are numerous examples of "science fiction" stories which are blatant retellings of well-known classics. They are fairly easy to spot and sometimes highly successful. This is more "soft" science fiction. For example, a western in space, a romance in space, a swashbuckling adventure in space, etc. For this type of story, believable aliens simply get in the way of an enjoyable yarn. However, basing a story around a weird alien characteristic and how humans deal with it always leads to interesting areas which is always science fiction. This is the path to "hard" science fiction.
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