Grrl Power #760 – Necessity is the mother of space travel
I hate when I think of jokes that require me to draw weird stuff I have no idea how to draw. Well, I’ve never drawn an alien space station before Grrl Power, or an alien food court, or the inside or outside of a spaceship… Or… buildings or cars or guns or parking lots…
Okay, maybe that’s not a valid thing to complain about if I’m trying to make a living as a comic artists, but I’m still allowed to complain that crabs are hard to draw. I guess I could have put Garthim warriors in those two panels, but I’ve never drawn them either, so that wouldn’t have helped.
Basically before I did this comic, 99% of my art was superheroine pinups and… other art mostly involving the female form. *cough*
The thing about Dabbler’s hypothesis is, I kind of hate this argument because it validates all the lazy alien designs in Star Trek and basically every other space show that I have complained about here and elsewhere. Really it’s my own fault for being lazy when it comes to drawing aliens. I could have made all the aliens on Fracture Station really bizarre, but it’s kind of not really in my wheelhouse to design stuff like that. Plus then I would have had a harder time justifying Dabbler’s looking like a sexy human woman with some cosmetic add-ons if everything Sydney encountered in space looked like something from the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
Maybe the next alien they encounter will look like a spider with jellyfish for legs.
But to sum up her postulate; the humanoid form is successful because it lets us do a lot with a little. A little less (one eye, one leg, etc) and we’d be fucked, too much (twenty arms) and we’d be fucked the first time a famine rolls around, and if we were too good (acid spit and regeneration and natural armor) and we’d be lazy, both physically and intellectually.
It’s kind of a big swing, but I was trying to come up with a reason so many aliens look… 85% similar without resorting to precursors/progenitors/ancients seeding the galaxy with life, while at the same time leaving myself wiggle room for basically anything I want to include.
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What Suzie said is exactly what I’ve been thinking since the last update. :-)
Well natural selection is supposed tobe all about random mutation tossing up changes, and the changes that provide a reproductive or survival advantage are the ones that stick. Not all worlds will have conditions exactly like Earth’s, so under the right circumstances the utility of 4 arms may outweigh the added caloric cost to maintain them. I couldn’t begin to say what those circumstances might be, but the possibility is there.
Cheating at cards.
Taunting / stealing from the other monkeys without falling out of the tree.
Reaching that one itchy spot between the shoulder blades.
Woodworking.
Moderately-good swordplay.
Moderately-awesome foreplay…
Consider the possibility that the tantric energy on which the species feeds was the *first* mutation, while all the rest followed later in service to that original mutation.
Assuming the race wasn’t made in a vat someplace by elves.
Stonehenge: keeping out the elves since 2000 BC (or thereabouts, ya know).
Ro Jaws beat me too it, darn it…
Counterpoint: Dabbler did say 6 limbs was best of both worlds, and her species has somewhat obviated the need for caloric intake, since they can ‘eat’ other creature’s
horninessTantric Energy, or autotroph it up to some extent with some homemade TE.Four arms should be a advantage when “gathering” “food” for the Succubi. So in this case natural selection might favor the many armed. Horns on the other hand seem like a disadvantage.
But without them she can’t be a horny devil.
Damn, I wish these comments had a ‘Like’ button…
Horns might be a disadvantage if we were going strictly by what a human might find attractive, but if you consider other animal species with horns/antlers, they are more often a signifier of good breeding potential than anything else. If that’s what succubi/incubi find sexy (assuming they breed with each other regularly, which they must have at some point.. Maybe it’s an asari thing where they generally don’t and it’s weird if you do) then that would be what they would keep.
Or maybe succubi were originally a parasitic/symbiotic species that bred with/fed on a particular race on their original homeworld, so they evolved to be most attractive to that original race, and now that they have alternate food sources the horns are mostly vestigial.
Or the horns could be a more recent cosmetic addition that just happens to be fashionable.
Incubi, are a relatively new invention.
The horns are something to hold on to when you’re not treating her like a porcelain doll.
That just brings up all sorts of uncomfortable questions about how a species developed to absorb ‘tantric’ energy. What even is ‘tantric’ energy? If it’s tangible enough to consume as a form of nourishment, can it be bottled up and sold in a grocery store? What kind of oddball evolutionary tricks need to occur for a material species to evolve to consume something that is essentially immaterial? It’d be like humans suddenly evolving to consume dark matter. I’m sure there’s some completely plausible in world explaination, but it’s just a bizarre concept.
It’s literally based on magic though, which means all bets and explanations are essentially off. Evolution need not apply.
Evolution still applies. Evolution ALWAYS applies. The introduction of magic just gives organisms another tool to use in adapting to their environment.
Even major gene modification still gives way to selection pressures. A species that gets too silly with their choice of modifications could wipe themselves out. Or the portion of a species that favors stupid, maladaptive modifications will loose out to the portion of the species that doesn’t engage in such silliness.
Gene modification only makes natural selection a little bit more meta. Even artificial selection is just natural selection, one step removed. Humans find cows tasty and keep them as livestock. That scenario establishes a new environment to which cows will adapt, making themselves tastier to humans or making them better at producing more, tastier milk.
Artificial selection just results in greater, more rapid shifts in existing features, but there aren’t as many changes under the hood or changes to the genome of the species as a whole … or at least that’s the case the way that we tend to do it.
“A species that gets too silly with their choice of modifications could wipe themselves out.”
The Asgard from Stargate SG-1 and cloning :).
I haven’t seen the series, actually. Costs me a lot of geek cred. I keep meaning to go back and watch it, but I haven’t yet.
I get what you mean, at any rate.
Oof, I don’t envy that task. I loved the series, but that’s a lot of binge watching. I’d have to do a bike ride in between seasons to balance it out! XD Between SG1, Atlantis and Universe, you’d have to take some serious vacation time to catch up.
Still, a fun watch tho.
It’s really worth watching. One of the few shows where even after they replaced one of the main characters, it didnt actually harm the show’s viewership. SG1 was great, as was Atlantis (again, even when they replace some of the main characters, they managed to keep the show at the same high quality).
Universe was awful though. Just… horrible. There’s literally one decent character in the entire show, which forgot that part of what made Stargate a good show was a combination of action with a little comedy every so often. Stargate Universe instead tried to be like Battlestar Galactica and failed miserably, despite having a decent basic concept. They also had annoying and amateurish shaky cam.
Well, yes and no. When magic just goes *BAMPH* and out pops some being or race or beings with all the adaptation previously required removed, it can easily make for a species which has significantly reduced the need for evolution in order to adapt. Any intelligent species, for example. Humans living in cold areas will probably never evolve fur coats because the already evolved intelligence removes that need, as the cold is managed in different ways.
For all we know so far, succubi could be like golems – constructed – but also capable of producing offspring, which means also capable of producing hybrids since they’re able to mate with so many different species as part of their genetic build.
Asari.
We don’t have much canon on what magic is in the story. Could be a race that evolved under influence from the collective aethersphere idea of angels and demons, could be a species of humanoids that all learned magic to such a degree that they modified themselves to some of it being an inhereant trait.
kind of like the Reyvetails from ArTonelico and the bio-androids of the Tenchi Muyo OVA continuity *Tenchi’s half brother Kenshi inherited bio-android traits from his mother who is a bio-android from Geminar*.
could also add Android 18 from Dragon Ball…but modified human, and no indications yet if Marron inherited anything special from her as a result.
Dabbler also might be a gene mod as well. DaveB has mentioned in the past, and Dabbler has mentioned or alluded in the comic, that she was ‘built’ for this type of stuff (sex). Might have just been a term of art but might have been literal. I’m leaning towards literal because DaveB has mentioned things that suggest that succubi were a constructed race, and Dabbler is at least part succubus.
Bias does not equal exact match every time.
In other words, Dabbler’s species must have come from a planet with easier access to calories.
I’d picture Dabbler’s home-world’s ecology as a VERY rare example of:
1)__Calories that you need to struggle for (which would encourage better brains)
2)__A planet-wide ecology that is stable-enough to NEVER experience the “rollercoaster” of Feast/Famine (which would normally wipe-out most species LONG before they became sentient, much less space-faring).
[Messenger]:
Dabbler: “I said a ‘BIAS’, Suzie, not a ‘MANDATE’! That might mark me as FAR from the center of the Bell-Curve, but it’s not the same as a ‘CONTRADICTION’ of my premise!!! & did you notice that all 4 of my hands are 4-fingered? That could very-well be Evolution’s way of compensating for the biomass of the additional 2 arms!”
Have you tried soldering with only 2 arms, Suzie?!
I have, I did it for a living in the 1980’s.
Things have changed since the 80s – tiny *SOP and QFN packaging, BGA, tiny little <1mm² discrete components, very large surface-mount FETs, very large-gauge starnded, enameled wires…
These days I feel like 6 arms is the right number for soldering :|
I did that too.
I am also, a Digital Electronics Technician, I went to school to learn.
I kept with Electronics into the early nineties, but after a stint in the Middle East I decided it wasn’t worth going where many of the jobs which paid good money were.
Or weaving a complex magic spell with Somatic components whilst also fending off an angry mob with a fusillade from your custom built and calibrated dual laser pistols?
Wow I wasn’t thinking about the advantages of being able to do Somatic gestures while fighting with another two of your arms. That’s really useful. I wonder if magic is why four arms is better than two for Xuriel’s species?
also remember that i wouldn’t exactly say Xuriel has a species, she’s a hybrid of like three non connected species
She doesn’t have a species, butt the four arms (and four bewbs), tail, horns and everything else had to have come from somewhere (you can’t just pass them off as being a result of her hybridizationing)
I really need to get one of those mechanical arms. Sick of trying to position stuff just right so I can work on it.
Same, except I paint miniatures.
Ya need one of these…
https://www.stewmac.com/Luthier_Tools/Tools_by_Job/Tools_for_Electronics_and_Pickups/Soldering/StewMac_Solder_Monster.html
i’m waiting for her to explain why she and her alien friend all have giant bewbs…
Cause they have Genetic Engineering and *Big Boobs AWESOME!!!*
“I’m actually small for my species. thanks for drawing attention to it, Suzie.”
That might actually be one way to shut down some of these questions. “You know how on Earth, it’s considered rude, even offensive, to comment on someone’s body morphology? That’s not just a human thing.”
200% agree but it would be fun to explain it on an evolutionary standpoint like she’s doing now…
Well, in Dabbler’s case, it’s part of attracting prey for an easy lunch. Cora’s human, so no explanation needed.
I’ve read a couple articles that have come up lately that talk about human’s breasts, and possibly why we’re the only species on Earth that has permanent breasts. Other species mammary glands only develop when they are pregnant and/or nursing, and they tend to shrink back down when finished nursing. Even other primates don’t have them on a permanent basis – just humans.
So why would Dabbler and other non-Terran species have them?
It should also be noted that human females come “into heat” 12 or 13 times a year with little or no outward sign of it. It has been theorized that human females are the “sexiest” females on the planet because of the need/desire to keep the male around to help raise the young. Maintaining permanent breasts could serve the same purpose, it help keeps the male around to help raise the young.
That actually seems like a pretty good explanation of why it would be a beneficial trait – more parental involvement would lead to higher survival rates and more knowledge transfer between generations. That would drastically accelerate the rate of learning and brain development.
That ignores the fact that attraction to breasts is demonstrably cultural. There are cultures which laugh at our attraction to boobs “Ha, they are for feeding babies you fools!”
the best reason i heard for the evolution of breasts is we walk up right so we needed some reproductive advertising up front like the ass does in the back.
the point is most animals walk mostly on all fours, even the other great apes spend most of their time on all fours. so an animals face and but are at the same level almost all the time so it works great as an sexual signaler. but once you start walking up right this is no longer true and a replacement/additional advertisement is needed. this is why ass cleavage and breast Cleavage look so much alike and why they are the two largest sexual attractants.
Daniel here. Would her 4 arms be more capable than 2 arms going off her argument? While it would allow for greater manual dexterity, allowing for greater ease in constructing things (I would have loved an extra pair of hands to help me build something many times) however as Dabbler pointed out, growing them would take valuable energy…
I guess luckily for Dabbler’s baseline species, Nature tends to go with what works, not what would be optimal. If certain Dinosaur era creatures had been more successful, we could have had 4 winged birds which could have glided easier and had more control. Obviously Dabbler’s parent species managed to make 4 arms work long enough to pass it along, making it a genetic trait of their kingdom…
Four arms would work great for humans. But the second pair should be placed on or below the shoulders, they should be placed just above our legs, connected to the pelvic bone.
Why? Heavy lifting without damaging the spine. Use the lower arms for carrying heavy objects and the upper arms to help balance the object, as well as other things requiring desterity more than strength. Such as using a keyboard and mouse.
Unfortunately, evolution is bad at making new stuff up from scratch. It tends to reuse or repeat existing structures. Gill arches get swung forward and turn into a jaw. Jaw bones get turned into inner ear bones. Swim bladders get turned into lungs. Sometimes, as in snakes, vertebrae get repeated multiple times to make the spine longer. But it is really hard to engineer a repeat of a complex series of multiple parts in a new location and get them to still work all together. And with any moving part you still need to wire up a new control center in the brain to make it move.
There is a mutation that can make fruit flies grow legs where their antennae are supposed to be. But this is more a sign that antennae are genetically similar to legs, and have their new function due to repressor genes. The same is true with inducing teeth development in birds.
Beyond the caloric load, consider also complexity as a limiting factor in this way: The more arms you have the more joints you have. Another shoulder anchored to your spinal column. More weight. More muscles to knot. More strain on a support structure that has to be accounted for. Increased likelihood of malfunctions in all the additional moving parts. Thousands of little pass-along effects throughout your entire structure. You need to pump more volume of blood, so you’re going to need more room for a slightly bigger heart, or some other mechanism to get energy and nutrients to cycle where they need to go.
Redundancy isn’t free. What happens to the shoulder of the upper limb on a side when the lower one gets damaged, or even just strained? How much does the movement of one impact the other? You can’t move the upper pair down as far or as easily because the lower pair creates a mechanical obstruction, and visa versa, at the very least, but they’re likely going to pull on each other horizontally as well through sheer biomechanics, which limits a lot of the perceived advantages of a hexapodal humanoid.
And so on. Every part and feature you tack on is another point of failure, another vector for infection, another lever for your predators. You can only keep them if they’re more useful than their cost, in both calories and opportunity.
I know an artist, who has figured that out.
https://www.deviantart.com/notifications/#view=32781393
That’s not a link we can see.
Have trouble viewing DeviantArt after their recent change anyway: top half the image is cut off, and can’t view ‘mature’ art without having an actual account (use to be able to ‘sneak’ past the filter by simply entering a correct date ie anything over the age of 18)
So make a throwaway account. It’s easy enough. And if you ever need it again, you can send a reminder to your e-mail address.
I’ve never had the issue you’re describing, with part of the image being cut off. Are you using some weird browser or something? Have too many plugins?
At the very least, you should be able to download the image and view it outside of the browser. Almost every artist on there allows downloading, at least as far as I’ve noticed within my communities.
Haven’t used email in at least eight years
Never had any troubles viewing the images before the recent change to DA itself
You are such a special kind of stupid. You’ve been given a solution, and instead of acknowledging it you state a fact which, even if true, is irrelevant. You have internet access, which means you can create a throwaway email account.
If you said you were having trouble eating your soup and someone said “So use a spoon” I’d love to hear you respond “I haven’t used a spoon in 8 years!”
No one fucking cares what twisted idiosyncrasies your feeble brain has decided to impose upon you. Pick up a spoon, eat your soup, and then abandon spoons again for eternity if you like. Or don’t ever mention that you’re having trouble eating your soup, because the suggestion each time is going to be “So use a spoon.”
No one needs to hear your self-imposed issues which no amount of helpful suggestions will ever be able to solve simply because you have decided to ignore the solution.
Is the link SFW?
Perfectly safe. It doesn’t lead to an image.
Not perfectly safe for work, as the page it defaults to has a pile of sample accounts displayed, several of which are of “art stock” images with the human body being shown in various poses, and some fully nude.
That’s a link to your notification page, Sasha. You need to get us the link to the actual image, as in:
https://www.deviantart.com/%5Bartist-name%5D/art/%5Bimage-name%5D
No, that isn’t a real link, guys.
Wow, this board does not like brackets. You get the idea, though. Each %5B is an open bracket, and each %5D is a close bracket. Not that it matters, since it was just an illustrative link.
Brackets, greater-than/less-than, and a few others are taken as markup boundaries on this board, and anything within them is just vanished even if it is not a valid markup label.
I’m showing you the artist, it is up to you to do the research.
Except, it didn’t show the artist, just look me to a login page
It’s an old argument for an old sci-fi trope, but your version works about as well as it ever does, Dave.
Much like parallel evolution, the are only so many answers to a problem like how to swim fast, pay for high energy cost brains or explain why all your aliens look like actors in rubber suits and make up.
I think Susie’s distracted by the thought that dabbler could play with both her chest and her back side at the same time while they kiss.
I know I’m distracted by her having her way with Susie like this… now.
Well, now I’M distracted by that. Thanks a lot.
Sounds like it’s time for Dabbler to employ her hypno-boobs. If the reporter lady with the pink hair (from the first press conference way back when) is there in the same position relative to Susie News, she might catch a glancing blow. It’s sad when innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire.
The pink-haired lady is the one from pages 144, 146, 148, 151, 154, 162, 163, 165, 166, 169, 173, 174, 177, and 178. (I only counted the pages on which you can see her face)
Christ, I just noticed “glancing blow”, back in my first paragraph. That wasn’t intended. Even my subconscious is a pervert.
Her name is ‘Pinkie’, and she is Suzie’s rival :P
One big part I’ve always liked in Star Wars, Mass Effect and a few other sci-fi settings, is that their aliens was a lot more varied. Sure there was humanoid ones, but it wasn’t only humans with bits and bobs on their faces, there was so much more. Some were even completely alien from us, like giant slugs and levitating jellyfish, and plenty came from planets that was different compared to Earth.
I hope Suzie didn’t knock over a beehive for that remark….!
I didn’t see mention of it, but already existing features tend to be repurposed from prior forms. Creatures don’t sprout wings. Scales become feathers, and gliding promotes arm & hand design for even better gliding to the point of flight. Two light-sensitive spots are better than one, while three or four are redundant on a worm. As the worm becomes increasingly complex, the two light sensitive spots also become complex leading to eyes. There isn’t the basis to sprout a third or fourth eye, and no benefit to making additional light-sensitive patches.
Now try explaining that to the horseshoe crab. Which has not only multiple eyes, but multiple -kinds- of eyes.
The horseshoe crab is actually a spider. Like all spiders, it has 8 eyes, but only 2 of them are fully functional. The other 6 are little more than light sensors.
it would be more far to say spiders are horseshoe crabs as they came first
Bubble Theory. You could just reference the Bubble Theory of Extraterrestrial Evolution.
Put simply: The bubble theory states that evolution functions a lot like a bubble in water. Bubbles in water are round because it’s the easiest shape to accomplish their goal in: Reach the surface through a more-dense substance. Animals on other planets will largely look like Earth’s animals because our shapes are suited to terrestrial environments with somewhat flat surfaces, light, atmosphere, and gravity.
The Bubble Theory suggests that in any Earthlike Environment, Omnivorous Bipeds will ultimately become the sapient animal because it’s the most efficient form for that niche in that environment. By being upright you get a better view of incoming serious threats, you have the least amount of vital surface area near to the ground where smaller but dangerous predators can’t reach to attack it, and you are able to manipulate objects with your forelimbs that are no longer required for locomotion, increasing the value of object and pattern recognition alongside elastic thinking.
Small insects will also almost always have 6-8 limbs (6 legs, 8 legs, or 6 legs and wings) because at that size additional limbs aren’t -particularly- costly and give the animal additional gripping force during dangerous situations, like wind and rain, or the inherent advantages of 3 dimensional movement in travel for genetic dispersement and safety from predators limited to largely duodimensional movement.
More complex land animals (reptiles, mammals) will largely be quadrupeds because it gives a good balance of speed and stability whether you’re running for your life or chasing prey. Winged Animals will tend to have small legs and powerful pectoral muscles because those structures are more efficient for a flying animal.
Meanwhile Fish will have a tail or fins to paddle through water. Non-Fish animals that evolve towards aquatic or amphibious life will also have flippers or powerful tails. And when powerful tails aren’t an actual option, lower limbs will evolve in that direction, like they have with seals which started out as an otter-like basal pinniped.
Snakes and snakelike animals will have no limbs because their method of locomotion doesn’t require them… but they’ll almost always have scales because fur is not conducive to their means of moving.
And here and there you’ll come across freaky-ass animal forms like Octopi and Squids who found really strange ecological niches that benefit from ridiculous adaptations.
Octopi are definitely not from around here.
https://dailygalaxy.com/2018/11/the-alien-octopus-hypothesis-is-one-of-earths-most-intelligent-species-the-product-of-an-interstellar-genetic-code-watch-todays-galaxy-stream/
Bubble Theory. You could just reference the Bubble Theory of Extraterrestrial Evolution.
Which I just did and got nothing. Google turned up a big goose egg on that. At least the first five pages of search results showed nothing. Do you have a link?
because it’s the most efficient form for that niche in that environment
Regardless of my failed search, that just tells me that whoever made up that idea (it doesn’t qualify as a hypothesis much less a theory) doesn’t have a clue about evolution. “Most efficient” is not an evolutionary goal. Nothing is an evolutionary goal. An advantageous evolutionary advantage is just an edge on the competition. And an edge is not a slam-dunk. In the history of life, as in the history of sports, sometimes the shittier team pulled off a win.
Small insects will also almost always have 6-8 limbs (6 legs, 8 legs, or 6 legs and wings) because […]
…”Because” blah, blah, blah. There was a point in our planet’s history where big arthropods dominated. The only reason reason emerging tetrapods eventually managed to out-compete them is because the oxygen content of the atmosphere changed radically and such large bodies for arthropods could no longer be supported. If that had not happened, the world would be much different today. TETRAPODS GOT LUCKY! Not just lucky that the chemical composition of the atmosphere changed, but luckier eons before that in that their ancestors got lucky over fish with more sets of of fins. And lucky before that for a myriad of other reasons as an equal myriad of body plans competed for resources.
It is only sheer conceit, pure arrogance that makes the assumption that anything vaguely resembling ourselves would be even the “most common”. Re-wind our planet’s history back to the unicellular and the odds are overwhelmingly against it playing out the same way again.
People, regarding how intelligent life that evolves on a planet will look, let’s not forget that we are working with a sample size of ONE.
Weird – I got two definitions easily – one related to finance and economic theory, another related to the cosmology and expansion of the universe.
I didn’t see anything on the first two pages relevant to evolution, however, so the point is yet valid. Your final paragraph is dead on – we still have a *lot* of exploring to do. Titan and Europa and maybe Venus have real possibilities of re-writing lots of evolutionary theory, and they’re the *easy* targets.
On the other hand / flipper, there was a link at the bottom of Google that suggested a “Bubble Theory – Biology” which says, basically, that bubbles of various proto-organic gases bubbling up from underwater reserves acted as a membranes / mixing pots for those various gases to combine and form simple organic compounds. Repeat until single cell organisms occur…
Not sure where the rest of that post came from, but not a biology fanatic, so…
https://education.seattlepi.com/bubble-model-biology-6142.html
Ah, my apologies – didn’t include the “Extraterrestrial Evolution” part. Yeah, I got nothing on that too.
The atmosphere on Venus is able to melt lead, and on the surface the atmospheric pressure is, greater than at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Also most of the atmosphere, is made mostly of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid.
And wouldn’t it be cool if we found life there?
Not saying it’s likely, or that we can overcome the technical challenges of performing the investigation, but compared to other solar systems, our own solar system is relatively early to investigate. :D
You’re right about the temperature, but the pressure on the surface of Venus is 93 times Earth’s. Equivalent to 900m depth, not 11 km. Divers with special gas mixes have gone that deep.
Not only that, but it’s one occurrence out of ~five (give or take depending on who is arguing what qualifies…) mass extinction events. Accepting five, we have intelligence appearing (for all the cetacean or octopus or whatever lovers, I’ll qualify that with: in a form capable of forming a technological civilization) only once out of six opportunities on this planet.
This does assume that any technological civilisation would leave sufficient evidence that we would recognise it as such – be that in the fossil record, through their works or wastes, or by successfully dodging extinction to the present day. I’m not sure how long it would take for current Human civilisation to fade from view*, and much depends on the capabilities or existing knowledge of whoever is looking, but some claim it wouldn’t take very long at all relative to geological/evolutionary timescales.
On a similar note but swinging the odds back in favour, there would doubtless be time for more than one technologically-civilised species between mass extinctions. It’s only taken a few million years for Humans to go from plains ape to overdominant tech-civ (depending on how the start is defined), and the chances of us lasting another million are looking slim. Let’s take a very rough figure of ten million years for a tech-civ species to emerge, have their few thousand years of glory, fall, and the environment to recover. The average time between the ‘big five’ mass extinction events is about 100 million years, again to no great precision. So there would be the opportunity for several tech-civs to rise and fall in between each major mass extinction, and very possibly for none of them to know that their predecessors had ever existed.
*Note that our hypothetical future observer only sees what the planet looks like in their own time. The removal and burning of hydrocarbon deposits by Humans is not realistically going to be reversed, but the observer doesn’t know that they were there in the first place. If you don’t have the ‘before’ picture, it’s a lot harder to spot the changes in the ‘after’.
6 Limbs- Insects, 8 legs Arachnids.
“Bubbles in water are round because it’s the easiest shape to accomplish their goal in: Reach the surface through a more-dense substance” – Steampunkette
Not really. They’re round because that’s the shape with least surface area for a given volume, and because interfaces are not favourable energetically. You could describe it in terms of ‘goals’, but the goal is to minimise the amount of expensive interface for the given amount of material in the bubble. The same physics applies whether the bubble density is lighter, heavier, or equal to the bulk density; all that is required is that the two materials be fluids (i.e. liquids or gases) that don’t mix with each other.
I really, really like your hypothesis. It makes the most sense of any theory about humanoid species in space that I’ve heard to date, & it even sounds relatively feasible.
I hate to be a debbie downer, but I think you may have missed drawing her lower-left horn in the last panel of this page.
Also your theory does kind of tie into Steampunkette’s “Bubble Theory”
Nah, it is just hiding behind her hair as inertia causes it to flow forward when she suddenly shoves her head forward.
Someone is going to get a tongue-lashing when they get home, and not in the usual fun way :P
This reminds me of Shepards conversation with Mordin Solus during Mass Effect 2 regarding the disruption of evolutionary progress: https://youtu.be/VJIQfmWx3dI
I was going to say that! :)
So, weird thought, but now that we now that humans are in space, have any of them developed super powers? Or is that an Earth only thing?
I misread this and first thought if you asked if any alien species developed super powers (which I think is a no), but your actual question is interesting as well. If they did, what is so special about humans that this happens, if not, what is so special about Earth that it happens here.
I don’t know its not like earth has the only evidence for super advanced Nth level tech just sitting around at the bottom of the ocean for who knows how long waiting for some “random”/right person to find….. at one of the places its believed Atlantis could be found ….
I’m sure these things are not related at all in anyway….
Atlantis has been found, right were it has always been
And it was never believed to be on the other side of the damn Atlantic
Atlantis is an allegory it never really existed but there have been a lot theories on where it would be including form the self proclaim psychic Edgar Cayce. who almost single-handedly created the modern idea of Atlantis being a super advanced technoldgical culture with aliens making a race of people , space travel, energy crystals and flying cars while making it a house hold name. (the whole aliens making a race of people quickly really fits this comic too.)
he Also believed Atlantis laid off the coat of Cuba/ Florida keys and made a few predictions of people finding clues about it in the 1970’s. when people found the bimini road in the 70’s a lot of people freaked out and said he was right and that was Atlantis
so I’d say a lot of people have thought Atlantis was on the other side of the “damn Atlantic” over the years
Okay, let me clarify that: no-one with any sense believed it to be on the other side of the damn Atlantic!
People as far back as Aristotle in Greece had heard of Atlantis and the Atlanteans, if it was really on the other side of the Atlantic, why was America not ‘found’ until Columbus (ignoring the Vikings a thousand years earlier or the ‘Indians’ fifty thousand years earlier)?
Edgar Cayce was a complete and utter nutter
of cause Edgar was a nut but that’s not the point
the point is there is a lot of mythological story this comic could use as a base for what ever path it takes. also Aristotle did not believe Atlantis was real he believed Pluto (his teacher and first person to write about it) made it up to teach philosophy.
Oh right, Plato (knew it was one of those crazy Greek dudes)
Hypothesized yes; proven, no.
More proven than being in the Americas
Some believe it is where it has always been (and still populated), others believe it was at the mouth of the Mediterranean or even Spain (although those are more likely to be colonies {Spain} or ports {mouth of the Med}), or even sites from other cultures (specially the mouth of the Med site)
Oh, and not saying there wasn’t some advanced civilization in the Americas that built that ‘bimini road’ thing, just that that was not where Atlantis was
Dave, don’t stress about it too much. You’ve already posited a universe with superheroes and magic, so there’s no need to over-think the humanoid alien thing.
He has admittedly given very plausible explanations for it. A lot better than the reasons given on Star Trek (ancient humanoids seeded the universe with their DNA because they wanted to).
He has admittedly given very plausible explanations for it
No, he hasn’t. He has certainly tried, but has fallen afoul of the same mistakes that so many insufficiently conversant with evolutionary biology and paleontology do. To assert an evolutionary bias in favor of a humanoid body plan requires so many presuppositions that one might as well invoke magic. Which the Grrl Power universe explicitly has, so it’ll work for the purposes of this comic. But not in any serious discussion, no.
Yes, Dave’s is a lot better than the ST “reason”, but only in the way that a a two-car collision is better than a two-passenger jet collision.
I’m pretty sure we’ve argued about this on the last page. I still have no idea what ‘evolutionary biology’ and ‘paleontology’ studies or links you’re using to make your assertion, and I already showed links that show that evolutionary biology studies of the Miocene Era support what DaveB says, despite how much you inexplicably despise the Miocene Era (Age of the Apes). When I brought up the evolutionary biology links about the Miocene, you started on about how the humanoid body form started with stuff like four lobed fish – which means you were not understanding the difference between ‘humanoid form’ and ‘every single step along the the evolutionary process.’
And again, asserting an evolutionary bias in favor of a humanoid body plan only requires one presupposition, and that presupposition is the only place we’ve found complex sapient life so far, Earth, has creatures with only humanoid forms as the dominant species. I don’t know which planets you’re using to deny this.
It doesn’t require magic, although Grrlpower has magic.
There’s a small mistake in panel four:
“What do you think the chance of them discover fire is?” – I think you mean discover*ing* fire.
Suzie, getting straight to the point. I like her, she’s not easily distracted by razzmatazz.
A difficult feat when being introduced to supers and aliens all in one lifetime.
Suzie is getting closer to “best girl”.
Funny how in Sci-Fi generally everyone considers Religion to be some bygone thing and religious people to be primitive & backwards. There are exceptions, but it’s still generally how it treated, even though one can be extremely intelligent an still be religious, and one can still make scientific arguments for the existence of a God.
For example, The “Was it Designed” series makes use of Occam’s Razor by examining to complex designs found in Nature and how Humans have replicated or wish to replicate them, then posits the simple question: If a complex design is found that sentient beings wish to replicate, which is more likely? it coming about by random chance? or by design?
Though if you’re the sort of person who’d automatically dismiss it merely cause it was made by a Religious Organization, even though it’s making a Scientific argument, then consider other examples of stuff found in Nature where Occam’s Razor would suggest some sort of Creator, such as DNA or Sequential Hermaphrodites
DNA in it’s most basic form is still an incredibly complex chemical that is co-dependant on RNA and certain Proteins, themselves incredibly complex chemicals, for it’s existence, and they are also dependant on DNA and each other for their existence.
Basically, all Life is dependant on 3 incredibly complex chemicals that are all co-dependant for their existence or else they would instantly dissipate, meaning that they would have to form in the exact same spot at the exact same time and then have nothing happen to break them apart.
While there are RNA Viruses that exist without DNA, the RNA in those viruses are chemically unstable making them extremely dangerous and in need of a host that has DNA. And some may argue against the possibility of it being designed due to “Junk DNA”, Geneticist John Mattick has disproven it’s existence.
Scientists have attempted to replicate this in a lab in accordance with the Scientific Method, but the best that they’ve ever achieved is getting a few of the more basic proteins. And Proteins are made up of Amino Acids linking together, and are not spawned from the Amino Acids at random.
This would mean that there’s either a Creator of some sort, or some unknown variable we are unaware of. However, there’s been no major development in Physics in over 100 years and even though the universe operates on constants, we seen no reoccurrence or DNA, RNA & the necessary Proteins forming at random.
(And I’m not setting any sort of deadline on Scientific Discovery, but if there’s no major change to our understanding of something for over a century than it’s relatively safe to conclude that we have a pretty firm grasp upon it, everything you listed was stuff already proposed via our prior understanding of physics, we were just confirming it. Like with that photo we got earlier this year of a Black Hole, we’d hypothesised them for decades as an explanation for why stars in certain areas of space were gravitating towards a single location, but with that photo we’d gotten definitive proof.)
Ergo, Occam’s Razor dictates that it’s more likely that there’s some form of Creator that’s smarter than we currently are.
And with Sequential Hermaphrodites, which are organisms that can change gender at will, with the most common example been the Clownfish. There is currently no Scientific explanation for how they got that ability, especially given the fact that they use it to replace an absent gender amongst a pair, mean that if there were two Males, one would become Female, and if there were two Females, one would become Male.
(And yes, I’m aware that all clownfish are born male; forming groups of 2-6, with the largest in the group becomes female, the next largest its mate. And if any of them is removed from the group, the rest moves up the hierarchy, morphing to female if needs be. I was just basically summarising what generally happen, such as if a Male ends up on it own and runs into another Male, or a Female end up on their own and runs into another Female)
In other words, they would either have to rapidly evolve that ability, which is not how Evolution works or else we’d be seeing all kinds of crazy mutations happen all the time, or slowly gain it over millions of years, but they’d more likely either go extinct or backtrack before gaining it. Meaning that our current understanding of Evolution is flawed, cause as I’ve said before, there’s no explanation amongst the Scientific Community for how they got this ability.
Thus there is either some unknown variable we are unaware of, which is unlikely cause our understanding of Evolution has been rather consistent over the past half century, due to the fact that there’s been no major reforms of the Theory of Evolution, or there’s some form of Creator.
And with the Missing Link, the only evidence of it’s existence is that the Theory of Evolution states that there should be one. However despite 150 years of searching by Tens of Thousands of Researchers with Billions of Dollars of Funding, the best we ever got for the definitive “Missing Link” was fraudulent claims by fame & money hungry Scientists, and a couple of misidentifications.
And while the “missing link” doesn’t refer to any one organism. It been a term for any transitional form that is currently missing, that is, undiscovered. And there been plenty of fossils been designated as different “Hominids”, something to keep in mind is that the “links” that have been found, are at most a couple dozen, and what we’re told they looked like are largely up to the artistic interpretations of the discoverer, in other words, they could look a lot more ape-like or human than we’ve been lead to believe, especially since they often work off massively incomplete fossils and are called a new “species” based off rather small differences.
To help put in into context, Native Americans generally have strong cheek bones, European generally have lean faces with strong jawlines & Asians generally have softer features with rounder faces, if humanity were to die out and an alien were to come along and find our bones, they could decide that each of these groups of people were “different species” based solely off these arbitrary differences, even though in reality we were the same species.
Another way too look at it would be that there are many breeds of Dog that each look vastly different from another, but they’re still the same species. While Wolves and Foxes look very similar, but Foxes are more closely related to Cats.
In a sentence, how we designate things is generally decided by our own preconceived biases.
And while yes, Occam’s Razor is more of a philosophy, the Laws of Cause & Effect proposed by Isaac Newton is a Universal Law that has been repeatedly confirmed. So that posits the question: What caused the Big Bang?
To use a Bible quote:
Of course, every house is constructed by someone, but the one who constructed all things is God. – Hebrews 3:4
While Programmers and such have tried applying evolution to designs and algorithms, essentially getting it to design something that performs the task in the efficient way, designing it and redesigning it completely by chance, with admittedly amazing results. For such a program to work, there’d still need to be rules and a system in place in order to determine which design would actually work, and unlike the real world, if a design ends up been complete useless, it can just start over from scratch.
And while one might argue that Evolution also has a way to do that in the form of Dying. It would only work for a minor error, however if there was something that proved useful for a while, was built upon, but later became a hinderance, there’s no real way to start over and life would only continue if there were lifeforms that never developed what ever it was that became a hinderance. In other words, a certain type of lifeform would have become no more. But that’s never really happened, as there are still birds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, etc & stuff like Mass Extinctions Events were the result of sudden changes caused by external factors, not the evolutionary process. And keep in mind, every species we’ve come across was perfectly suit for the conditions of it’s day, and everything it had possessed a purpose.
Something more applicable to the real world would be the House analogy given by the Bible, with another way to look at it been this:
If you got all the necessary materials for building a House, put them all in a pile, then stuck a bunch of dynamite in there and blew everything up, would you get a perfectly built house with working water, electricity, heating & plumbing?
It doesn’t matter how many times you blow up and materials, you are *never* going to get a house.
And before you start making such accusations, I don’t think all researchers are intentionally lying to us, but I believe that Scientific Community as a whole benefits greatly from the Theory of Evolution, as it gained them a large amount of independence from religious organisations that they previously relied upon for most of their funding, and for them to say it’s wrong or telling people that it isn’t as airtight as they’ve been lead to believe would greatly hurt them.
And they have been hesitant to admit they were wrong in the past, like how they were hesitant to admit Galen was wrong about Human Biology for decades after definite proof that he was had been discovered. And that’s not even getting into Scientists who had sabotaged or stole credit from one another, or the fact that a lot of prominent scientists who “defied” the Catholic Church in the “Name of Science” actually worked for and were supported by them, a major example been Copernicus
Of course, I’m not singling out any group, what I’m saying is that people in any group have lied or refused to admit to fault or being incorrect for the sake of gaining or maintaining influence, money, fame or power.
Given your reasoning: how did the Creator come into being then?
First of all, Thanks for reading the entire comment!
The Biblical answer to you question is that Jehovah God always has and always will exist. This is cause he is on a higher plane of existence than us, a higher dimension in more scientific terms, and thus isn’t bound by the same rules we are
How can we know that it’s a higher plane of existence that is not bound by the same rules? Why should in a higher plane of existence it be possible for something complex to be able to exist without it being built while it not being possible in ours (as Occam’s Razor would imply: as above, so below and vice versa)?
Other dimensions that follow different Laws of Physics than ours have long been theorized, and according to String Theory, must exist
String theory is not proven yet, the many-worlds hypothesis is just one of the possible cosmologies suggested by string theory, and even if infinitely many alternative universes would exist, each with its unique set of laws, it still doesn’t follow that there should be one that meets your criteria.
Nope, you can’t handwave it away like that. Your logic has to be consistent. If you are going to state that a god must exist to have created us, then you have to explain who created god, and so on up the chain. This argument has also been long debunked. Perhaps you should stop using JW apologetics as scientific sources.
My logic is consistent, Evolution originated within our Universe and therefore must follow it’s internal rules, God however pre-dates the Universe and exists outside of it, therefore he isn’t bound by the same rules as us.
Other Dimensions that follow different Laws of Physics than ours have long been theorized, and according to String Theory, must exist. That includes realities that don’t have Cause and Effect
Galactus disagrees :)
Everything, has 10 “dimensions”.
I think that Titan might mean branes, not dimensions.
Historically, yehweh was a descendant of the caananite religion (most of the theories have him coming from there anyway). Son of the big daddy god El (which confusingly is both a name and title applied to even other gods in the same pantheon).
Meh, turtles all the way down.
I checked your claims, while there is certainly a Canaanite God named El, there is no god in the faith bearing a name that even remotely resembled the name Yahweh or any variation of the name.
While there was a Hebrew tern “‘El“, (probably meaning “Mighty One’ or ‘Strong One’), that was used in association with the Hebrew God, it was also used to reference other gods and even men.
While the words are similar, it not uncommon for the same word to have different meanings in different culture, for instance, the Islamic name “Kamala” comes from the Arabic word Kamal which means “perfection”, in Finnish, the word “Kamala” means “Horrible”
Yam
this is the likely name the Canaanites called the Israelites god, the enemy of their god Baal.
It is pretty common to right your god as the bigger cosmic boss than the other guy’s god.
as a note, Yahweh, like Jehovah is an assume pronunciation for the tetragrammaton of one of its more sacred 72 names. But not the most sacred.
While Yam is also a Canaanite god, none of my sources indicate that there’s any correlation or connection between him and the Judeo-Christian God.
Also I’ve never come across, nor could I find, anything to suggest that God has 72 names
But of course you didn’t find any in YOUR sources, given the second thing you just said.
you didn’t even google 72 names of God. Go for it, google even auto fills when you type “72 names of…”
and of course Judeo Christian bias sources would want to disconnect, ignoring early Judaism and their god having brothers and all that. Why would they who keep insisting their God is the most powerful thing ever, ever acknowledge they borrowed (like everything else) their god from an earlier source.
psst: the demoness Astarte is actually Ishtar (which technically also makes her Aphrodite), following religious and cultural migrations is fun.
Those “names” are just Titles, and they have nothing to do with the Canaanites
God is a title, Yahweh, the Tetragrammaton is one of those names.
However I will take the Hebrew sites saying “Names of God” as the proper source over what you say.
Now the Canaanites. The point there was “Yam”, one religion seldom looks favorably on the god of another unless they can squeeze them into their own faith; otherwise demonizes them. Hence pointing out Hebrew texts changing Ishtar into a demon named Astarte.
Naturally the Religions of Abraham won’t use the name “Yam” because its not the name THEY used; no more so than you could expect a Mesopotamian to used the name Aphrodite Aeria when talking about Ishtar or Astarte. I am looking at this from a historical point of view and simply pointing out that given how it is described, the name, and the role they attribute; especially relative to their enemies; that Yam is the best candidate in the Canaanite pantheon to be referring to the Tetragrammaton; just as their god is described as its enemy in the Torah; so vice versa.
No demons are named in the Bible, the closest one gets to a name is “Satan the Devil”, which mean “The Treacherous Deceiver”
And Canaanites came up with their own name for Jehovah God, then he doesn’t originate from their religion
What a complete and utter misuse of Occam’s Razor.
“Occam’s razor (or Ockham’s razor) is a principle from philosophy. Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In this case the one that requires the least speculation is usually correct. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation.”
Assuming a creator is a MASSIVE violation of this, not a valid use.
The simplest argument against it is recursive.
You have to assume everything about this creator, and also come up with a method that they are unknown to us.
And then you have to reason about how they came about.
If we’re to advanced to have evolved naturally, they need an Even more advanced creator.
But then that creator had to come from somewhere, for which you would need a more advanced creator.
That’s not less complicated or requires less speculation.
Ocean’s Razor isn’t “The simplest possible sentence that could explain something” like that. You can’t just claim “A god did it” and call it a day.
I know that I was defending you a lot last strip, but the Occams Razor argument is REALLY not a good one. Evolution, both biologican and technological, do not work based on Occam’s Razor. DNA, as I mentioned is not peak efficiency, there’s a lot of garbage information in it. It’s just more efficient than other, even less efficient structures. Same with technology. Technology is created to fill a niche, and not always the most direct method of making technology to fill that niche. Sometimes the route is incredibly cumbersome.
Take the airplane for example. Think of how many failed attempts were made before they actually understood the process of lift. They went through a lot of methods of figuring out flight, many of which involved flapping arms, since birds flap arms. They tried wings, but did not account to the sufficient speed necessary to give enough lift an aircraft, even though the basic principle of lift was already understood with watercraft (planing lift, instead of aerodynamic lift), as was the concept of pressure differentials (which was understood as early as 1754 because of Euler).
Also in a lot of sci-fi, religion is still acknowledged by a lot of species. It’s just in species like humans that it tends to be ignored, largely because of Star Trek’s influence. In Star Wars, religion is a pretty major thing. That’s pretty much what the Jedi are – a religion based on the Force. The only real difference is there’s definitive proof that the Force exists in the Star Wars universe.
And in some other sci-fi, certain advanced species are so powerful that they essentially ARE gods. The Ancients in Stargate (and the Ori, who literally get stronger from the genuine worship of lower beings). Or the First Ones in Babylon 5, or even the Vorlon and Shadows, who basically took on the role of religious beings across the universe, including on Earth. The Q are essentially omnipotent and omniscient, and at least on one occasion Q has claimed to actually be God for humanity in the episode where Picard temporarily dies (Picard refuses to believe him, but never actually gives a good reason why not to believe him, except that Q is thoroughly annoying to Picard and he simply does not WANT to believe that the universe is so insane that Q would literally be God).
And I know – but Pander, humans were able to fight and defeat Vorlons and Shadows, are you saying humans can defeat gods?
Well…. Hercules and other Greek heroes like Perseus and Theseus frequently did in their stories, or at least against demigods if not gods. And the gods of ancient Greece themselves killed most of the Titans, who were basically gods compared to the gods. And in judeo-christian lore, the name Israel literally means ‘wrestling with god’ based on the story of Jacob, who is given the name Israel after he literally wrestled with God (although technically in the story, he wrestled with the angel Penuel, who’s name means ‘The Face of God’). So… yeah it isnt exactly unheard of in archetype stories for man to be able to defeat God or gods. I don’t know the name of the story since I only know about it from a Jordan Peterson lecture, but that means it’s probably from Genesis since that’s the part of the Bible that he frequently lectures about in his evolutionary psychology classes.
So yeah it’s not that unusual in modern stories, like Babylon 5, to suggest that humans could defeat gods.
I won’t bring up Star Trek 4 though, because the creature was specifically NOT God, just pretending to be in order to escape his prison. Still, the line “What does God need with a spaceship?” was pretty funny.
Pretty sure that El is a proper noun originally at least.
In the religion that Judaism evolved from, there was the big daddy god El and his 50 sons, one of whom was yahweh.
Was reading to try to learn more, and wow do my eyes glaze over at the prospect of reading that many proper nouns. The history of the evolution of religions is complicated. Again, mostly because of over abundance of proper nouns and regional differences.
But yeah, El was both the name of the big daddy god of the caananite religion that Judaism descended from and a general title for any god, so I guess we would both be right?
Also wondering what the religions would look like today if asherah hadn’t been excised from the religion (yahweh’s wife)
Havent heard this before but I’ll read up on it.
Wikipedia was origins of El, origins of judaism, and Yahweh (god of Sumeria and Judah(iron age israel)). Exact origin of yehweh is disputed, but seems to have come from caananite and Egyptian sources with more theories being on caananite
Correction, 70 sons.
Eh, oldest archeological evidence for Judaism is about 3400 years old.
Sounds about right, since that’s around when archaeological evidence of Caananites are also from, and there is evidence of some aspect of the story of Abraham from Egyptian writing from that time (between 1000BC and 1500BC) So…. 3500 years or so would make sense.
Not really sure what it has to do with what I originally said about how a lot of sci-fi shows have religions in them that are not seen as primitive or ignorant (ie, Star Wars, the Ori/Ancients, Babylon 5), but it’s still really interesting.
Mostly said it because you included translations of words which included the word “El” in it
For some reason, I originally thought you were bringing up a Superman reference, then realized you probably weren’t, because I was all set to start giving a list of all the Kryptonian gods from Rao to Flamebird to Aethyr to Vohc to Mordo to Yuda to Cythonna. :)
Also the actual events of the story of abraham are still 500 ish years before even the earliest textual documentation of it.
Yeah, I think I mentioned that in another post.
Yeah, it is – each little area as its own melting pot of ideas about the nature of the divine / higher order of consciousness and they borrow / steal from each other constantly.
Which begs the question – were these early faith systems being made up whole cloth / piecemeal, or were the revelations about the nature of divinity / higher order or consciousness being doled out by those higher orders of consciousness at a time / place when those receiving them were finally capable of understanding them?
Real chicken and egg stuff – the easier answer seems more likely, but we’ve learned that education builds on prior education, so there’s just the teeniest sliver of wiggle room there to introduce doubt.
Which, if one is honest, is the foundation on which Faith rests. :D
as a person with OCD, as i sit here having to count ten taps in a exact rhythm while repeating the lyrics of cartoons theme song before i can hit the “post” button or I’ll feel like it would cause something horrible to happen, i can tell you were the idea of gods come form.
This idea was used pretty effectively in Xenocide, book 3 of the Ender’s Game series.
The series actually plays with some interesting concepts around the connections (and conflicts) between religion and science, although they’re not completely based around it.
Muslims, Jews, and Christians, all worship the same God; The God of Abraham.
Thus they are all called Abrahamic religions.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&channel=tus&q=Abrahamic
Religions don’t usually Evolve, evolve means change.
*coughs* and just how many flavours of Christianity are there- and how many have spawned in the past 500 years compared to the 500 years before that? Heck just looking at the superficial adaptions of decoration related to Easter (from Palm fronds to pussy willows to tulips) religions adapt, absorb and extort the material from predecessor religions in order to appeal to the newest populace aquired- a prime hallmark of evolution.
Religion most definitely evolves and changes. It’s not like we’re all still worshiping Canaanite gods.
It’s not like Christianity doesn’t have a few hundred different sects with vastly different lore, plus a couple of major official Reformations. Or in Judaism – religion used to be the domain of the woman, since women were the source of order for the home, while men were the source of order for the state (when religion started becoming intertwined with the state, that’s when men started taking the leadership role in religion).
Religions are also more likely to evolve if they’re ‘inclusive’ religions, rather than exclusive ones. And also more likely to evolve based on the method of inclusion (voluntary vs through conquest). It’s why a lot of judaic laws remain unchanged, while a lot of christian laws are vastly different. Also why islamic society still holds a lot of the same cultural rules as they did at the beginning of the religion, while christianity holds very few of the same cultural rules as they did in the beginning of their religion (unless you take into account pre-islamic religions which were incorporated into Islam by Mohammed, like Allah as a moon god of war from a pantheon of gods).
It was also very normal with pre-monotheistic religions, like how the Romans basically took all of the Greek gods and just gave them different names. Most religions, if it wants to remain relevant, do change with time, or at least with the new cultures in which it finds itself.
That’s an adorable bit of regurgitating a long spiel of easily-debunked garbage. Occam’s Razor does not just mean ‘whatever you can most easily say is right.’ A super-advanced ‘creator’ is a more complicated entity than the thing it is creating, so that’s the worst possible answer. Informationally, if I want to make a maze-solving robot, I COULD pre-load it with every possible maze, but the better solution is to give it a maze-solving algorithm that doesn’t require pre-computing the universe of possible states.
There is a long history of Creationists pointing to some feature and saying “Science hasn’t explained that, so it’s proof a Creator must have done it” and then Science comes up with a generally accepted explanation for that feature, and Creationists quietly stop mentioning that feature as evidence of anything, and move on to some other as-yet-unexplained feature as convincing evidence that there’s a creator. When that, in turn gets explained, again, it’s no longer touted as in any way significant, and some other feature is the new undeniable piece of evidence that proves, for sure, that there must have been a Creator, otherwise Science would have explained this by now, rather than wasting all that time explaining other things…
As for experiments on producing DNA or RNA from inorganic chemicals, in less than a century, working on laboratory scales, we’ve managed to observe the spontaneous emergence of simple proteins. For the self-assembling house, that’s like dumping all the materials in a heap, going to get the dynamite, and coming back to find that you already have half a brick wall with the mortar setting nicely. The actual primitive Earth had hundreds of millions of years in which life could develop – for comparison, land animals have only existed at all for a few hundred million years – so if a dinosaur scientist had left a sealed laboratory with an experiment running for the ~65 million years since that mass extinction, a negative result still wouldn’t be conclusive (aside from the time-frame, the scale is also significant – to account for all life on Earth today, life only has to have appeared spontaneously at one place on the entire planet once in hundreds of millions of years).
A better analogy than throwing a bunch of building materials into a heap and mixing it up might be a lottery. If a million people play the lottery every week for a year, would it be surprising if at least one of them won the jackpot at least once? And that’s despite it being pretty unlikely for anyone to ever win the jackpot. It works out (at least for the UK national lottery) that you’re statistically more likely to get killed by a traffic accident between buying the ticket and claiming your prize than you are to win the jackpot.
For the missing link, how do you think we know that foxes are more closely related to cats than to dogs? And what makes you think that we don’t apply the same techniques to determine fossil species where possible? Look up the Denisovans – a few scraps of bone visually indistinguishable from other hominins, identified as a separate species through DNA analysis. But that’s beside the point – no matter how many intermediate fossils are found, there will always be missing links until and unless someone manages to get a complete family line, parent to child, in unbroken lineage for thousands of generations…
In general, there will always be gaps in scientific knowledge – even if someone invents a cheap, reliable time-viewer, capable of displaying any time and place in Earth’s past, it would take a concerted effort for centuries just to answer all the questions about human history, let alone anything actually ambitious. “There are things we don’t understand” is not evidence for anything – it’s the expected state of affairs.
Look up “god of the gaps”.
Thank you, you make many good points. Many of the worlds best scientists are religious or spiritual. Most arguments against them insist that we must be able to understand everything and forget that current scientific theory is changing constantly and what we thought we knew yesterday is very often found to be somewhat or entirely wrong today.
Quantum theory and experimentation has found that all of existence comes from a unified field of energy. It would not be outlandish to call this field God any more than the idea that the universe was once compressed to the size of a pea and spontaneously formed when the pressure was just right.
Thank you!
Not the size of a pea. A lot smaller than that :)
Are you seriously trying to use the “Tornado in a Junkyard” argument. That was totally debunked years ago. And I see you also tossed in the old “god of the Gaps” argument as well, also long debunked.
The tornado in a junkyard theory mainly doesnt work because it assumes that evolution is completely random, when it’s actually based on the environment and natural selection – only the mutations are random… what gets passed on to offspring is not.
“Funny how in Sci-Fi generally everyone considers Religion to be some bygone thing and religious people to be primitive & backwards”. What a strange assertion. I wonder where it comes from. I know many Christians who love science fiction. The greatest “Doctor Who” fan I know is an ordained minister, he has EVERY episode on tape. As for religion not showing up in Science Fiction stories themselves, in Episode 24 of “Star Trek”, “The Ultimate Computer” the computer, its self, recognizes God when it says murder is “against the laws of God and Man”. If one pays close attention, one finds Dr. McCoy makes occasional references that seem to indicate he believes in God. Also, in one of the movies, they journey to the edge of Federation Space in hopes of finding “God”. Religion is all over the place in “Star Wars”. The “Fleet Series” by Jack Campbell makes repeated and continual references to a religion of ancestor worship. In “Dune” the Fremen worship the sand worms as Gods, the Sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit is a religion that is, literally, trying to breed their own messiah, not to mention, once Paul Atreides becomes Emperor, the people are actively encouraged to worship him as a God. Religion is common enough in science fiction. The reason it does not come up more often is because, in many cases, it is just not relevant to the story. When one writes a book, of limited volume, one tends to concentrate on things that advance the plot and ignore anything that doesn’t. In most cases, we just don’t know whether the characters believe in God because it never comes up.
As for the creation of The Universe, on one hand, we have Christians who believe it was created by something, i.e. God, that has no beginning and no end, something that has obvious problems. On the other hand there are scientists, like Stephen Hawking, who believe it just came out of no where with the big bang, but conveniently ignore the question “what caused the big bang”. Both answers leave a hanging question that they make no attempt to answer. I don’t find either scenario to be particularly logical.
Religion is based on faith, facts are immaterial.
Religion is based on faith, but facts are not always immaterial. Very often, myth is based on some sort of facts that have changed with each reinterpretation of the original story.
“nd one can still make scientific arguments for the existence of a God.”
No, you cannot; the existence of God can be neither disproven, nor proven.
The Convergent Evolution argument comes up in a lot of sci-fi, for all types of body plans.
All the badguy aliens look like giant bugs because multiple legs and tough exoskeletons are usually good things to have in a wide variety of environments. The sentient aliens from the ice moon look like giant bio-luminescent jellyfish because all the adaptations for extreme pressure work in those oceans as well. The secondary protagonist of your oddly well-written sci-fi smut has a lot of slimy tentacles because what works for the octopus and the squid also worked for their species.
And it works the other way too, if you still want to sprinkle in some real weird stuff:
The reason the few really weird and original designs you came up with are so weird while the others are so familiar is because their environment is wildly different than anything found on Earth and/or at some point their distant ancestors developed some random little feature and everything that came afterword just kinda went with it, improving or altering it as natural selection demands. Had the genetic RNG worked out just slightly different, we’d be seeing stuff like them on Earth as well.
What, like portraits of hypothetical female Presidents and stuff?
Porn, or Hentai
Happy Thursday! Thanks for the comic, Dave!
As with many theists, your argument is based on a basic misunderstanding of the principles you abuse to fit your pre-constructed theory.
Occam’s razor only works when you understand, on some level, the complexity of the two things you compare.
You posit that an omnipotent deity is more plausible than random chance, but an omnipotent deity isn’t a fully explained theory, and isn’t ‘simple’, it requires much more explanation, where do they come from, how do they work, why has no scientific proof ever occurred? Until we even understand the hypothesis of god or gods, you cannot assume it is simple just because it’s magic.
Conversely, the theory of evolution is both well understood and we can see it in practice, MRSA is an example of evolution in action. Yes there are steps in the process that we haven’t completely mapped out yet, but that’s because we’re making an entire history from small pieces of information, which are then confirmed and rejected as needed.
Your philosophy, on the other hand, has no such complete history, because magic doesn’t require a complete, consistent path from the beginning to here.
Your god of the gaps, a deity whose existence is implied by the ever decreasing gaps in scientific understanding, must be getting a little cramped as it’s purview is shrunk by those people who don’t stop at the conclusion that ‘god did it’ as if that has ever been the correct answer.
A wise man once said “every mystery ever solved has turned out to be… Not magic”
Now I don’t have time to deconstruct your entire philosophy, but time itself will do that, so I don’t need to.
Now why don’t you go back to whatever you do when you’re not straining the disbelief of people who read a comic about superheroes, like conning poor people out of their money or molesting kids. On second thoughts, stay here where we can keep an eye on you.
Since it seems to have arsed this up, this is @titan.
A God can be understood on some level. By think of them as a sort of universal programmer for something like a game or a hologram. And proof can come in form of the fact that the Universe is consistent in the rules that it follows on every level.
A good way to test the validity of a religions God is to look at the claims of it Holy Text:
– Do their prophecies consistently come true? This article explains how Biblical Prophecies have & are been fulfilled
– Do their explanations for how the World works match up with Science’s explanations? This article points out the Bible’s Scientific accuracy
– Does their telling of History match up with archaeological finds? There are countless example of archaeological finds confirming the Bible’s telling of Jewish, Greek & Egyptian Historical Life
First point: Any work of sufficient size and vagueness will have passages that can be seen as valid with sufficient laxness. For example, the Biblical quote says the waters will be evaporated. The historian says the river was diverted. Not the same thing. A number of Nostradamus’ predictions have also come true to the same degree of scrutiny. Also, how many predictions from the Bible have not come true?
Second point: The Bible itself contractions this point, “The universe is governed day-to-day by rational natural laws, not by the whims of deities.” Joshua 10: 12-13 “On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel: ‘Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.’ So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on[b] its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.”
Third point: Alexander Dumas’ _The Three Musketeers_ matches up with history, that doesn’t mean that everything in it is true.
The Bible also claims that you can make a circle with a circumference exactly equal to three times the diameter, so it’s a little hard to take seriously as a source of scientific information.
Which Scripture says that?
1 Kings 7:23 From the English Standard Version:
Then he made the sea of cast metal. It was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference.
—-
The Bible doesn’t do the math for you. 30 divided by 10 is 3. Apologetics for this says “a cubit is not a cubit because the Bible must must must be right”, forgetting entirely the logical recursion if a cubit is sloppy, then so’s The Book.
I would put this more towards rounding out a number, like what stores do with prices.
Long post, I apologize in advance. Enjoy the read though:
I don’t think that fortune telling/prophecy is particularly good way of proving the validity of a religion. I think of religion more as a basis for forming morality archetypes.
If you come at religion from the perspective of ‘Do prophecies come true’ you open yourself up to the argument that most divine prophecies do NOT come true and you only hear about the ones that do because they’re historically significant, or because the prophecies themselves were vague enough to fit a given scenario, self-fulfilling prophecies that only occur because someone said it would, and people work towards making sure they will (which make it more of a plan than an actual prophecy), or because the ‘prophecy’ came after the actual event which was prophecized, then people just claimed that so-and-so said it would happen.
For example, you can say Star Trek the 1960s TV show prophecized cell phones because of the communicator. But no – the communicator just happened to spur on people to create the cell phone instead. Tricorders were an inspiration for ipads and other tablets. Universal translator? Hello Google Translate. Holodeck? Hello Playstation VR, Oculus Rift, and Microsoft Hololens.
Dick Tracy prophecized the Apple Watch? Or Dick Tracy inspired people to create the Apple Watch? It’s just not a good argument to claim that prophecies, even accurate ones, are evidence of a religion being valid. The validity of a religion is better shown through how it influences a culture’s morality and social queues through its stories.
It’s not like we have a real life version of Good Omens’ “The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter.” Prophecies tend to be vague specifically because then they can be adapted for events that actually happen afterwards.
God as a programmer, however, is a real theory, as is the Boltzmann Brain, and the ‘Virtual Universe’ theory. Like with religion, they are incapable of actually being tested.
As for if the world matches up with science’s explanations, sometimes it does, I admit. But as I also mentioned quite a bit last comment section, it’s because a lot of scientists were also quite religious in history, from the beginning of the scientific method to basic concepts about genetics (Gregor Mendel, the monk) to the beginning of physics (Newton) to modern physics (Einstein) to modern quantum physics (Planck). They happened to be religious people who were inspired by their religion to understand the truths in an empirical fashion, which generally means science (with the exception of Planck, since quantum physics is still largely theoretical physics, but widely accepted, even by scientists who are atheists or agnostic. I wouldnt say that because religion has had some influence in accurate science, it means the Bible is accurate from a scientific method. Because it isn’t, and you’re opening yourself up to a lot of people being able to easily refute you.
I did look at the links btw, and they’re highly interpretive (because I don’t attack data by attacking the data-giver, I attack data by attacking the actual arguments being made). The second link is primarily about re-interpreting biblical parables. That’s not science. That’s making excuses for vague wording or flawed reasoning based on an understandable lack of knowledge of the physical world, while desperately wanting to have some sort of answer to fill in the blank (much in the way that science fills in the blank about universal equations with dark matter and dark energy).
It’s not ‘scientific’ to say that the Earth was created in six days, even though in the Scopes Monkey Trial, Clarence Darrow used a similar argument as in your second link about how, if the sun was not created until the third day, then the first two days would have been of indeterminate length, since a day is based on the rotation of the Earth around its axis relative to the sun’s position. But the theory sort of ends there, since the Earth actually did not exist before the sun – that ignores accretion, and accretion is how the solar system formed. That much is known. It’s actually been replicated in computer models and even in small scale physical models showing how accretion works, even if people do not have the specifics on what happened during the accretion period, given the amount of matter flying around during that point of time in the solar system.
The fossil records alone dismiss the concept of the Earth being created in six days, even if you take into account the argument that the first two days were of indeterminate length (due to the lack of a sun until the third day, and all the problems with the laws of gravitation that come out of that, which alone show that the Bible is not scientifically accurate).
The Bible, just like other religious texts, are meant to be a series of archetypical stories to teach certain values and moral virtues, and differentiate those virtues in a way to form a cohesive society despite the laws of nature being otherwise in effect. When people claim it is to be treated as actual science on par with empirical-evidence-backed science, they tend to lose the argument.
Elsewhere in the Bible, Adam and Eve would not have had enough genetic diversity to form a society, even if you take into account divine intervention, since they didn’t start to procreate until after they were evicted from Eden. The Bible literally has to create other people from the aether, which it does not actually explain in any detail. To quote from the Scopes Monkey Trial’s Clarence Darrow “Did God pull off another Creation the next county over?” Some people might try to claim that earlier, left out stories, like Lilith, would explain that, but 3 people do not have enough genetic diversity any more than two people do.
I will admit that both science and religion have elements of ‘faith’ because I try to steelman arguments, and there are few things in science that I have to admit that scientists rely on faith to posit as true – but the latter (religion) relies on faith a whole lot more than the former (science). Science adopts elements of faith when it shoe-horns in certain concepts like Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and ‘physics breaks down at 10 to the negative 38th power after the Big Bang. As a placeholder until they can figure out if there’s any better answer. Which, lets be honest, is faith. But religion relies on faith a whole lot more, often counter to actual scientific principles that have better empirical evidence than the religious parables that would otherwise explain it. And most scientists also hold certain moral codes, which are almost always influenced by the cultures in which they were raised, and those cultures invariably had religion as the underpinning of its moral fabric (even if the people have abandoned the actual parables involved as being historically accurate).
Saying ‘the four corners of the earth is just a figure of speech’ falls flat when you go back to the origin of the people who wrote ‘the four corners of the earth.’ Figures of speech are figures of speech because what might have originally been an inaccurate statement evolves to mean something different. And the reason we use the words sunrise and sunset are likewise because we used to inaccurately think that the sun was what moved around the Earth, rather than the opposite. That does not make the Bible correct – that means the Bible was wrong, and we just never bothered to change our language because the words became ingrained common parlance.
Look, I am not someone who generally ‘attacks’ religion, despite being agnostic, because I see that religion has value, and I recognize that many scientists were, in fact, quite religious as part of their scientific methodology. I don’t think that codes of morality can form from the vacuum, without a culture that had religion as an underpinning, because I think human society evolved to require archetype stories when they form civilizations, especially over a certain minimal population beyond the family unit.
I also recognize that there are some elements of science that literally do rely on faith, even though many people don’t like to admit that. But saying the Bible itself is scientifically accurate? No. It’s not meant to be, and it’s not.
Oh, the third part of your argument – archeological finds confirming jewish, greek and egyptian historical life? Some of that is accurate. Other parts are either false or unproven due to a lack of any existing archaeological record (like the story of Abraham and Isaac). For example, with the story of Abraham, the earliest records of the story are from an Egyptian papyrus record in 1500BC, but Abraham is supposedly from approximately 2000BC. That’s still a five hundred year difference, so there’s no actual archeological evidence that he ever existed as more than a story. Other biblical figures like Jesus have a lot more historical evidence behind them because of ancient historians near to his lifetime, like the Roman historian Tacitus (113AD), who would be seen as someone not influenced by religion to claim that he was a real person, or the jewish historian Josephus (93AD). Both of those historians have no reason to fabricate the existence of Jesus, and it’s close enough in time to give credibility to his existence. But the idea that someone existed does not mean the stories of the Bible, which were largely put into writing over 330 years after he was around, and not based on those other contemporary written texts of archaeological significance, does not mean the Bible is accurate on its own merit.
Add to the problem of a 300 year difference between oral tradition and something being put into physical writing (the Codex Sinaiticus, written in 330AD), the problem of translations of translations of translations, including the King James version of the Bible, written in 1611, makes it difficult to assume the Bible should be taken as an accurate representation of any facts beyond the morality queues which the parables are trying to express, even if some of it might be based on certain historical elements.
Work can be really, really boring sometimes. :)
“– Do their prophecies consistently come true? ”
No, they do not.
– Do their explanations for how the World works match up with Science’s explanations? This article points out the Bible’s Scientific accuracy No they don’t. And since it cannot be tested, it is not science.
“– Does their telling of History match up with archaeological finds?”
Occasionally, Sodom and Gomorrah, have never been found. Also, many things in the bible are “scientifically “impossible”. I do not believe in magic, it has no basis in science.
Okay, name a prophecy that didn’t come true. And did you even read the linked article I gave on Science & the Bible.
And Sodom and Gomorrah were thoroughly destroyed
Had to do some google searches for the verses since I’m not religious, but here are a few prophecies that did not come true that I found after about 5 minutes research.
The Nile did not dry up (Ezekiel 30:12).
Israel will live in peace with its neighbors (Ezekiel 28:24-26)
Israel will extend from the Red Sea to the Euphrates (Exodus 23:25-31)
Nebuchadnezzar will conquer Egypt (Ezekiel 29:16-21)
Egypt will be a desolate wasteland (Ezekiel 29:1-15)
The sea will drain (Isaiah 19:1-8)
Also, while an archaeological site in the Jordan Valley called Tall el-Hammam is speculated to be the remains of Sodom, there’s no evidence on how it was destroyed in the excavation.
Actually, the exact prophecies detailed in Ezekiel 25:1–32:32 are:
Ammon, Moab, Edom, and Philistia to be desolated
Tyre to be besieged by Nebuchadnezzar and, in time, to become a desolated site; destruction likened to the sinking of a fine ship with its cargo; Tyrian dynasty to end because of arrogance and treachery
Egypt to be plundered by Nebuchadnezzar in payment for his services as executioner of divine judgment against Tyre; Pharaoh and his crowd compared to a cedar that would be cut down
Which was fulfilled in the Book of 2 Kings, keep in mind that the Bible does use a lot of colourful illustrations
For Exodus 23: 31 here’s what 1 Kings 4: 21 says:
Solʹo·mon ruled over all the kingdoms from the River to the land of the Phi·lisʹtines and to the boundary of Egypt. They brought tribute and served Solʹo·mon all the days of his life.
And the illustration of the Nile drying up was used multiple times in the Bible by Prophets to represent the disaster due to come upon Egypt as a result of God’s judgment against the nation
That took me Ten Minutes to look up once I started looking into it. You seem to be going by a “Atheism of Holes” Fallacy, where when a perceived “Hole” in the Word of the Bible is found, it’s taken as automatic evidence that the whole thing is false without any further investigation been done that could answer the question
Ther is no proof they ever existed, also “turned into a pillar of Salt, is scientifically impossible.
Actually they’re pretty sure they found archaeological evidence of Sodom (Tall el-Hammam).
Although yes, people can not actually be turned into a pillar of salt. Heck, salt only makes up about 0.4 percent of a human’s body weight, at a proportionate concentration roughly equal to that of seawater. That part of the story is clearly a parable, the moral of which is ‘listen to authority figures if you know what’s good for you.’ Although the other parable in Sodom and Gamorrah is the basis for William Blackstone’s commentary on the Laws of England (which was incorporated by the US Constitution) that ‘It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.’
In the story, God was going to destroy 5 cities (Admah, Zaboiim, Zoar, Sodom, and Gomorrah). Abraham firs talks God into not destroying them if he can find 50 righteous people, then TEN righteous person in the cities. When they couldnt even find that many righteous people in the city, Abraham bargained God into at least sparing any he COULD find in the city. The only people in either city who were considered righteous was Abraham’s nephew, Lot, who was told by a couple of angels to flee the city. He was allowed to take his wife with him on the condition neither of them looked back at the city. Lot’s wife looks back.
Bam. Salt pillar.
Morals of the story – don’t punish the innocent just to get at the guilty if you can at all help it, and listen to the people in charge if you value your life.
To the intelligent crabs at the top of the comic, two words:
Hermit crabs
Just going to point out that dinosaurs developed first, and only died out through a freak accident, opening a wide variety of niches for mammals to exploit, and leading to the evolution of humans. So shouldn’t most aliens look more like bipedal dinosaurs.
Yeah, it’s probable that if dinosaurs had not died out, they might have evolved into bipedal humanoid dinosaurs, or avian humanoids (birds are basically descendants of dinosaurs – Jurassic Park got that part right).
However, mammals developed VERY early on and it was only because of the environment being more conducive to reptiles getting large that reptiles dominated for a long time. Originally, reptiles were either sauropsids or synapsids. Both are reptiles, but sauropsids evolved into other reptiles and birds, while sauropsids evolved into mammals over 320 million years ago.
Amphibians evolved even earlier than reptiles, and for an even longer time than the reptiles, they dominated the planet. The main difference between humans and other species that have controlled the planet, however, is that while other animals have adapted to the environment, humans began to make the planet adapt to them, which makes humans rather unique in the history of Earth.
Most of this I admittedly learned through BBC documentaries like Walking with Dinosaurs :).
Shoulders are ball and socket joints.
I dunno, it’s hard to argue that almost-human forms are optimal when you look at how maladapted we are to being upright apes. Spines suck! Pelviseses are garbage! Knees are MEDIOCRE! Shoulders aren’t even real joints, they’re just a mushy flesh collar that slips and pops and freezes all the damn time! I’m old and everything hurts!!!
…ahem. I mean there’s probably a better way. Tripods are inherently more stable, or maybe hexopodia (the key insight). Or at least a spinal column that doesn’t crumble before you’re 50.
Intelligent design my aching ass.
I don’t think anyone said human forms are optimal. But they are the minimally necessarily efficient forms to survive. At least according to Dabbler, and her rationale does make sense.
Also spines do not suck. All primates have vertibrae. Tripods are inherently stable for standing, but not so much for movement, unless you’re a macropod, like a kangaroo (I mentioned last strip’s comment board that kangaroos essentially use their tails as a third ‘leg’ to hop, and their bodies are actually very badly formed for doing something like walking).
And hey, sure you’re old and everything hurt, but just try to survive until the singularity and everything will be just dandy. :)
Yeah, more evidence that humans are the end result of “good enough to survive and pass traits to the next generation” competitive selection.
Unfortunately, the traits of aggression that helped our ancestors survive now risk our self destruction.
That and a reproductive system set to 70% mortality rate levels.
Yeah, as much as I would have loved to see Suzie bring up how incredibly inefficient, ineffective and wasteful human reproduction is compared to almost any mammal species that goes into estrus; (including primates) that’s definitely going off the lighthearted comedy trope and I don’t think Dan’s got the mental chops to pull off menstrual comedy from a woman’s perspective.
We’re still evolving. Check back 10 million years from now.
I’m not going to wait that long to fix my spine. When robot bodies become affordable my brain is going to say goodbye to the old upright monkey body. Take that evolution!
It’s iffy, if we will not be extinct, within 100 years.
People have been worrying about humans going extinct for a few thousand years. Each time the date of our supposed extinction arrives, nothing happens. And they just push back the date a few more years. Over and over again.
We’ll still be around in 100 years, even if there are biological pandemics or massive war. Especially considering the short amount of time we’ve dominated the planet compared to other species, we’ve had an insanely large influence on the planet compred to any other lifeform. Giant amphibians ruled the earth unchallenged for 210 million years. They had absolutely no effect on the planet beyond their effect on the evolutionary process. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for another 165 million years, undisputed. But they also did not actually affect the Earth, except that they kept mammals out of most evolutionary niches. Even before the Age of Apes was the Age of Birds, since birds pretty much ruled the Earth for 20 million years (everywhere except Asia). Again, they had absolutely no effect on the planet at all.
It wasn’t until the age of apes in the Miocene era that man gained any sort of prominence. It wasn’t until the last 29,000 years, that humans gained dominance over the planet. And in that short amount of time we’ve had an immense effect on the Earth compared to any other species that has dominated the planet. And we’ve done so in an incredibly short period of time. We’ve also spread in number far more than any other species – largely because of our ability to alter the environment to suit our needs instead of having to adapt to the environment.
If birds ruled the Earth for 20 million years, I’m pretty sure humans can at least last that long, if not a lot longer given our ability to alter the Earth to suit our purposes instead of being victim to the whims of the planet.
A three legged creature sounds more stable until you try to figure out how it walks. I turns out there is no simple walking gait for a three legged creature. You usually end up with a one, two, one, two gait that leaves thing rather unbalanced. A four legged creature has a very simple gait and is almost as stable as a tripod, plus, it can, usually, tolerate the loss of one leg.
I think you’ll find that’s a moist[i]wad[/i]
What Suzie News said is what we’ve all been thinking :).
I assume for the most part aliens would have sort of cliques based on their body types.
Like, can you imagine being a sailor on a space ship where every other crew member looks like a horror movie monster? Or hanging out in a bar full of 20 foot long centipedes? Actually, the 20ft long centipedes would probably be grossed out by the way you look too.
Also, assuming physical attraction is somewhat constant, there’s always a positive bias toward creatures you find attractive.
Additionally, physical requirements may cause bias, such that Hobbits and Centaurs probably don’t have much interaction, not because of the horse body, but because of sheer size difference.
Also, magic.
So, then you can throw in the eldritch horrors and nightmare fuel whenever you want. As a bonus you can just make a joke about being from “the south side” or “the other side of the hoverail tracks” or what not when they turn out to actually a really nice guy whose a great dad to his 47 larva.
“Come see me after the briefing and I’ll show you the point of four arms for the type of alien I am.”
For hugging and picking pockets at the same time?
Long time fan of your “other art mostly involving the female form. *cough*”
The Vogons. They evolved to breath on land, and then stopped evolving. Thick rubbery skin, little Brady eyes, tiny arms big webbed feet. Perfect form for intergalactic civil service Bureaucracy.
What Suzy’s forgetting is that even with 4 arms, horns, and her other variations from human norms, Dabbler, by rational standards, is actually very closely humanoid.
Dave, I’d say look at Farscape for aliens. Sure most of the crew is humanoid (Gigi Edgely whew) but not all of them. There were a few merchants that didn’t fit that bill, either.
One of the merchants on a station was a spider king (oh wait he was in jail with Rigel) and Pilot’s species is very much not humanoid. Then again, leviathans aren’t humanoid, or fully organic, and they’re a sapient race too.
Plus, you know, horta.
I met Gigi Edgely! :) It was at Emerald City Comic Con a million years ago (2008? 2009?), before it got ridiculously overcrowded, and she was a very charming and down-to-earth seeming person. It was hard to believe how short she was compared to the other two Farscape actors who were present, Lani Tupu and Wayne Pygram, especially since she looked roughly the same height as them in the show. Lani was quiet and courteous, though not very talkative, but Wayne was great to chat with, particularly when talking about all the make-up work he had to go through to be Scorpius.
Farscape was a great show. :)
I’m jealous. That… doesn’t happen, even rarely!
Alternate answer: Cora is humanoid, so her ship is ergonomically designed for humanoids. Some other forms of life can make do with adaptations, but humanoid crew are more comfortable and thus more likely to join and stick around.
This extends to a larger scale. If a species needs water to survive they could walk around the drylander part of the station in a suit, but most of them would hang out in the submerged part that was off-camera (because Sydney’s not going to land in what she sees as ocean if there’s a humanoid city right there).
What Dabbler said is that the humanoid form is evolutionarily efficient and there’s a bias toward races of that body type making it into space. A bias is not exclusivity, so Suzy pointing out a pair of extra arms on Dabbler really is meaningless.
Babylon 5 at least TRIES to have some more ‘exotic’ alien races…but they couldn’t get the puppets to work. But, it’s a good rationale.
I think that Babylon 5 also says that the Vorlon had a hand in different species’ evolutionary paths, which might be why so many races have humanoid body types similar to that of the ‘First Race’ that the Vorlon and Shadows both look to as their ‘father figure’ race, despite how neither Vorlon or Shadows have a humanoid appearance.
A theory by some quantum physicists and others is that our galaxy’s magnetic field may have a frequency or structure that favors the humanoid form. This would explain why almost all ET experiences have been with humanoids and why we may have to visit other galaxies to see many sentient creatures that aren’t humanoid. Call it nature or Gods will as you like.
References to any papers with that theory*? I’m not a quantum physicist, but I know enough of the general idea that I don’t think quantum-scale anything would affect macro-scale evolution of mammalian structure.
* or legitimate ET experiences, for that matter.
Which ones and what are the basis, for their Hypothesis’?
Whew, looks like that hit a sore spot.
As much as you might think the explanation comes across as “lazy plot justification” it’s a fairly valid enough explanation for the characters to come up with, especially if panspernia is a factor but no one knows who, how, how much, when, or why.
Run with this explanation as the general accepted theory by spacefaring civilizations and it’s fine.
I can agree that it’s a bit of lazy design, but at the same time, the price to pay for going the other way is too significant. You don’t just have to deal with more difficulty with art design, but the less humanoid another species is, the less compatible their… everything is going to be. The two species might not be able to use the same technology, the same clothing/weapons, the same communication, the same food… maybe not even the same AIR or LIGHT.
That’s not just harder to draw – it’s harder to write. And even if you can fully flesh out a concept for one or more totally alien species that have basically nothing in common with humans… what do you do with them, narratively? The less they can interact and coexist with humans, the less you can have them DOING with human characters. You’d have to write most of their interactions taking place via communications technology which is considerably less interesting for your readers than if your aliens and humans CAN interact more deeply.
Of course, you can just come up with alien life that doesn’t LOOK human but still matches us in all those other ways… but that’s honestly less realistic than going “panspernia and similar evolutionary justification” because look at how much diversity there is just on Earth, let alone what might be seen on other planets. It’s generally accepted that if there were aliens that developed 100% separately from humankind on a completely different planet, they’d have almost nothing in common with us at all.
That’s all a bit of a long-winded way of saying “don’t worry about it, it works fine”, heh. But yeah. Doing anything else, even in a setting that is entirely focused on alien/human interaction, is rarely ever going to be worth it.