That's why I love Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture series where he says the equivalent of: "turns out most of the galaxy uses mouth parts for hands, and we're the weird ones with hands not attached to our face."
Using mouth parts for hands is a terrible arrangement. You keep the vital parts of your body, the eyes and brains, too close with the tool manipulating appendage. A slip of the hand or accident might result in you getting blinded.
I was quite bothered when I learned not too long ago that crabs, lobsters and crayfish aren't actually related to spiders and scorpions at all. Like WTH evolution? That's weirder than hyenas not being related to dogs. (Yes yes I know not CLOSELY RELATED)
@@Aethuviel Well, that depends on what you mean by "not closely related." Both chelicerates and mandibulates are members of phylum Arthropoda. So they would indeed share a common ancestor (that would have presumably resembled a centipede).
Wouldn't e.g. the xenomorph from Alien have a humanoid body plan without being a mammalian vertebrate? They have an exoskeleton, different morphs have different number of limbs (the Queen has six, the facehuggers have eight), they don't give birth to live young, etc.
@anon6000 Thanks for the useful feedback! I did talk about "roughly humanoid", so less specific would also do. With "mammaloid" I really meant anything more advanced than a four-legged fish. See also my answer to @magnolia1253 here.
Agreed, Humanoid as the term is generally understud in Sci-Fi, is a large hindlimbed bibedal Tetrapod with a vertically oriented body with grasping forelimbs topped by an articulated head. This dose not require them to be mamalian at all, and Reptilian, avian and even insect like forms could fit the definition, and many forms of mammalian life would fail to qualify.
There's this really tiny TH-cam channel by a palentologist by the name of Ponera with a video titled "why I hate anthropomorphic aliens" and he raises such a good point, if we have creatures on earth that are so extremely different to us that share dna with us, it seems extremely unlikely that creatures on alien world with entirely different environments and evolutionary pressures that share absolutely NO dna with us would have any resemblance to us.
You make three assumptions that can not be proven as of yet: alien worlds that can sustain life are entirely different, those evolutionary pressures are so different and no shared "DNA". There is new information available stating that DNA isn't the blueprints we've been led to believe. Therefore, i believe that useful biological structures are universal and will be utilized whenever possible. Whenever we actually find life outside of earth, it won't look too different from what we have already seen here.
@@duanegarrett4900 I make three assumptions based on liklihood. We are yet to find a planet with conditions similar to our own, so it life finds it's way in another planet, by pure mathematical probability, even if you remove the vast majority of planets due to their inhospitality towards life from the equation the chances are still high thst the planets conditions will not be the exact same as ours and therefore evolutionary pressures would be different. And that's following your assumption that the lifeforms on other planets need to have conditions that can sustain carbon based life forms, which is not necessarily one we should be making. Even if we had a form of coverergant evolution going on creating a similar body model to that of a mammal, there's absolutely no reason to think that it would result in the formation of a bipedal anthropomorphic shape. Our bipedal body plan is extremely rare throughout all of earth's history and largely developed due to our evolution of being arboreal and then moving environments away from the forest. I was using dna in a more general sense, I'm sure you know what I mean when I use it.
Galaxy Quest was one of the few with a non-bilaterian protagonist, the octopoid Thermians. Even if they were clever enough to have a cloaking device to make themselves appear humanoid. The villain Sarris was a standard humanoid sci fi reptilian, so the writers seem to have exhausted their creativity on the octopoids.
Yep, I also look forward to that. There are 2 huge problems with equations of this kind. We don't really know much about life on Earth, or the ecosystem or physics or anything else really. We are just scratching the surface and we are full with false assumptions. And we have a sample size of 1. And even that one is mostly unknown.
@@4124V4TA-SNPCA-xmy perspective was massively shifted when messing around with a game engine and making a simple game I tried to port to mobile. The monster I made had 8 legs, 4 heads, and 4 tails and a 4-part mouth. It had more than 50 "bones" controlling the rig and that was too much for the mobile client. While a tetrapod with a head jaw and tail can have a full-fledged rig with less than half that many and a minimal rig with a about a dozen bones. It made me realize that generally body plan complexity is inversely proportional to behavioral complexity. And apes even lost their tails. I don't think you'll start with anything more complex than a tetrapod, and to get complex enough for space flight I think you need two arms to make tool use practical enough to justify burning that much energy running a big brain - ours burns 1/5 of our calories, and thats probably down quite a bit since our brains used to be even larger.
Humanoids in fantasy worlds are more believable, as they are usually close relatives of humans that went down a different path due to natural selection, outbreeding, magic, divine intervention, or some mix of all of those. It is not that hard to imagine a world where multiple human-compatible species overlap and co-evolved and can and frequently do interbreed while maintaining distinct characteristics. That is just Paleolithic Earth.
Robert Asprin did a novel called "bug wars" where there's no humans. It's lizards vs insects. Robert Sawyer has great aliens. "Illegal Alien" had very believable aliens that weren't humanoid, as did "Calculating God." Both those were lots of fun. I always figured it's because internal skeletons only evolved once on Earth, so "weird" aliens manage to look alien even tho it's almost ridiculous if you look at clams, octopuses, star fish, etc. The "trace genetics back" idea was wonderfully handled in a novel called "Inherit the Stars," where in the near future we find a 50,000-year-old human skeleton on the moon and spend the novel trying to figure out how that could possibly be. (Not a bad solution, if a bit of a stretch.) The problem with putting diverse races all into the same place in a medieval world where it takes a year to walk across the country should be obvious. Diverse star trek? Sure. Diverse sherwood forest? Not so much. Diverse hobbits where the only hobbit family to ever leave their shire is world famous? Probably not.
Yes, as I mentioned above, it's odd that every society at every stage of evolution happens to resemble an American college campus. Demographically unlikely, especially for an ancient and traditional society.
Well, some groups of cephalopods do have the analogue structure of a skeleton as an internal shell, but your comment is on point. I wonder in our case what would happen if mollusks were the main group to evolve on land...
Then, how does that work with all other life, whom we share so many fundamental treats and DNA with… it somehow implies those alien humans would be closer to us then monkeys or apes… some suspension of disbelief remains required for your premise, unless you invoke some higher force then basic evolution, that converges not only over space, but time as well, but don’t let that stop you!
@@ivarbrouwer197 In the upcoming game _Exodus_ by Archetype Entertainment, all the "aliens" are descendents of human colonists (and in some cases, animals from Earth) evolved through genetic engineering over a span of time of 40, 000 years. *EDIT:* sorry for my English. I'm Brazilian and my knowledge of that language is rusted.
That is probably the best way to have a galaxy filled with various humanoid aliens. Long lost relatives that have adapted and/or drifted away genetically from their roots. I have been considering retconning SW and ST with that in mind, though it would still be a huge stretch for those.
That genetic incompatibility would extend to diseases and digestion as well. And about half the phyla on Earth are worms, and a worm and a fish are both basically function-oriented tubes of meat, so lots of planets probably have analogues to them. Same with beetles, very successful body plan. To extend the mediocrity principle, if Earth is an average representative sample of a terrestrial world, maybe the same broad categories of life exist in roughly the same proportions on other terrestrial worlds. So given the long span of time they were around we would expect most planets to be crawling wth dinosaurs 😁 For me the issue with the assumption of humanoid aliens is the conflation of the humanoid body plan with sapience. An elephant or a crow with just a _little_ more dexterity and precision could plausibly have achieved the amazing technology of "throwing rocks" before any of the great apes and thus began hauling itself out of ecological perdition. If you haven't seen Callum Stephen Diggle's work before, well it's at least worth a look, since his aliens are extremely nonhumanoid, though I'd argue he doesn't pay sufficient attention to basic ecogeographical principles like Gloger's rule or square cube law - most of them have absurdly greebled surface areas, far beyond any natural animal, and you can't actually deduce what niche or biome they evolved in from looking at them.
Oh yes... I always imagine what ants and termites would be able to achieve if they had the body plan of mantises or scorpions, with "manipulator limbs"... Ants can only use their own mouths to manipulate objects, and are easily the second most technically advanced species on earth, being able to figure out technologies like agriculture, husbandry, antibiotics, food preservation, dams, urbanism, and, maybe, even a rudimentary form of "writing" with pheromones...
I strongly agree! At one time I wondered about speculative evolution of a cetacean that, for some reason, kept their hind limbs as manipulators as to reach human like levels of sapience. Also I hadn't heard of CS Diggle, but his work looks amazing! I especially like the Galji that are basically elephantoid with two trunks with hand-like ends. That really hits the point home!
@@Phrenotopia Yeah I do like his stuff - with reservations - but mostly it's great to see someone break the mold. As for cetaceans, suppose instead they came onto land again, walking on their forelimbs, and the flukes of the tail were exapted into a grasper. Like a cat wanting to be let out and back in on ten million year timescales haha
While beetles are highly succesful, I'd like to point out that arthropods, and with them exoskeletons, only evolved once. All animals with articulated exoskeletons are related, meaning there is no guarantee another planet has them at all. It's very likely life on most planets is soft-bodied with skeletons of any kind only found in sessile lifeforms. Shells seem likely to show up, though, as do teeth of some kind. Beetles also hinge on wings, another rare feature that only evolved once in arthropods, hence no beetle spiders. The issue is: Success does not mean it's likely to show up. At best it means it's likely to succeed if it ever shows up.
Very nice. You should go deeper in the Drake equation analogy and animal morphology on earth. In fact it is a much better scenario than that of Drake's
One great sci-fi series often overlooked for the amazing variety of its alien lifeforms designs is Farscape. Sure, it has multiple alien species that are akin to space humans with makeup, but the main cast involves non-humanoid aliens brilliantly portrayed by puppet performers from the Jim Henson Company. Farscape is one of the only franchises that lets you empathize with a 3 feet tall frog-like alien despot, and an 8 feet tall symbiotic arthropod ship Pilot.
You are frelling right! It's not a stinky unimaginative dren like most. And full of gigeresque stuff. I will hope for the movie or spinoff, forever in developmental hell. At least it continues in the comics but still... I'll never forget it's premiere back in there days. And how many great designs and practical aliens were developed for 2 minutes of screen time in a single episode. It's not the most scientific, but it is the most unique and imaginative and alien when it comes to TV to date. Other great stuff was Babylon 5. With different sections on the titular space station with different atmospheric composition, temperature, atmospheric pressure and gravity for different species, most of which are non human. Oh course there main characters were humanoid for budgetary reasons on one hand and foot better connection one the other. But the gaim had to engineer a new subspecies to be able to make presence amongst three humanoid species and they still had to wear a high tech suit to accommodate their biology. And the encounter suits of more advanced aliens, including far future humanity. These are there two best live action series ever in my opinion. I wonder what will JMS achieve with it. I wouldn't be surprised if the reboot would drop suddenly in five years or so like how they did with the last movie.
But if you use mouthparts for hands, and hands evolve from legs, how do you chase your prey? What do you hold the thing you're biting with so it can't get away? Or what do you use to bring food to your mouth so you can consume calories faster? Evolution isn't random. Mouths evolved first when we were just simple tubes connecting mouth an anus. If using mouths to manipulate things was a good idea why didn't anything evolve to do that instead of adding unnecessary extra limbs? Closest is an elephant's trunk but elephants are limited by the lack of a second manipulating appendage to do more complex work so they'd probably never evolve to use tools.
@@j.f.fisher5318 Right. Not like most amniots doing that already. Have you seen dogs and cats, dinosaurs including crows and ravens? People born without feet or hands (if not, see Freaks!!!)? To get onto fiction, do you know Pierson's Puppeteers? Speculative Dinosaur Worlds? Etc. etc. there are so many possibilities. _( Or elephants with 7 trunks, 7 mouths and 7 pairs of tusks? ;) )_ BTW elephants don't only have trunks. They have trunks, tusks and foreheads. Even legs to bring down trees, or fight if it is absolutely necessary and unavoidable...
6:51 the starwars universe uses the celestial beings known as the father son and daughter saying they seeded life all across the galaxy from what I remember unless it is now legends
From what I've heard, it's more efficient to have fewer legs when moving fast. Therefore, there are no fast centipedes. 4 legs are better than 6. 2 legged creatures almost certainly come from 4 legged. Certain body shapes are simply more efficient. Therefore, what the creature looks like is determined by where and how it lives.
Tiger beetles run faster than any tetrapod. And why is running speed the measure of efficiency? Why not swimming, flying, burrowing, web spinning, etc?
@@jambec144 This applies when you have to run fast. If you want to climb, stand firmly, something else applies. Then many legs might be better. As the creature grows larger, the legs must grow proportionally more to support the weight. Then there will eventually be a lack of space with many legs.
@@niklasmolen4753the computational complexity of multiple legs is still a major hurdle. Neural tissue burns a lot of calories and for example cephalopods have a brain for each leg.
@@niklasmolen4753 Just as I must ask why the ability to run fast is essential to intelligence, I must ask why being (how?) large is essential to intelligence? And I wonder how to explain large animals like the brontosaurus or elephant, which have large very appendages unrelated to locomotion?
@@j.f.fisher5318 I've seen this claim made before, and I wonder if there is any evidence in support of it. Is there any evidence that snakes gained intelligence when they lost their limbs? Is there any evidence that elephants lost intelligence when they evolved their trunks? A praying mantis might well be smarter than a centipede, but I'd bet that it has far more to do with mantids being visually oriented, and very little to do with limb number.
I don't know if anyone has posted it. But I'm pretty sure that in starwars legends or some documentary or something, they said that humans from Earth built a colony ship and when they used the image it launched them back in time and into the other galaxy and then they spread out everywhere.
In the ALIEN books, the xenomorph always adopts certain traits from the host it gestates in. And actually, that is something that happens in nature. Usually it is done to mimic other animals for survival. There are flies that look like wasps and non poisonous snakes with similar patterns to toxic ones. In the alien universe I would expect it's more of an environmental adaptation. If you are born into an alien environment, it makes sense to have a similar body plan to those who built that environment. I expect if a Xenomorph were gestated in an avian species, it would be born with wings.
The Star Trek humanoid species are just old folklore "races" transported into space: Vulcans are space-Elves, Klingons are space-Trolls, and Ferengi are space-Goblins.
I think Klingons were Mongols but in space! Later space samurai-orks. Nowadays I have no idea. And Remans and Romulans are the dark elves and blood elves to the vulcan space elves.
Actually, in the old Star Wars expanded universe, there is the explanation that some aliens are simply human subspecies (those biologically identical but with different colors, like the Chiss), and others may have evolved (tens of thousands of years isn't a very long time in evolution, but never mind) or engineered themselves to look more like humans, to fit into a society made by and for humans. It doesn't explain the basic humanoid bodyplans though, and Star Wars was never really about speculative biology or even good worldbuilding. Avatar has a different issue, because those are extremely humanoid creatures that stick out like a sore thumb out of what we've so far seen of the fauna, and unlike SW, Avatar at least tries to bring speculative biology onto the big screen. The biggest reason for how common humanoids and humanesque (those that even have our faces and details, like Star Trek aliens and Na'vi) aliens are in pop culture, is of course because of familiarity. A casual audience simply wouldn't want to watch a movie about the birrin, arguably the best technological aliens in speculative biology.
I find it extremely unlikely that alien life forms would much resemble us. We simply don't have fantasy enough to figure out what solutions nature could come up with on other planets.
I think the humanoid form would be one of the most common amongst intelligent life in the universe, for a couple of reasons. 1. I've worked both construction and on a refinery before, and its hard to imagine another body plan that's able to climb and maneuver and manipulate as well as a ours (arachnid is the only other one I can think of) 2. There are a number of other very intelligent species on Earth (dolphins, elephants, ravens...) but only intelligent apes eventually developed technology. I believe our body-plan facilitated that evolutionary step. Of course, by humanoid, I mean 2 arms, 2 legs, and a head. Whether such a creature is mammalian or a vertebrate doesn't matter in this case.
Nada a ver. Seus argumentos são mais design inteligente e não evolução. O que precisamos para algo inteligente não é o plano corporal antropoide, masemvroscmsnipuladores e um cérebro capaz de inteligência complexa.
I can't remember the name, but I seem to recall a scientist talking about this, and they suggested the 'two arms, two legs, one head' model might be likely to be followed for any other sapient tool-using alien we ever are likely to meet. Their arguments basically came down to the idea that such a form would be the best-optimized balance between several key elementary requirements: an energy-intensive brain, a versatile suite of directed senses, the ability to finely manipulate objects, and the ability to move around while manipulating things at the same time.
@@SteveMND i'm sure the aliens say the same thing about their own body plan 😁 "well obviously you need a buoyancy sac and flappers to move around, nerve nodes evenly distributed throughout the body for redundancy's sake, a sonar melon, and an adhesive gunk gland to carry things"
"...able to climb and maneuver..." I can easily imagine a large number of abilities that could be useful to a technological species. What about the ability to fly, swim, burrow, weave webs, taste with your hands, see IR, manipulate more than two objects at a time, etc.? "...only intelligent apes eventually developed technology." I think that this is simply a case of having a single example of technology developing, and not evidence that only one way exists.
I love this kind of analysis. I often wonder if our own narrow dataset for evolutionary history is limited by the ecological context in which evolution took place. Namely, once one set of organisms develops a set of features that allow them to occupy a particular ecological niche, do they rapidly dominate those resources and make it impossible for other distantly related organisms to make the same transition. This seems to be true for the evolution of multicellular terrestrial photosynthetic organisms. Brown and red algae never followed green algae onto the land. Same with the evolution of multicellular heterotrophs, though countless diverse protist families flirt with the first stages of the process. This likely even extends back to the first cellular structures, where a first mover advantage changed the chemistry of the early biosphere enough to make a second independent cellularisation impossible. The situation of only having one biosphere to study is not that different to exoplanet studies where we only had one planetary solar system to analyse. Once our telescopes gathered more data on exoplanets we realised our solar system is pretty damn weird and not suitable for making general theories of planetary formation.
I believe the human body is highly optimized for life on land, under gravity and an atmosphere, and so it seems reasonable to assume that life on other planets with similar conditions might have a comparable form.
The issue with using a Drake-like equation is the possibility of reconvergence. For example, one can at least imagine a clade with pentaradial symmetry becoming the first large encephalized creatures, walking along the bottom of the ocean and swimming using a mix of finned arms and jet propulsion, then proceeding to dominate the large land animal niches after being stranded in fresh water too long. At this point, they may change their walking gait due to the lack of buoyancy to help them balance or support their weight, modifying one limb for feeding and basic manipulation as an extension of the jaw, and the other four for propelling itself in a particular direction. You now have four-limbed, bilaterally symmetric land animals. If you accept convergence as a possibility then you need to consider every path that leads to a given outcome, not just the historical one.
Also evolution doesn't really want to make space-faring species. It just wnts to pass on genes and ants are great at that, or mice, or whatever. Whatever route evolution follows it doesn't need to end in something able to build a space ship. Most routes won't lead to that, and most planets with life will never become space-faring even in another 10 billion years or whatever. We didn't happen until Earth entered a cycle of glaciation which made constant repeated demands for rapid adaptation. It's possible our level of intelligence will never develop without such a protracted pressure to rapidly adapt.
This is similar to an idea I had, only the pentaradial animaloid used * two * arms as heads, and walked on three hind legs. ("Crutching" is a common form of locomotion for animals first evolving the ability to walk, and it's compatible with being a tripod. And having two head-claws seemed more sensible than having just one claw.) The animaloid started out with five eyes, but the two posterior eyes were eventually lost, resulting in a trinocular animaloid. The single fore eye became specialized for detailed color vision, and the two peripheral eyes became specialized in detecting motion.
I think it's more of an analog, since technically, it is not a form of reproduction. The genes are shared between individuals and those individuals keep those traded genes if I am not mistaken.
... and in our quest for life elsewhere we seem to be only focusing on the likes of our own organic life, based on our own chemistry. How about a sentient life form based in something else besides Carbon? 😁
O pior nem é o fato de termos este viés chauvinista na busca por vida mas o fato de grandes agências como a NASA ou pesquisadores apostarem praticamente tudo em vida baseada em carbono + água como solvente + oxigênio como gás para metabolismo. Isso sim não faz sentido algum. É triplicar um viés.
I think that most of the same engineering constraints would still be in effect. You'd likely still end up with bilateral symmetry and a head/cephalothorax.
Carbon just meets all the criteria for life SO WELL. Other elements _can_ imitate it under VERY specific conditions but only under those conditions. Further, carbon still leaves a lot of room for variety! I speculated upon the possibility of fluorocarbon-based life on an oxygen-poor planet close to a blue star. Above the melting point of sulfure, teflon (poly tetrafluoroethylene) is a soluble goo with reactivity comparable to parafins! Plants would use UV light to convert carbon tetrafluoride to teflon and fluorine. The fluorine reacts with the sulfur to make sulfur hexafluoride which is on the edge of thermally decomposing back into it's component elements at these temperatures. Animals inhale fluorine or SF6 to oxidize teflon back to CF4. This is an irradiated, scorchinh hellscape devoid of water with blood-red seas of molten brimstone obscured by a corrosive, toxic atmosphere. This is _theoretically_ possible and within the realm of 'carbon-based life', but it requires such specific conditions: a blue star which won't last as long as a yellow or red one, a planet largely devoid of the element oxygen and enriched in sulfur and fluorine. This is the issue with exotic life; it requires exotic circumstances!
Carbon-based Life as we see on Earth is the only kind of Life we know for certain is possible. So naturally, it's the default to work with, helping us limit ourselves in our speculations. I do have a few Xenobiology video concepts lined up. Most of the time, however, I don't feel it's very useful to go beyond that, even though it can be fun sometimes. No matter what, there are many good reasons for why carbon *is* the universal default. Any proposed alternatives, like Silicon, just don't really work when looked at more closely.
If we ignore the prequel retcons and "bug" Reinterpretation of the, xenomorph, we can assume they are not strictly biological. H. R Giger meant for them to be "biomechanical" As in, they are a weird blend of life and non life. In the newest movie, the director wanted the xeno coccoon to "digest" material from the ships hull. Somewhat reafirms the idea that they are not necessarily following the rules of biology. If the goo is more of a computer and or some form of nanotech... How far fetch would this theory be in your opinion?
very interesting video as usual! very interested to break down the evolution of vertebrates but i gotta say, gen ai used in the the thumbnail and the video is not a good look, especially given the ease to find real original photos and your regular of good human made illustrations in your videos
tbf you could relax the humanoid definition to include centaur-like creatures, and creatures with erect posture by means other than a back bone specifically to allow the requirements to relax to just bilaterian with legs and some kind of rigid segmented body element
Ok, so this video is about the chances of aliens being humanoid, not specificaly inteligent aliens. For inteligent aliens i would say there's a good chance for them being humanoid. Brains require a lot of energy, with Bipedalism being one of, if not the most energy efficient form of locomotion possible through natural evolution, they would probably walk on 2 legs. They'd probably also have hands, since they'd need a way to dexterously handle tools in order to create technology (i don't think tenticles or something like an elephant's trunk or anything of the sort would be dexterous enough). Assuming that they'd be simetrical they would probably have 2 arms and 2 legs since any more would cost more then it's worth.
In Star Trek Enterprise, The first Vulcan/Human hybrid was Elizabeth. Her parents were T'Pol, (a Vulcan female), and Charles Tucker, (a Human male). It is explained in universe that this was only possible due to the intervention of 22nd century medical technology. This retcon attempted to answer the obvious objections from evolutionary biologists that alien hybrids make no sense. (Not to be crude but a lonely sheep herder producing a Human/sheep hybrid actually makes more biological sense!) But at least the writers are trying to make sense of this, although it still doesn't make any actual scientific sense.
The retconning is indeed wild 😄 In the same series we also get an explanation for the "smooth" Klingons of TOS. I should watch it again, though it's not my favourite series in the franchise...
I guess we could have something "humanoid" that isn't a tetrapod or vertebrate, like how mantises can walk as quadrupeds and use their front limbs as we use our arms, for example...
I would call the mantis bauplan centaur-like. And the centaur bauplan has evolved several times (mantids, mantisflies, assassin bugs, pelican spiders, scorpions, lobsters, elephants).
Yes, I agree here. A six-legged body plan I would not call humanoid, but perhaps centauroid and it might actually be more optimal than bipedal. My favourite sapient concept are Alex Ries's Birrin that have that aspect.
There's a decent discussion of this from almost 50 years ago by Larry Niven, regarding Superman and his incompatibility with Lois Lane, 'Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex'. Much has been said about Mr Spock as well. Star Trek got around that with interstellar seeding and directed evolutionary development. And it couldn't happen any other way, imo, not even convergent morphological evolution outside of our planet. It's about as likely as the plot of Galaxy Quest.
Scifi has different adaptive pressures than evolution. Old scifi strongly favored people in suits. Nowadays in games you can retarget animations for any humanoid on another humanoid rig so it's easier to make humanoid aliens. On the other hand evolution has no incentive to make aliens that can build space ships. Evolution just wants to select species that can pass on their genes and ants, mice, and fish are great at that. You'll only see evolution make something that can build starships, if it really really has to and has a species that's got what it takes to start from, otherwise extinction is a lot more likely than some of the more imaginative aliens I've seen out there. On earth here's the candidates: Primates have two hands and two feet so they can move around while doing complex manipulations of objects. Elephants have just one hand which limits their ability to manipulate stuff. Corvids can manage a combination of beak and foot manipulation which gives them some options. Cetaceans are really smart but no hands is holding them back. Cephalopods are really smart too but their commitment to brainpower is really over the top because tentacles are a lot more complex to control so each tentacle has its own brain. And brains burn a lot of energy which is probably a big part of why their intelligence has probably been plateaued for tens if not hundreds of millions of years.
@@j.f.fisher5318 It's not true of all cephalopods, but squid and octopus use the telomeres in their genes as long-term memory storage. They use RNA to write memories into their genes, and it has been shown that they can pass down memories to offspring. I think they are as close to alien as we have on Earth, because they think so vastly differently, and their environment is so different. The ganglial clusters they use for brains aren't even enough to decode their vision -- they have eyes almost identical to ours -- yet they still do it just fine. And still, they use the same basic twenty amino acids as everything else on Earth, despite there being hundreds of thousands of possible aminos to work with. And we have only just recently mapped out the proteins possible with the twenty we have. We have no idea what is possible in aliens. And even still, you stick to very materialistic viewpoints of intelligence. Dolphins are far smarter than ourselves, whales likely beyond us in ways we cannot perceive. We still lie to ourselves as a characteristic of normal health. There is no possible way we have the mental vision to foresee anything beyond our immediate understanding yet. We are too young a species, too maladapted, too competitive, and insane by the rational standards we hold ourselves accountable by. All your assumptions are farts in the wind.
yeah, i've never really understood the relatability argument. relatability is about the spark of intelligence in the eyes, it's about something behaving with intent. if people can empathize with the pixar lamp they can empathize with my stupid sea star rhinoceros alien design haha
If there are spacefaring aliens most if not all will be roughly humanoid (bipedal, two arms, and head). Maybe on a high-g world maybe a centaur-like species but I'd still expect evolution to favor small tetrapods to start with when the square-cube law doesn't care about weight all that much so probably not. And my issue with something like the drake equation is that evolution isn't random. I'd been a fan of non-humanoid aliens until I was optimizing a hobby game project I'd made to work on mobile and having issues. It was a horror game with an 8-legged, 4 tailed, 4-headed monster. The problem was it had too many computational "bones" and animating it was bogging down the game on my phone's limited resources. Basically 3 bones per limb times 16 limbs was 48 bones while a humanoid character only needs 10 bones for a minimal rig, or something in the range of the 20s for a fairly sophisticated rig not including facial animation. Roghly half the complexity or a bit more if fingers were added. And the monster didn't have anything like fingers in return for all that extra complexity. Note that apes even gave up their tail on the way to our more complex behaviors. Coincidence? That made me realize behavioral complexity tends to be inversely correlated with body plan complexity. Spiders are mostly solitary. Insects can be communal but their basic behaviors are still simple but build complex group behaviors. Like piling objects just takes a simple robotic behavior that pushes things around with less than half a dozen steps but combined a bunch of ants can make a pile of dirt. Basically more limbs wastes computational resources. Neural tissue is hungry and not particularly useful until you get to tool use, and high calorie requirements reduce odds for survival. As an extreme example, cephalopods are highly intelligent but have a brain for every leg. Four legs is the simplest stable walking layout so that's what evolution will probably end up selecting. Literal bones are good for muscle attachment and simplify the computational load for each limb by limiting joints and range of motion (as opposed to cephalopodsneeding a brain for each tentacle). Exoskeletons are probably too weak if the examples of earth arthropods like ants being so ridiculously weak when compared to animals with an endoskeleton using the square-cube law are typical (if ants were even dog-sized they'd be too weak to even move). The most important factor in the development of intelligence though isn't body plan but the development of a socially-driven intelligence "arms race" between members of a species competing for food and mates. This is seen in all terrestrial and avian species with high intelligence reaching the base level needed to start using tools. Once there, if one doesn't have a body plan that can evolve separate limbs for moving and manipulating things there's a limit to how much utility one can gain from tool use and intelligence probably plateaus at whatever is sufficient to keep up in social competition. Of course the reasons why scifi tends to have humanoid aliens is totally different. Mostly because its easier. From aliens with brow ridges to retargeting humanoid animations in games.
I've seen this claim made before, and I wonder if there is any empirical evidence for it. Is there any evidence that snakes gained intelligence when they lost their limbs? Is there any evidence that elephants lost intelligence when they evolved their trunks? Yes, an 8-legged, 4 tailed, 4-headed monster isn't all that efficient. But I don't see how this by itself implies that a snake would be rather brainer than an elephant. Computational complexity resulting from limb numbers, if an issue, is clearly swamped out by other considerations.
@@jambec144it isn't so much that things get brainier, but they get more efficient. They can keep the same intelligence and burn less calories so they're less likely to starve. Modern humans have significantly smaller brains than humans 10k years ago, for example. But more broadly there are no arthropods having more than 6 legs that are social and even with the intelligence of cephalopods, very few are social. And there are fewer than 1/10 as many 8-legged arthropods as 6-legged. It isn't so much brainless as behavioral complexity and adaptive diversity.
there are quite a few animals that demonstrate intelligence, tool use, and culture. but no animals apart from humans that have had civilization, not that we can see in the archeological record. Now you could argue that they didn't have some essential thing that humans have, but who's to say there isn't entirely different ways to get there. Instead, lets look at how many distantly related intelligent animals there are (such as crows, primates, octopus) there are clearly a few impressively intelligent animals, but so many more that are not intelligence, that it seems to me the jump between normal and intelligent is not as impressive as intelligent and civilization. although, it's possible that it's not actually difficult, it's a question of is it advantageous? would crows or octopus benefit from having a civilization?
Every form of life that you find on earth is plausible on any other planet, but as far as space, fearing aliens, goes, only aliens, with possible thumbs could achieve the level of sophistication. It takes to build a spaceship. Mammalian, lizards, amphibians, and at a stretch birds would be the most common candidates. All strictly aquatic life would be non-candidates as spacefaring creatures, because they would never invent chemistry, metallurgy, or glassmaking. Without those disciplines, you wouldn’t even get to making basic machinery.
Check this out , Curiosity rover took a picture of a Martian statue and more. She's on my channel and where in the SOL she is. She looks human. If you saw her you would wonder what country she's from instead of planet.
...if it can happen on Earth, why can such a thing not evolve somewhere else? Is Earth something special, like religions believe? So I do think, that there are beings like us and other intelligent beings with completely different body plans in this Universe and in many other Universes, that support material structures...
@ 7:00 Why does biological realism count then? I mean, what are the odds that every society everywhere, at any point in time, happens to be in the process of sudden racial admixture? More than that, why should the demographics always resemble those of a contemporary college campus? If racial realism is rejected, then why bother with other aspects of creating a realistic world? Why bother with costumes, settings, and even constructing whole languages?
To begin with, races are social constructs and it's more useful to speak of phenotypes, but even then we need to apply a lot of care. So with that in mind, "biological realism" or "race realism" don't really count, no. What *is* real are clinal variations in melanin levels, bone structure and hair structure over geographic distances between interbreeding local populations. Tolkien actually did elaborate a bit about geographic variations of different human groupings, so one could say these aspects of his world-building legacy are being wiped away by modernity. However, if fantasy races were to be made more realistic, then dwarves, hobbits, elves etc would need to have phenotypes very different from humans. In reality, all these races are assumed to confirm to Northern European phenotypes with just some tweaks added like e.g. pointy ears etc. Referring to "contemporary college campus" actually hits the nail on the hammer, because it reflects one reality of what we're dealing with here: These universes are basically projections of their respective creators' immediate environment. Fantasy races have roots in Northern European folklore, so naturally these near-human beings are transmutations of local phenotypes. And even science fiction more often than not reflects the societies of their creation at their specific time slices. Early science fiction crews are predominantly white. Even Star Trek, though it attempts to represent a united Earth still more reflects current Western societies than a global one. With 4 centuries of increasing admixture these crews would actually be expected to look quite different. The point is that in the end, all these attempts at purported "realism" are not really worth it in compared to the benefits of inclusion and diversity. You get to pick the best actors and also engage the full spectrum of your audience more. This is almost a video script...
@@Phrenotopia The "races are a social construct" claim is contestable. Not only does a sizeable minority of geneticists within the West contest it, but it is a minority position outside of the West. Unfortunately, TH-cam doesn't allow for links, but you can see my defense of the biological reality of race at Quora (Jamie Bechtel's answer to "In your opinion, does race have a genetic or scientific basis?") As for demographic realism being rejected for the sake of inclusion, I would ask why this only applies to Europeans? Why isn't it applied to fantasy settings based on East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, pre-colonial America, etc? Nobody is harmed by an all Chinese cast. Why/how is anyone harmed by an all European cast? No offense is intended, but I feel that cognitive dissonance is being buried here for the sake of a political stance. If nothing else, you can surely see how those who don't share your political motives would find the absence of demographic realism to be a tad jarring? And if one absolutely must use fantasy to message (verb), then create something new, rather than betray Tolkien's vision. Artistic revisionism is no better than historical revisionism. People from all over the world were already able to enjoy his works before "inclusivity" became a concern. Woke messaging in no way improves his works. EDIT I: I’d be completely open to seeing black Harad, or maybe Asiatic Rhûn. Maybe the blue wizards could have had dark skin. And maybe a female warrior character could have been introduced, rather than completely transforming Galadriel into something unrecognizable (and, it would appear, central to all events in the Second Age). And of course, I quite agree with you that Dwarves and Elves should look rather alien (although I doubt that Tolkien would have agreed with that). EDIT II: I'm a conlanger, and I'm often surprised by the negative passion conlanging can generate. There was a rant I once saw somewhere by someone who hated the fact that people spend time trying to master eg. Klingon or Quenya. He suggested that fantasy worlds simply use endangered languages like Navajo. While I'm all for preserving endangered languages, I don't see why it must be at the cost of someone's artistic vision. But that seems to be part of the evangelical Woke spirit of the times: prioritizing identity politics over art and truth.
@@jambec144 To be clear, I wrote "raceS are social constructS" both in plural, to take away some of the ambiguity of terms here, even though some still remains. I don't like the phrasing "race is a social construct", because people often regard "race" as synonymous with "phenotypic variation", which of course is real and observable. But that "races" are social constructs is without question. To begin with, all taxonomic categories, or attempts at those, are. As someone with a background in taxonomy, I know that even species and higher taxa are social constructs, but these are at least far more qualified than races are. They are arrived at through scientific consensus, which is a social, intersubjective process. But whereas valid taxa are qualified, human races are clearly not. Of course, the clinal variation of certain phenotypical characteristics is real, but the categorizations imposed on that variation are highly arbitrary. And not only arbitrary, races are ultimately based on early modern Western ethnic hierarchies that came to serve a specific and very insidious purpose, that I hope I don't need to elucidate. For that and more reasons, I cannot really take any attempt to make these stale old categories relevant again seriously and even regard this with heightened suspicion. I recommend you sharpen your scepticism as well in this. Of course, a different world-building could have been done by paralleling real life Earth's phenotypic-geographic variation. It is being done in the Game of Thrones world, if I'm not mistaken, as an example. Tolkien did a little of that too, though imperfectly so, but he never fully fleshed it out, probably because his aim was to create a new specifically Anglo-Saxon lore. As his legacy has become democratized, the result is that people want to feel included in his wonderful universe. I am sure that, understanding the deeper background, he would support this, being staunchly anti-racist. Besides, I see little difference between introducing black hobbits to black Vulcans. Neither make a lot of sense to begin with and all we need to do is suspend our disbelief a little further. And again: You get a wider pool of excellent actors to choose from! To be honest, I don't much care for your lamentations over greater inclusivity and diversity in Western media. No offense, but if I'm not mistaken, more than a dedication to "demographic realism", as you start to call it now, or "artistic legacy" I sense a level of indignation over what you seem to feel is "unfair". You appear to gloss over that in the Western world we have a long history of exclusion, still ongoing, that we actively need to compensate for. So absolutely there is harm being done by exclusionary casting. Star Trek led the way here, even if imperfectly so. Need I remind you of the impact that casting of Nichelle Nichols as Uhura Nyota made in the US? This is by no means "political messaging" as you try to pidgeonhole it. It is being socially responsive and responsible against a backdrop of systemic injustice and standing for a vision for global harmony. And being "woke" is just becoming aware of this very systemic injustice. I fail to see what the problem is with that.
I really like your content but please don't use AI, besides being ugly and producing weird results it's unethical and it I think it wouldn't cost much to find human-made images to illustrate what you want
That's why I love Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture series where he says the equivalent of: "turns out most of the galaxy uses mouth parts for hands, and we're the weird ones with hands not attached to our face."
He makes an excellent point 👌🏻
At least our various _”caveman”_ ancestors did use their mouths as a third hand for hide preparation and leatherworking.
Using mouth parts for hands is a terrible arrangement. You keep the vital parts of your body, the eyes and brains, too close with the tool manipulating appendage. A slip of the hand or accident might result in you getting blinded.
@@minoadlawan4583 counter point, elephants.
Arachnids are about as genetically distant from crabs as an arthropod can be and yet include many superficially similarities to crabs.
Mites, beetles, turtles. There seems to be a trend towards tank-like bauplans.
I was quite bothered when I learned not too long ago that crabs, lobsters and crayfish aren't actually related to spiders and scorpions at all.
Like WTH evolution? That's weirder than hyenas not being related to dogs.
(Yes yes I know not CLOSELY RELATED)
@@Aethuviel Well, that depends on what you mean by "not closely related." Both chelicerates and mandibulates are members of phylum Arthropoda. So they would indeed share a common ancestor (that would have presumably resembled a centipede).
Wouldn't e.g. the xenomorph from Alien have a humanoid body plan without being a mammalian vertebrate? They have an exoskeleton, different morphs have different number of limbs (the Queen has six, the facehuggers have eight), they don't give birth to live young, etc.
@anon6000 Thanks for the useful feedback! I did talk about "roughly humanoid", so less specific would also do. With "mammaloid" I really meant anything more advanced than a four-legged fish. See also my answer to
@magnolia1253 here.
Agreed, Humanoid as the term is generally understud in Sci-Fi, is a large hindlimbed bibedal Tetrapod with a vertically oriented body with grasping forelimbs topped by an articulated head. This dose not require them to be mamalian at all, and Reptilian, avian and even insect like forms could fit the definition, and many forms of mammalian life would fail to qualify.
@@Phrenotopia In the movie Alien IV, the xenomorphs have a body plan more reminiscent of theropods than humanoids.
There's this really tiny TH-cam channel by a palentologist by the name of Ponera with a video titled "why I hate anthropomorphic aliens" and he raises such a good point, if we have creatures on earth that are so extremely different to us that share dna with us, it seems extremely unlikely that creatures on alien world with entirely different environments and evolutionary pressures that share absolutely NO dna with us would have any resemblance to us.
You make three assumptions that can not be proven as of yet: alien worlds that can sustain life are entirely different, those evolutionary pressures are so different and no shared "DNA". There is new information available stating that DNA isn't the blueprints we've been led to believe. Therefore, i believe that useful biological structures are universal and will be utilized whenever possible. Whenever we actually find life outside of earth, it won't look too different from what we have already seen here.
@@duanegarrett4900 I make three assumptions based on liklihood. We are yet to find a planet with conditions similar to our own, so it life finds it's way in another planet, by pure mathematical probability, even if you remove the vast majority of planets due to their inhospitality towards life from the equation the chances are still high thst the planets conditions will not be the exact same as ours and therefore evolutionary pressures would be different.
And that's following your assumption that the lifeforms on other planets need to have conditions that can sustain carbon based life forms, which is not necessarily one we should be making.
Even if we had a form of coverergant evolution going on creating a similar body model to that of a mammal, there's absolutely no reason to think that it would result in the formation of a bipedal anthropomorphic shape. Our bipedal body plan is extremely rare throughout all of earth's history and largely developed due to our evolution of being arboreal and then moving environments away from the forest.
I was using dna in a more general sense, I'm sure you know what I mean when I use it.
Galaxy Quest was one of the few with a non-bilaterian protagonist, the octopoid Thermians. Even if they were clever enough to have a cloaking device to make themselves appear humanoid. The villain Sarris was a standard humanoid sci fi reptilian, so the writers seem to have exhausted their creativity on the octopoids.
Loved this, look forward to your humanoid Drake equation.
Same! Never thought about doing that, but it makes perfect sense!
Also the one for non-humanoid sapient aliens.
Yep, I also look forward to that.
There are 2 huge problems with equations of this kind.
We don't really know much about life on Earth, or the ecosystem or physics or anything else really. We are just scratching the surface and we are full with false assumptions.
And we have a sample size of 1. And even that one is mostly unknown.
@4124V4TA-SNPCA-x This is indeed my challenge. But a less linear approach may do the trick.
@@4124V4TA-SNPCA-xmy perspective was massively shifted when messing around with a game engine and making a simple game I tried to port to mobile. The monster I made had 8 legs, 4 heads, and 4 tails and a 4-part mouth. It had more than 50 "bones" controlling the rig and that was too much for the mobile client. While a tetrapod with a head jaw and tail can have a full-fledged rig with less than half that many and a minimal rig with a about a dozen bones. It made me realize that generally body plan complexity is inversely proportional to behavioral complexity. And apes even lost their tails. I don't think you'll start with anything more complex than a tetrapod, and to get complex enough for space flight I think you need two arms to make tool use practical enough to justify burning that much energy running a big brain - ours burns 1/5 of our calories, and thats probably down quite a bit since our brains used to be even larger.
Humanoids in fantasy worlds are more believable, as they are usually close relatives of humans that went down a different path due to natural selection, outbreeding, magic, divine intervention, or some mix of all of those. It is not that hard to imagine a world where multiple human-compatible species overlap and co-evolved and can and frequently do interbreed while maintaining distinct characteristics. That is just Paleolithic Earth.
Robert Asprin did a novel called "bug wars" where there's no humans. It's lizards vs insects. Robert Sawyer has great aliens. "Illegal Alien" had very believable aliens that weren't humanoid, as did "Calculating God." Both those were lots of fun.
I always figured it's because internal skeletons only evolved once on Earth, so "weird" aliens manage to look alien even tho it's almost ridiculous if you look at clams, octopuses, star fish, etc.
The "trace genetics back" idea was wonderfully handled in a novel called "Inherit the Stars," where in the near future we find a 50,000-year-old human skeleton on the moon and spend the novel trying to figure out how that could possibly be. (Not a bad solution, if a bit of a stretch.)
The problem with putting diverse races all into the same place in a medieval world where it takes a year to walk across the country should be obvious. Diverse star trek? Sure. Diverse sherwood forest? Not so much. Diverse hobbits where the only hobbit family to ever leave their shire is world famous? Probably not.
Yes, as I mentioned above, it's odd that every society at every stage of evolution happens to resemble an American college campus. Demographically unlikely, especially for an ancient and traditional society.
Well, some groups of cephalopods do have the analogue structure of a skeleton as an internal shell, but your comment is on point.
I wonder in our case what would happen if mollusks were the main group to evolve on land...
In my comic series I am attempting to make, all humanoid aliens are actually related to humans and perhaps have descended from a common ancestor.
Aí faz sentido.
Then, how does that work with all other life, whom we share so many fundamental treats and DNA with… it somehow implies those alien humans would be closer to us then monkeys or apes… some suspension of disbelief remains required for your premise, unless you invoke some higher force then basic evolution, that converges not only over space, but time as well, but don’t let that stop you!
so they're all basically long-lost colonies? nice
@@ivarbrouwer197 In the upcoming game _Exodus_ by Archetype Entertainment, all the "aliens" are descendents of human colonists (and in some cases, animals from Earth) evolved through genetic engineering over a span of time of 40, 000 years.
*EDIT:* sorry for my English. I'm Brazilian and my knowledge of that language is rusted.
That is probably the best way to have a galaxy filled with various humanoid aliens. Long lost relatives that have adapted and/or drifted away genetically from their roots. I have been considering retconning SW and ST with that in mind, though it would still be a huge stretch for those.
That genetic incompatibility would extend to diseases and digestion as well. And about half the phyla on Earth are worms, and a worm and a fish are both basically function-oriented tubes of meat, so lots of planets probably have analogues to them. Same with beetles, very successful body plan. To extend the mediocrity principle, if Earth is an average representative sample of a terrestrial world, maybe the same broad categories of life exist in roughly the same proportions on other terrestrial worlds. So given the long span of time they were around we would expect most planets to be crawling wth dinosaurs 😁
For me the issue with the assumption of humanoid aliens is the conflation of the humanoid body plan with sapience. An elephant or a crow with just a _little_ more dexterity and precision could plausibly have achieved the amazing technology of "throwing rocks" before any of the great apes and thus began hauling itself out of ecological perdition.
If you haven't seen Callum Stephen Diggle's work before, well it's at least worth a look, since his aliens are extremely nonhumanoid, though I'd argue he doesn't pay sufficient attention to basic ecogeographical principles like Gloger's rule or square cube law - most of them have absurdly greebled surface areas, far beyond any natural animal, and you can't actually deduce what niche or biome they evolved in from looking at them.
Oh yes... I always imagine what ants and termites would be able to achieve if they had the body plan of mantises or scorpions, with "manipulator limbs"...
Ants can only use their own mouths to manipulate objects, and are easily the second most technically advanced species on earth, being able to figure out technologies like agriculture, husbandry, antibiotics, food preservation, dams, urbanism, and, maybe, even a rudimentary form of "writing" with pheromones...
I strongly agree! At one time I wondered about speculative evolution of a cetacean that, for some reason, kept their hind limbs as manipulators as to reach human like levels of sapience. Also I hadn't heard of CS Diggle, but his work looks amazing! I especially like the Galji that are basically elephantoid with two trunks with hand-like ends. That really hits the point home!
@@Phrenotopia Yeah I do like his stuff - with reservations - but mostly it's great to see someone break the mold. As for cetaceans, suppose instead they came onto land again, walking on their forelimbs, and the flukes of the tail were exapted into a grasper. Like a cat wanting to be let out and back in on ten million year timescales haha
While beetles are highly succesful, I'd like to point out that arthropods, and with them exoskeletons, only evolved once. All animals with articulated exoskeletons are related, meaning there is no guarantee another planet has them at all. It's very likely life on most planets is soft-bodied with skeletons of any kind only found in sessile lifeforms. Shells seem likely to show up, though, as do teeth of some kind.
Beetles also hinge on wings, another rare feature that only evolved once in arthropods, hence no beetle spiders.
The issue is: Success does not mean it's likely to show up. At best it means it's likely to succeed if it ever shows up.
@@thomasrdiehl Yes, very good observations. I ponder these matters a lot and hope to be able to arrive at something cohesive the coming time.
Very nice. You should go deeper in the Drake equation analogy and animal morphology on earth. In fact it is a much better scenario than that of Drake's
Thank you! That is exactly what I intend to do, but making it a lot more sophisticated even.
I will be very happy to see these results published. Thank you.
One day I might :)
One great sci-fi series often overlooked for the amazing variety of its alien lifeforms designs is Farscape.
Sure, it has multiple alien species that are akin to space humans with makeup, but the main cast involves non-humanoid aliens brilliantly portrayed by puppet performers from the Jim Henson Company. Farscape is one of the only franchises that lets you empathize with a 3 feet tall frog-like alien despot, and an 8 feet tall symbiotic arthropod ship Pilot.
Never heard of this! Looks neat!
You are frelling right! It's not a stinky unimaginative dren like most. And full of gigeresque stuff. I will hope for the movie or spinoff, forever in developmental hell. At least it continues in the comics but still... I'll never forget it's premiere back in there days. And how many great designs and practical aliens were developed for 2 minutes of screen time in a single episode.
It's not the most scientific, but it is the most unique and imaginative and alien when it comes to TV to date.
Other great stuff was Babylon 5. With different sections on the titular space station with different atmospheric composition, temperature, atmospheric pressure and gravity for different species, most of which are non human. Oh course there main characters were humanoid for budgetary reasons on one hand and foot better connection one the other. But the gaim had to engineer a new subspecies to be able to make presence amongst three humanoid species and they still had to wear a high tech suit to accommodate their biology. And the encounter suits of more advanced aliens, including far future humanity. These are there two best live action series ever in my opinion. I wonder what will JMS achieve with it. I wouldn't be surprised if the reboot would drop suddenly in five years or so like how they did with the last movie.
But if you use mouthparts for hands, and hands evolve from legs, how do you chase your prey? What do you hold the thing you're biting with so it can't get away? Or what do you use to bring food to your mouth so you can consume calories faster? Evolution isn't random. Mouths evolved first when we were just simple tubes connecting mouth an anus. If using mouths to manipulate things was a good idea why didn't anything evolve to do that instead of adding unnecessary extra limbs? Closest is an elephant's trunk but elephants are limited by the lack of a second manipulating appendage to do more complex work so they'd probably never evolve to use tools.
@j.f.fisher5318 exactly, the universe is probably teeming with life. Intelligent, tool using life is likely rare tho
@@j.f.fisher5318
Right. Not like most amniots doing that already. Have you seen dogs and cats, dinosaurs including crows and ravens?
People born without feet or hands (if not, see Freaks!!!)?
To get onto fiction, do you know Pierson's Puppeteers?
Speculative Dinosaur Worlds? Etc. etc. there are so many possibilities.
_( Or elephants with 7 trunks, 7 mouths and 7 pairs of tusks? ;) )_
BTW elephants don't only have trunks. They have trunks, tusks and foreheads. Even legs to bring down trees, or fight if it is absolutely necessary and unavoidable...
6:51 the starwars universe uses the celestial beings known as the father son and daughter saying they seeded life all across the galaxy from what I remember unless it is now legends
From what I've heard, it's more efficient to have fewer legs when moving fast. Therefore, there are no fast centipedes. 4 legs are better than 6. 2 legged creatures almost certainly come from 4 legged.
Certain body shapes are simply more efficient. Therefore, what the creature looks like is determined by where and how it lives.
Tiger beetles run faster than any tetrapod. And why is running speed the measure of efficiency? Why not swimming, flying, burrowing, web spinning, etc?
@@jambec144
This applies when you have to run fast. If you want to climb, stand firmly, something else applies. Then many legs might be better.
As the creature grows larger, the legs must grow proportionally more to support the weight. Then there will eventually be a lack of space with many legs.
@@niklasmolen4753the computational complexity of multiple legs is still a major hurdle. Neural tissue burns a lot of calories and for example cephalopods have a brain for each leg.
@@niklasmolen4753 Just as I must ask why the ability to run fast is essential to intelligence, I must ask why being (how?) large is essential to intelligence? And I wonder how to explain large animals like the brontosaurus or elephant, which have large very appendages unrelated to locomotion?
@@j.f.fisher5318 I've seen this claim made before, and I wonder if there is any evidence in support of it. Is there any evidence that snakes gained intelligence when they lost their limbs? Is there any evidence that elephants lost intelligence when they evolved their trunks? A praying mantis might well be smarter than a centipede, but I'd bet that it has far more to do with mantids being visually oriented, and very little to do with limb number.
Nice, contrary to other video’s about this topic, this really gives this subject ‘hands and feet’. ;)
I see what you did there! :D
I don't know if anyone has posted it. But I'm pretty sure that in starwars legends or some documentary or something, they said that humans from Earth built a colony ship and when they used the image it launched them back in time and into the other galaxy and then they spread out everywhere.
In the ALIEN books, the xenomorph always adopts certain traits from the host it gestates in. And actually, that is something that happens in nature. Usually it is done to mimic other animals for survival. There are flies that look like wasps and non poisonous snakes with similar patterns to toxic ones. In the alien universe I would expect it's more of an environmental adaptation. If you are born into an alien environment, it makes sense to have a similar body plan to those who built that environment. I expect if a Xenomorph were gestated in an avian species, it would be born with wings.
A humanoid species is more likely the less specifically you define it.
The Star Trek humanoid species are just old folklore "races" transported into space: Vulcans are space-Elves, Klingons are space-Trolls, and Ferengi are space-Goblins.
I think Klingons were Mongols but in space! Later space samurai-orks. Nowadays I have no idea.
And Remans and Romulans are the dark elves and blood elves to the vulcan space elves.
Now this is the kind of content I thrive on
Actually, in the old Star Wars expanded universe, there is the explanation that some aliens are simply human subspecies (those biologically identical but with different colors, like the Chiss), and others may have evolved (tens of thousands of years isn't a very long time in evolution, but never mind) or engineered themselves to look more like humans, to fit into a society made by and for humans.
It doesn't explain the basic humanoid bodyplans though, and Star Wars was never really about speculative biology or even good worldbuilding.
Avatar has a different issue, because those are extremely humanoid creatures that stick out like a sore thumb out of what we've so far seen of the fauna, and unlike SW, Avatar at least tries to bring speculative biology onto the big screen.
The biggest reason for how common humanoids and humanesque (those that even have our faces and details, like Star Trek aliens and Na'vi) aliens are in pop culture, is of course because of familiarity. A casual audience simply wouldn't want to watch a movie about the birrin, arguably the best technological aliens in speculative biology.
YES!!! I CAN’T WAIT FOR THE VERTEBRATE RECIPE VIDEO!!!!!!!
Excellent video! I'm looking forward to the next one.
So, humans AND xenomorphs were BOTH created by the engineers, so they may share a common ancestor.
I find it extremely unlikely that alien life forms would much resemble us. We simply don't have fantasy enough to figure out what solutions nature could come up with on other planets.
I think the humanoid form would be one of the most common amongst intelligent life in the universe, for a couple of reasons.
1. I've worked both construction and on a refinery before, and its hard to imagine another body plan that's able to climb and maneuver and manipulate as well as a ours (arachnid is the only other one I can think of)
2. There are a number of other very intelligent species on Earth (dolphins, elephants, ravens...) but only intelligent apes eventually developed technology. I believe our body-plan facilitated that evolutionary step.
Of course, by humanoid, I mean 2 arms, 2 legs, and a head. Whether such a creature is mammalian or a vertebrate doesn't matter in this case.
Nada a ver. Seus argumentos são mais design inteligente e não evolução. O que precisamos para algo inteligente não é o plano corporal antropoide, masemvroscmsnipuladores e um cérebro capaz de inteligência complexa.
@@leobmesquita A brain can do nothing but think, it needs a body that can perform.
It has nothing to do with intelligent design.
I can't remember the name, but I seem to recall a scientist talking about this, and they suggested the 'two arms, two legs, one head' model might be likely to be followed for any other sapient tool-using alien we ever are likely to meet. Their arguments basically came down to the idea that such a form would be the best-optimized balance between several key elementary requirements: an energy-intensive brain, a versatile suite of directed senses, the ability to finely manipulate objects, and the ability to move around while manipulating things at the same time.
@@SteveMND i'm sure the aliens say the same thing about their own body plan 😁 "well obviously you need a buoyancy sac and flappers to move around, nerve nodes evenly distributed throughout the body for redundancy's sake, a sonar melon, and an adhesive gunk gland to carry things"
"...able to climb and maneuver..."
I can easily imagine a large number of abilities that could be useful to a technological species. What about the ability to fly, swim, burrow, weave webs, taste with your hands, see IR, manipulate more than two objects at a time, etc.?
"...only intelligent apes eventually developed technology."
I think that this is simply a case of having a single example of technology developing, and not evidence that only one way exists.
The xenomorphs should be asked how, outside of our normal thoughts, this could happen.
I love this kind of analysis. I often wonder if our own narrow dataset for evolutionary history is limited by the ecological context in which evolution took place. Namely, once one set of organisms develops a set of features that allow them to occupy a particular ecological niche, do they rapidly dominate those resources and make it impossible for other distantly related organisms to make the same transition. This seems to be true for the evolution of multicellular terrestrial photosynthetic organisms. Brown and red algae never followed green algae onto the land. Same with the evolution of multicellular heterotrophs, though countless diverse protist families flirt with the first stages of the process. This likely even extends back to the first cellular structures, where a first mover advantage changed the chemistry of the early biosphere enough to make a second independent cellularisation impossible. The situation of only having one biosphere to study is not that different to exoplanet studies where we only had one planetary solar system to analyse. Once our telescopes gathered more data on exoplanets we realised our solar system is pretty damn weird and not suitable for making general theories of planetary formation.
Yes, I feel very much the same way and think along similar lines...
I believe the human body is highly optimized for life on land, under gravity and an atmosphere, and so it seems reasonable to assume that life on other planets with similar conditions might have a comparable form.
The issue with using a Drake-like equation is the possibility of reconvergence. For example, one can at least imagine a clade with pentaradial symmetry becoming the first large encephalized creatures, walking along the bottom of the ocean and swimming using a mix of finned arms and jet propulsion, then proceeding to dominate the large land animal niches after being stranded in fresh water too long. At this point, they may change their walking gait due to the lack of buoyancy to help them balance or support their weight, modifying one limb for feeding and basic manipulation as an extension of the jaw, and the other four for propelling itself in a particular direction. You now have four-limbed, bilaterally symmetric land animals. If you accept convergence as a possibility then you need to consider every path that leads to a given outcome, not just the historical one.
Also evolution doesn't really want to make space-faring species. It just wnts to pass on genes and ants are great at that, or mice, or whatever. Whatever route evolution follows it doesn't need to end in something able to build a space ship. Most routes won't lead to that, and most planets with life will never become space-faring even in another 10 billion years or whatever. We didn't happen until Earth entered a cycle of glaciation which made constant repeated demands for rapid adaptation. It's possible our level of intelligence will never develop without such a protracted pressure to rapidly adapt.
This is similar to an idea I had, only the pentaradial animaloid used * two * arms as heads, and walked on three hind legs. ("Crutching" is a common form of locomotion for animals first evolving the ability to walk, and it's compatible with being a tripod. And having two head-claws seemed more sensible than having just one claw.) The animaloid started out with five eyes, but the two posterior eyes were eventually lost, resulting in a trinocular animaloid. The single fore eye became specialized for detailed color vision, and the two peripheral eyes became specialized in detecting motion.
Didn't you make a video like this a long time ago
This is the reboot
is horizontal gene transfer considered as a form of sex or just analog?
I think it's more of an analog, since technically, it is not a form of reproduction. The genes are shared between individuals and those individuals keep those traded genes if I am not mistaken.
Just analog because horizontal gene transfer is often done through retroviruses, not reproduction
... and in our quest for life elsewhere we seem to be only focusing on the likes of our own organic life, based on our own chemistry. How about a sentient life form based in something else besides Carbon? 😁
its a frequency thing, the elements required for carbon-based life are just more common in the universe overall
O pior nem é o fato de termos este viés chauvinista na busca por vida mas o fato de grandes agências como a NASA ou pesquisadores apostarem praticamente tudo em vida baseada em carbono + água como solvente + oxigênio como gás para metabolismo. Isso sim não faz sentido algum. É triplicar um viés.
I think that most of the same engineering constraints would still be in effect. You'd likely still end up with bilateral symmetry and a head/cephalothorax.
Carbon just meets all the criteria for life SO WELL. Other elements _can_ imitate it under VERY specific conditions but only under those conditions.
Further, carbon still leaves a lot of room for variety! I speculated upon the possibility of fluorocarbon-based life on an oxygen-poor planet close to a blue star. Above the melting point of sulfure, teflon (poly tetrafluoroethylene) is a soluble goo with reactivity comparable to parafins! Plants would use UV light to convert carbon tetrafluoride to teflon and fluorine. The fluorine reacts with the sulfur to make sulfur hexafluoride which is on the edge of thermally decomposing back into it's component elements at these temperatures. Animals inhale fluorine or SF6 to oxidize teflon back to CF4.
This is an irradiated, scorchinh hellscape devoid of water with blood-red seas of molten brimstone obscured by a corrosive, toxic atmosphere. This is _theoretically_ possible and within the realm of 'carbon-based life', but it requires such specific conditions: a blue star which won't last as long as a yellow or red one, a planet largely devoid of the element oxygen and enriched in sulfur and fluorine.
This is the issue with exotic life; it requires exotic circumstances!
Carbon-based Life as we see on Earth is the only kind of Life we know for certain is possible. So naturally, it's the default to work with, helping us limit ourselves in our speculations. I do have a few Xenobiology video concepts lined up. Most of the time, however, I don't feel it's very useful to go beyond that, even though it can be fun sometimes. No matter what, there are many good reasons for why carbon *is* the universal default. Any proposed alternatives, like Silicon, just don't really work when looked at more closely.
If we ignore the prequel retcons and "bug" Reinterpretation of the, xenomorph, we can assume they are not strictly biological. H. R Giger meant for them to be "biomechanical" As in, they are a weird blend of life and non life.
In the newest movie, the director wanted the xeno coccoon to "digest" material from the ships hull. Somewhat reafirms the idea that they are not necessarily following the rules of biology.
If the goo is more of a computer and or some form of nanotech... How far fetch would this theory be in your opinion?
very interesting video as usual! very interested to break down the evolution of vertebrates
but i gotta say, gen ai used in the the thumbnail and the video is not a good look, especially given the ease to find real original photos and your regular of good human made illustrations in your videos
tbf you could relax the humanoid definition to include centaur-like creatures, and creatures with erect posture by means other than a back bone specifically to allow the requirements to relax to just bilaterian with legs and some kind of rigid segmented body element
Ok, so this video is about the chances of aliens being humanoid, not specificaly inteligent aliens.
For inteligent aliens i would say there's a good chance for them being humanoid. Brains require a lot of energy, with Bipedalism being one of, if not the most energy efficient form of locomotion possible through natural evolution, they would probably walk on 2 legs.
They'd probably also have hands, since they'd need a way to dexterously handle tools in order to create technology (i don't think tenticles or something like an elephant's trunk or anything of the sort would be dexterous enough).
Assuming that they'd be simetrical they would probably have 2 arms and 2 legs since any more would cost more then it's worth.
Check out the game Ascendancy from 1995. It have great aliens designs.
*_Why are Aliens Humanoid?_*
Also known as, *_Why Are Extra Terrestrials Breedable?_* 😅
In Star Trek Enterprise, The first Vulcan/Human hybrid was Elizabeth. Her parents were T'Pol, (a Vulcan female), and Charles Tucker, (a Human male). It is explained in universe that this was only possible due to the intervention of 22nd century medical technology. This retcon attempted to answer the obvious objections from evolutionary biologists that alien hybrids make no sense. (Not to be crude but a lonely sheep herder producing a Human/sheep hybrid actually makes more biological sense!) But at least the writers are trying to make sense of this, although it still doesn't make any actual scientific sense.
The retconning is indeed wild 😄 In the same series we also get an explanation for the "smooth" Klingons of TOS. I should watch it again, though it's not my favourite series in the franchise...
I guess we could have something "humanoid" that isn't a tetrapod or vertebrate, like how mantises can walk as quadrupeds and use their front limbs as we use our arms, for example...
I would call the mantis bauplan centaur-like. And the centaur bauplan has evolved several times (mantids, mantisflies, assassin bugs, pelican spiders, scorpions, lobsters, elephants).
Or just call it centaurism instead of 'centaur bodyplan'... That's what the rest of evolutionists call it.
@@magnolia1253 Oh? Possibly, but a quick internet search yields no results.
@@jambec144 The phenomenon is called centaurism, I can also confirm
Yes, I agree here. A six-legged body plan I would not call humanoid, but perhaps centauroid and it might actually be more optimal than bipedal. My favourite sapient concept are Alex Ries's Birrin that have that aspect.
There's a decent discussion of this from almost 50 years ago by Larry Niven, regarding Superman and his incompatibility with Lois Lane, 'Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex'. Much has been said about Mr Spock as well. Star Trek got around that with interstellar seeding and directed evolutionary development. And it couldn't happen any other way, imo, not even convergent morphological evolution outside of our planet. It's about as likely as the plot of Galaxy Quest.
Scifi has different adaptive pressures than evolution. Old scifi strongly favored people in suits. Nowadays in games you can retarget animations for any humanoid on another humanoid rig so it's easier to make humanoid aliens.
On the other hand evolution has no incentive to make aliens that can build space ships. Evolution just wants to select species that can pass on their genes and ants, mice, and fish are great at that.
You'll only see evolution make something that can build starships, if it really really has to and has a species that's got what it takes to start from, otherwise extinction is a lot more likely than some of the more imaginative aliens I've seen out there.
On earth here's the candidates:
Primates have two hands and two feet so they can move around while doing complex manipulations of objects. Elephants have just one hand which limits their ability to manipulate stuff. Corvids can manage a combination of beak and foot manipulation which gives them some options. Cetaceans are really smart but no hands is holding them back. Cephalopods are really smart too but their commitment to brainpower is really over the top because tentacles are a lot more complex to control so each tentacle has its own brain. And brains burn a lot of energy which is probably a big part of why their intelligence has probably been plateaued for tens if not hundreds of millions of years.
@@j.f.fisher5318 It's not true of all cephalopods, but squid and octopus use the telomeres in their genes as long-term memory storage. They use RNA to write memories into their genes, and it has been shown that they can pass down memories to offspring. I think they are as close to alien as we have on Earth, because they think so vastly differently, and their environment is so different. The ganglial clusters they use for brains aren't even enough to decode their vision -- they have eyes almost identical to ours -- yet they still do it just fine. And still, they use the same basic twenty amino acids as everything else on Earth, despite there being hundreds of thousands of possible aminos to work with. And we have only just recently mapped out the proteins possible with the twenty we have.
We have no idea what is possible in aliens. And even still, you stick to very materialistic viewpoints of intelligence. Dolphins are far smarter than ourselves, whales likely beyond us in ways we cannot perceive. We still lie to ourselves as a characteristic of normal health. There is no possible way we have the mental vision to foresee anything beyond our immediate understanding yet. We are too young a species, too maladapted, too competitive, and insane by the rational standards we hold ourselves accountable by.
All your assumptions are farts in the wind.
Star Trek gave us Organiians. Hortas, Tholians, and many other non-humanoid alien life forms.
It's hilarious that most people need a character to be humanoid to empathize. I'm autistic to the point that I'm the other way around 😅
Prefiro também alienígenas não-humanóides
yeah, i've never really understood the relatability argument. relatability is about the spark of intelligence in the eyes, it's about something behaving with intent. if people can empathize with the pixar lamp they can empathize with my stupid sea star rhinoceros alien design haha
When reading scifi as a kid, I always loved it when the story was given from the alien's perspective.
@@jambec144Xenofiction is best fiction.
Definitely autistic and I can relate to snails better than most humanoids.
If there are spacefaring aliens most if not all will be roughly humanoid (bipedal, two arms, and head). Maybe on a high-g world maybe a centaur-like species but I'd still expect evolution to favor small tetrapods to start with when the square-cube law doesn't care about weight all that much so probably not. And my issue with something like the drake equation is that evolution isn't random.
I'd been a fan of non-humanoid aliens until I was optimizing a hobby game project I'd made to work on mobile and having issues. It was a horror game with an 8-legged, 4 tailed, 4-headed monster.
The problem was it had too many computational "bones" and animating it was bogging down the game on my phone's limited resources. Basically 3 bones per limb times 16 limbs was 48 bones while a humanoid character only needs 10 bones for a minimal rig, or something in the range of the 20s for a fairly sophisticated rig not including facial animation. Roghly half the complexity or a bit more if fingers were added. And the monster didn't have anything like fingers in return for all that extra complexity.
Note that apes even gave up their tail on the way to our more complex behaviors. Coincidence?
That made me realize behavioral complexity tends to be inversely correlated with body plan complexity. Spiders are mostly solitary. Insects can be communal but their basic behaviors are still simple but build complex group behaviors. Like piling objects just takes a simple robotic behavior that pushes things around with less than half a dozen steps but combined a bunch of ants can make a pile of dirt.
Basically more limbs wastes computational resources. Neural tissue is hungry and not particularly useful until you get to tool use, and high calorie requirements reduce odds for survival. As an extreme example, cephalopods are highly intelligent but have a brain for every leg.
Four legs is the simplest stable walking layout so that's what evolution will probably end up selecting. Literal bones are good for muscle attachment and simplify the computational load for each limb by limiting joints and range of motion (as opposed to cephalopodsneeding a brain for each tentacle). Exoskeletons are probably too weak if the examples of earth arthropods like ants being so ridiculously weak when compared to animals with an endoskeleton using the square-cube law are typical (if ants were even dog-sized they'd be too weak to even move).
The most important factor in the development of intelligence though isn't body plan but the development of a socially-driven intelligence "arms race" between members of a species competing for food and mates. This is seen in all terrestrial and avian species with high intelligence reaching the base level needed to start using tools.
Once there, if one doesn't have a body plan that can evolve separate limbs for moving and manipulating things there's a limit to how much utility one can gain from tool use and intelligence probably plateaus at whatever is sufficient to keep up in social competition.
Of course the reasons why scifi tends to have humanoid aliens is totally different. Mostly because its easier. From aliens with brow ridges to retargeting humanoid animations in games.
I've seen this claim made before, and I wonder if there is any empirical evidence for it. Is there any evidence that snakes gained intelligence when they lost their limbs? Is there any evidence that elephants lost intelligence when they evolved their trunks?
Yes, an 8-legged, 4 tailed, 4-headed monster isn't all that efficient. But I don't see how this by itself implies that a snake would be rather brainer than an elephant. Computational complexity resulting from limb numbers, if an issue, is clearly swamped out by other considerations.
@@jambec144it isn't so much that things get brainier, but they get more efficient. They can keep the same intelligence and burn less calories so they're less likely to starve. Modern humans have significantly smaller brains than humans 10k years ago, for example. But more broadly there are no arthropods having more than 6 legs that are social and even with the intelligence of cephalopods, very few are social. And there are fewer than 1/10 as many 8-legged arthropods as 6-legged. It isn't so much brainless as behavioral complexity and adaptive diversity.
there are quite a few animals that demonstrate intelligence, tool use, and culture. but no animals apart from humans that have had civilization, not that we can see in the archeological record. Now you could argue that they didn't have some essential thing that humans have, but who's to say there isn't entirely different ways to get there. Instead, lets look at how many distantly related intelligent animals there are (such as crows, primates, octopus) there are clearly a few impressively intelligent animals, but so many more that are not intelligence, that it seems to me the jump between normal and intelligent is not as impressive as intelligent and civilization. although, it's possible that it's not actually difficult, it's a question of is it advantageous? would crows or octopus benefit from having a civilization?
Every form of life that you find on earth is plausible on any other planet, but as far as space, fearing aliens, goes, only aliens, with possible thumbs could achieve the level of sophistication. It takes to build a spaceship. Mammalian, lizards, amphibians, and at a stretch birds would be the most common candidates. All strictly aquatic life would be non-candidates as spacefaring creatures, because they would never invent chemistry, metallurgy, or glassmaking. Without those disciplines, you wouldn’t even get to making basic machinery.
Check this out , Curiosity rover took a picture of a Martian statue and more. She's on my channel and where in the SOL she is. She looks human. If you saw her you would wonder what country she's from instead of planet.
because that first race that looked like the dominion seeded the galaxy with tier own DNA remember,
There is a Theorie in Trek Fandom that interspecies Reproduction (with the Exception of Bajoran-Cardassian Pregnancies) is done artificially.
Humanoids make special effects easier.
Big Game James Worthy is a Klingon.
the simple answer is humans are humancentric
👍
...if it can happen on Earth, why can such a thing not evolve somewhere else? Is Earth something special, like religions believe? So I do think, that there are beings like us and other intelligent beings with completely different body plans in this Universe and in many other Universes, that support material structures...
@ 7:00 Why does biological realism count then? I mean, what are the odds that every society everywhere, at any point in time, happens to be in the process of sudden racial admixture? More than that, why should the demographics always resemble those of a contemporary college campus? If racial realism is rejected, then why bother with other aspects of creating a realistic world? Why bother with costumes, settings, and even constructing whole languages?
... I don't know if I'm for or against this argument... So... I'll just stare at you until one of us feels uncomfortable.
@@magnolia1253 Discomfort can be a good sign. Embrace it.
To begin with, races are social constructs and it's more useful to speak of phenotypes, but even then we need to apply a lot of care. So with that in mind, "biological realism" or "race realism" don't really count, no. What *is* real are clinal variations in melanin levels, bone structure and hair structure over geographic distances between interbreeding local populations.
Tolkien actually did elaborate a bit about geographic variations of different human groupings, so one could say these aspects of his world-building legacy are being wiped away by modernity. However, if fantasy races were to be made more realistic, then dwarves, hobbits, elves etc would need to have phenotypes very different from humans. In reality, all these races are assumed to confirm to Northern European phenotypes with just some tweaks added like e.g. pointy ears etc.
Referring to "contemporary college campus" actually hits the nail on the hammer, because it reflects one reality of what we're dealing with here: These universes are basically projections of their respective creators' immediate environment. Fantasy races have roots in Northern European folklore, so naturally these near-human beings are transmutations of local phenotypes. And even science fiction more often than not reflects the societies of their creation at their specific time slices. Early science fiction crews are predominantly white. Even Star Trek, though it attempts to represent a united Earth still more reflects current Western societies than a global one. With 4 centuries of increasing admixture these crews would actually be expected to look quite different.
The point is that in the end, all these attempts at purported "realism" are not really worth it in compared to the benefits of inclusion and diversity. You get to pick the best actors and also engage the full spectrum of your audience more.
This is almost a video script...
@@Phrenotopia The "races are a social construct" claim is contestable. Not only does a sizeable minority of geneticists within the West contest it, but it is a minority position outside of the West. Unfortunately, TH-cam doesn't allow for links, but you can see my defense of the biological reality of race at Quora (Jamie Bechtel's answer to "In your opinion, does race have a genetic or scientific basis?")
As for demographic realism being rejected for the sake of inclusion, I would ask why this only applies to Europeans? Why isn't it applied to fantasy settings based on East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, pre-colonial America, etc? Nobody is harmed by an all Chinese cast. Why/how is anyone harmed by an all European cast?
No offense is intended, but I feel that cognitive dissonance is being buried here for the sake of a political stance. If nothing else, you can surely see how those who don't share your political motives would find the absence of demographic realism to be a tad jarring?
And if one absolutely must use fantasy to message (verb), then create something new, rather than betray Tolkien's vision. Artistic revisionism is no better than historical revisionism. People from all over the world were already able to enjoy his works before "inclusivity" became a concern. Woke messaging in no way improves his works.
EDIT I: I’d be completely open to seeing black Harad, or maybe Asiatic Rhûn. Maybe the blue wizards could have had dark skin. And maybe a female warrior character could have been introduced, rather than completely transforming Galadriel into something unrecognizable (and, it would appear, central to all events in the Second Age). And of course, I quite agree with you that Dwarves and Elves should look rather alien (although I doubt that Tolkien would have agreed with that).
EDIT II: I'm a conlanger, and I'm often surprised by the negative passion conlanging can generate. There was a rant I once saw somewhere by someone who hated the fact that people spend time trying to master eg. Klingon or Quenya. He suggested that fantasy worlds simply use endangered languages like Navajo. While I'm all for preserving endangered languages, I don't see why it must be at the cost of someone's artistic vision. But that seems to be part of the evangelical Woke spirit of the times: prioritizing identity politics over art and truth.
@@jambec144 To be clear, I wrote "raceS are social constructS" both in plural, to take away some of the ambiguity of terms here, even though some still remains. I don't like the phrasing "race is a social construct", because people often regard "race" as synonymous with "phenotypic variation", which of course is real and observable. But that "races" are social constructs is without question. To begin with, all taxonomic categories, or attempts at those, are.
As someone with a background in taxonomy, I know that even species and higher taxa are social constructs, but these are at least far more qualified than races are. They are arrived at through scientific consensus, which is a social, intersubjective process. But whereas valid taxa are qualified, human races are clearly not. Of course, the clinal variation of certain phenotypical characteristics is real, but the categorizations imposed on that variation are highly arbitrary. And not only arbitrary, races are ultimately based on early modern Western ethnic hierarchies that came to serve a specific and very insidious purpose, that I hope I don't need to elucidate. For that and more reasons, I cannot really take any attempt to make these stale old categories relevant again seriously and even regard this with heightened suspicion. I recommend you sharpen your scepticism as well in this.
Of course, a different world-building could have been done by paralleling real life Earth's phenotypic-geographic variation. It is being done in the Game of Thrones world, if I'm not mistaken, as an example. Tolkien did a little of that too, though imperfectly so, but he never fully fleshed it out, probably because his aim was to create a new specifically Anglo-Saxon lore. As his legacy has become democratized, the result is that people want to feel included in his wonderful universe. I am sure that, understanding the deeper background, he would support this, being staunchly anti-racist. Besides, I see little difference between introducing black hobbits to black Vulcans. Neither make a lot of sense to begin with and all we need to do is suspend our disbelief a little further. And again: You get a wider pool of excellent actors to choose from!
To be honest, I don't much care for your lamentations over greater inclusivity and diversity in Western media. No offense, but if I'm not mistaken, more than a dedication to "demographic realism", as you start to call it now, or "artistic legacy" I sense a level of indignation over what you seem to feel is "unfair". You appear to gloss over that in the Western world we have a long history of exclusion, still ongoing, that we actively need to compensate for. So absolutely there is harm being done by exclusionary casting. Star Trek led the way here, even if imperfectly so. Need I remind you of the impact that casting of Nichelle Nichols as Uhura Nyota made in the US? This is by no means "political messaging" as you try to pidgeonhole it. It is being socially responsive and responsible against a backdrop of systemic injustice and standing for a vision for global harmony.
And being "woke" is just becoming aware of this very systemic injustice. I fail to see what the problem is with that.
I really like your content but please don't use AI, besides being ugly and producing weird results it's unethical and it I think it wouldn't cost much to find human-made images to illustrate what you want