These concerns are actually how I imagine xenophobes get their growth bonus in stellaris and similar games that give the same general buff to being xenophobic. It is not that they are growing faster, it is they do not bother with what other species need for the most part. The Drs.* are trained for one species, and food is for one species, the infrastructure etc etc.
I love that each sentence has its own basically totaly random clip from a totlally random movie game or show which still manage to convays the point at each given time just perfectly.
They showed some scenes from Star Wars, and I thought, Star Wars just ignores everything he mentioned. They have a basic language, and if not, C3PO is always there, theycan all mostly survive on the same atmosphere and ecosystems, though the book From a Certain Point of View mentions that the Bith hate Tatooine.
I like the inclusion of flaps to cover the ears in Babylon 5's breathing masks. Good low-budget acknowledgement that atmospheric differences go beyond just breathing.
Magnetic field is also a factor that I've not seen scifi really covered. While human doesn't really have interaction with ambient magnetic field, an avian species might as it might disorient them.
Or imagine if such a species were to try to co habitate with a species that naturaly emit fluctuating magnetic fields for their own communication and movement. It would be as if they were constantly screaming in your ear!
depends on the human. There's a tribe of humans somewhere that has an innate ability to know what direction they're facing at all times, it's theorized that it's something that they're sensitive to because they don't use the terms "left" or "right" but rather will give cardinal directions. Such as "show me your North hand" they would mean the hand on the North facing side of your body... really fascinating and begs the question, do we all have this ability but it's undeveloped because we don't use it? We all (or are) those friends with an innate sense of direction.
He lives in a flatland and got up with the sun, and went to bed with the moon. You wouldn’t have the same issue with cardinal directions because you would see it constantly.
A magnetic field is essential for cell mitosis. Without it human life, and Terran life in general, would not be possible. If the field is too weak cells simply won't divide. If it is too strong they get fried. It would be a major concern.
From scratch a vet is probably a better start point for a cross species medic, already familiar with more environmental considerations and body plans as well as not always having the perfect tools / environment to work in.
Xenomedicine would I feel focus on chemistry biological theories and a whole lot of troubleshooting with massive reference libraries. A good space doctor would have to be able to look just about everything up.
@@cliffordsherman7702 I would agree with that being the ideal, perhaps even leaning on a neural interface or AI for rapid information downloading. But if there was need for a medic with minimal additional training a vet is likely to be a better choice.
I came here to mention this.🙂 It came up in a 1980s Star Trek book that had Robert April commanding the Enterprise, and delivering a shipload of diplomats from many species. The chief medical officer was trained as both an M.D. and a veterinarian.
Yes! That's one detail I loved in Star Trek: Enterprise. Dr. Phlox was always tending to his menagerie of animals from various worlds, showing the kind of researcher mindset needed for a doctor going into space for the first time.
story-wise, I could see a veterinarian also being controversial - "you brought a doctor for your animals to treat me? am I so below you, human?" plus there's the considerations that alien biology might well be extremely different - a vet might have an advantage in terms of different body plans, sure, but on the very low level, every single (Earth) animal has a biology that will be quite similar to humans, and very different from that of aliens. For emergency and trauma medicine, they could maybe be useful, but for anything complex? Hit and miss, at the very best.
That's what I appreciated about the first Men In Black movie, they actually talked about aliens being on a different time schedule than humans. Zed said "it's a 37 hour day, you'll get used to it, or have a psychotic episode.". Another thing that I don't see alot of sci-fi talking about is atmospheric pressure. There's no way that an alien who breathes methane could live in the same kind of environment that a oxygen-nitrogen breathing alien lived in.
Funnily enough if you break down the 37 hours into thirds it isn't too bad of a work schedule. 12 hours in the office, 12 hours for yourself and 12 hours of sleep in a day and a half Earth time. If you sleep in 6hr blocks you can have what feels like a full day off between shifts if you sleep before and after a work shift.
One of my favourites in Babylon5 by G'Kar: "It's an earth food, they are called Swedish meatballs. It's a strange thing, but every sentient race has its own version of these Swedish meatballs! I suspect it's one of those great universal mysteries which will either never be explained, or which would drive you mad if you ever learned the truth."
@@reliantncc1864 Except with Hitchhiker's it's the name that sounds vaguely similar, and the actual drink varies. From Chinanto/mnigs, which is water served slightly above room temperature, to Tzjin-anthony-ks, which is so potent it kills cows at a hundred paces.
The Orville has some other great and funny practicality moments, like the Moclans being able to eat a wide variety of solid matter and the cigarettes; not the crippling smoking addiction they get, but that fact the first thing Klyden does is eat one out of the curiosity of it's taste.
Futurama takes that Doctor point to hilarity with Dr. Zoidberg. He’s probably an excellent Doctor, knowledgeable in treatments and surgeries for numerous Alien Species. It just so happens Humans weren’t in his curriculum…
I don't remember which season it was, but one episode brought this up: apparently, Dr. Zoidberg genuinely is a university-educated doctor, and his expertise helps the crew save the day. It's just that his doctorate is in _art history,_ not medicine.
Throughout the series, it's implied that he is actually a brilliant physician when it comes to aliens, and he's simply out of his area of expertise with humans. For example, in season 6, episode 18, Mom tells Zoidberg that he could have been a millionaire with his own research lab if he had worked for her.
Nobody will mention White’s “Sector General” series of novels and short stories? They deal with a space hospital that treats humans as well as a bewildering array of non-human extraterrestrial species; the place is a huge space station that has to provide environments and supplies for a wide variety of physiologies (oxygen, chlorine, methane or superheated steam breathers; species that live in temperatures ranging from -80° C to + 250° C; a huge variety of biochemical barriers; translation and communication issues; the problem of being able to treat someone not of your own species…). It touches upon all the points mentioned in the video! I cannot recommend this series enough.
The amount of times mass effect was or could have been referenced here. Mass effect barely scratches the surface of the practicalities of multispecies habitation, but it still puts in more effort than most.
That's why I always liked Dr.Franklin from Babylon 5. He left Earth to learn about other species and it took him years to get all the information and practical experience
I once designed an alien species that was similar to the Velociraptor from Jurassic Park. But they communicated with color changing skin like a Cuttlefish. They have underdeveloped hearing since the planet had constant wind noise so sound is a poor form of communication. Changing a core concept of communication can have a significant effect on how a species develops and interact with others.
Blindess for example goes from a serious disability that people can live fulfilling lives with to something that cuts you off from the world almost entirely.
That sounds like an excelent plot for an episode of a sci-fi show where that species and protagonists have trouble communicating until the protagonists get a painter involved.
Crazy. In a short story of mine there were these raptor-like aliens, except they communicated with four-limbed sign language. Meanwhile, another species were like cephalopods changing patterns on their skin. Your combination is more truly alien I think.
Even just having a human who is mute has provoked some fascinating thoughts for myself about how they might communicate. There’s even variations in how mute someone can be.
I like Arrival because the how to communicate was pretty much the plot line altogether. Once the language barrier was crossed the final "power" so to speak was unlocked.
My favorite example of these issues is from Project Hail Mary by Andy Wier. It covers all these difficulties in a way that makes for a great story just with the two main characters learning how to interact.
This was exactly where my mind went first. PHM was a great example of the complexities of having two species with wildly different gravity and pressure needs. I also thought about how it affects the end. When researching my second novel, A Hardness of Minds, I found out that dolphins can hold and send a 'mental image', including translating images of object they've only seen into the sound of that image returned through sonar. So the aliens under the ice moon of Europa, and pass images around to each other naturally.
Except for the fact that PHM handwaved the communication away by having a non-linguist create a translation device together in a few days. It's unlikely a trained linguist could pull that off in months.
@@DocXango Well, it's more that the Eridian form of communication just so happens to be in a form that computers can identify and parse effectively. And he creates the device only to record the sounds, he still spends weeks learning it himself full-time
It also points out a basic issue with medical or biological assumptions; finding a comatose(-equivalent) Eradanian with it's digestive organs sitting on the floor nearby wouldn't be as much a cause for concern as a human in a similar state.
i totally forgot about that movie! Drifting interstellar ecumenopolis is really cool as a concept, but sadly you need to get people to CARE about enough of the parties involved, and it's a shame the movie failed on that.
The movie did an okay job but I feel the original graphic novel was much better at showcasing the highly varied environments and cultures of Point Central. The station also makes recurring appearances in other volumes.
One of the species in my setting comes from an extremely cold planet, where their "warm" equator is equivalent to Earth's Canada or Siberia. As such, they don't have sweat glands and have to wear suits with cooling tech to walk around on Earth. To appear more friendly to humans, they emote with LED animated masks, some individuals using more eccentric animations than others.
They're warmest place is Canada... and they have no sweat glands. I take it they use those suits on their homeworld too since they'd die in a Canadian summer. Edit: Source I'm Canadian.
Stargate SG-1 was a good illustration of the translation problem. They dealt with different languages frequently early on, but there's only so many times you can do that before it goes all the way from fascinating to annoying, so in the end they just went with everyone speaking English. Zootopia / Zootropolis does a rather nice job of showing many species of different sizes, shapes and environmental requirements living together.
SG-1 and Atlantis also did a pretty solid job of addressing the medical side of things. It's made very clear that the Tau'ri have some of the best doctors in the business, and they have ready access to a ton of spectacular equipment, but Dr.s Fraser, Beckett, Lam, and Keller were straight up about how they're regularly reduced to just feeling their way through how a given nonhuman's biology works, by blind trial and error as often as not.
@@tba113 Blind trial and error was pretty much how the medical profession mastered human biology; what happens if I poke this, how does this react to heat, why is this squidgy, why isn't this squidgy, what happens if I attach some cables and a generator to it?
Honestly, I could stand to see more of those kind of plots in SG-1, I feel like the later Unas-centric episodes were the closest SG-1 had to its own "Darmok". I mean, that's what Daniel is supposed to be there for, after all.
Michael Shanks (Daniel Jackson) was such a valuable character because of this. He was often required to figure out translations under a severe timetable, and the show made it make sense while keeping the tension high.
@@eskreskao The 'Enemy Mine' episode of season 7 was always one of my favourites for this reason. The fact Daniel brings an intermediary along to negotiate is grounded in real-life practices and their problems communicating ('Right, why would you guys know what spaceship is...') and having to reduce concepts to their very basics to understand each other.
I will always remember Babylon 5's "A Distant Star," and Sheridan's exchange with Ivanova about how accomodating an alien ambassador's request might "smooth any ruffled feathers." After a moment's pause, he then asks if the ambassador HAS feathers.
I’ve always felt like it would have to be unpleasant for species that have to wear specific breathing-equipment in earth-like atmospheres (Like the Kel-Dor in Star Wars or Zaranites in Star Trek) to have to spend the majority of their time wearing them. Imagine having to wear an entire gas mask all-day everyday and you can only (maybe) take it off in your bedroom.
You'd think that that would be horrible, but I've worked jobs before where I had to wear respirators for the whole 40hr work week and do Darth Vader impressions with my coworkers, and then covid happened and we had to wear masks even outside of work if you weren't home. You can get used to it. Then again not everyone could get used to wearing covid masks in the end, so I guess it depends on the person.
Early Star Trek handled the idea of different air requirements briefly with the Benzites in Star Trek TNG with the "inhalers" they wear on their chests. the Benzites were seen twice in TNG; Wesley's opponent in Starfleet Academy entrance exams in "Coming of age" and his brother Mendon who was an officer exchange candidate in "A matter of honor". As for medical supplies, that was addressed in TOS! In "Journey to Babel", when Ambassador Sarek was stabbed, McCoy tells us the ship hasn't got enough T- (that's T-negative) Vulcan blood in ship's supplies to do surgery to save his life. Spock has the same T- type, but only an experimental drug that amplifies blood cell production in Rigellians and other species similar to Vulcans gives him the ability to produce enough blood for the transfusions... at risk to his life at that.
@@IffyJottere There was also the TNG episode where Worf refused to donate blood to save a captured Romulan and he was the only one on board with compatible cells. Crusher couldn't replicate anything as they didn't have experience with Romulan biology.
One of my favorite examples of extreme differences in atmospheric requirements were the Tholians from Star Trek Enterprise, They had to live in a super heated atmospheres of at least 200 degrees Celsius, anything below 150 and they would literally freeze solid and shatter like an ice sculpture.
Ahh, yes, IIRC torture scenes with them. After an encounter with Enterprise, I could see why they were so Xenophobic. Original series, wasn't there a rock blob monster that accidentally killed many humans that were mining it's food and eggs?
The Star wars complete cross-section books actually have some fun and interesting details regarding this in the pages for the galactic senate and home one, like the fact that the offices of the senator from Dorin are pressurised and filled with the same atmospheric mix as their homeworld so they don't have to have their breathing equipment on, or that the Mon Calamari/Qurren offices have bathing pools to rehydrate themselves, or that home one and other mon calamari ships originally had several important passageways completely filled with water for ease of travel by the mon calamari and when they were refit for used by the rebellion these passageways had to be drained and have flooring and stairs installed so that non aquatic species could use them and several important interfaces we're only designed to be used by mon calamari meaning they had to be replaced with more universal control systems for other species to be able to use them properly and they weren't properly standardised until the New Republic created the MC80B
>several important interfaces we're only designed to be used by mon calamari meaning they had to be replaced with more universal control systems OOH this explains why so much of the tech is so analouge and chunky. Making it more ergonomic would be to favour a single species.
Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series has quite a few interesting examples. An interstellar civilization of humans is complicated enough, but what if you add in spiders, ants, AI, octopi, crows and even bacteria?
I have some arachnophobia, so reading Children of Time was a strange aspect for me. But interestingly I found the spiders to be far more interesting than the Humans. It is important to know that spiders communicate primarily through string tensioning, they are able to accurately interpret subtle vibrations through their webs and use it as a full fledged communication system. But when a web is not available, they communicate through hand signals and body language that is just as effective, but completely alien for us Humans.
Moreover, vets pretty much only treat mamals and reptiles, a very small and closely related set of animals. Considering the huge proportion of genetic and metabolitic mechanisms we share with pretty much anything that lives on earth and the unlikelyness of an independant evolution taking the same root (I’m not saying they won’t necessarily don’t have the same basic building blocs, chemistery being the same everywhere, but for example, the way dna is translated to proteins is both almost universal on earth and apparently totally arbitrary), we can only imagine how different an actual alien would be.
@@franck3279 ALSO fair. Even assuming they have the same biomchemistry as us, which I don't find too unlikely, they would look completely different. the difference between treating a fish and a bird are enormous, and while we don't think about it, dogs, humans, and cats are pretty similar.
Spoilers for Project Hail Mary: I loved that book because its clear Andy Weir considered each of these challenges when developing his alien life form and decided to set the bar at highest level of difficulty when solving for each, which makes their partnership/friendship feel all the more remarkable. The only real 'gimme' is that they both communicate at coincidentally similar vocal ranges which means that they can eventually talk and understand one another like Han and Chewie without Google translate.
The book discusses that - Rocky theorises that their hearing ranges overlap in the 'good for hearing danger' range of sounds made when things are banging together or a predator is approaching. And also notes that his own range of both hearing and vocalisation goes a lot higher that humans. Presumably he just speaks really deeply when using English.
I remember a Timothy Zahn book, Spinneret I believe, that had an aside that one of the space fairing races was aquatic, and as such their space craft were much heavier due to their "atmosphere" being water. This meant that each new ship launched from their planet was prohibitively costly, so they were trying to get the super material from this planet to make a space elevator.
Always love stories involving multiple alien species coexisting (or at least tolerate others).💚 I hope someday you review "Knights of Sidonia". Its my favorite. Another one of my favorite stories about multiple alien species is the Saga comics that discusses the dangers and difficulties (and possibly futility) of multi-species relations.
Apparently the difficulty of communication between dissimilar species was one of the larger ideas in Knights of Sidonia (to the point of naming a place after Stanislaw Lem, who to my understanding really dug into that concept in his own works), though it wasn't very well displayed until the very end. While the series is very soft-scifi in many respects, it stands out to me in how it revels in displays of megastructural engineering. Other sci-fi has huge ships and stations, but none I've seen communicate that scale quite as well as the "Sights of Sidonia" and the shows of how such an environment is incredibly dangerous such as how most clothing is equipped with tethers to prepare for the often-deadly emergency burns.
Two examples of this: First - Morn from DS9 was bald because he has pure Latinum is one if his stomachs. Something we don't know because we've never seen another member of his species. Second - the episode 9f Babylon 5 were Ivanova had to make a deal with an alien and the agree on contracts with sex. Ivanova was not down for that until someone pointed out that different species have different rules for things. She gets the idea that this guy has not idea what human sex is like, so she makes up some weird dance and calls it sex.😂
While never explicitly explored, the Pak'Ma'Ra, where well known to be complicated to exist around. Not only is their food inedible to other species (it has to be regurgitated), they live in a different atmosphere and their excrement is outright lethal to other species, to the point they have a completely separate waste disposal system dedicated exclusively to them.
It was a good job that the alien didn't have a line like 'We have downloaded your Internet for the past 200 years and 99.99% of it refers to sexual interactions'.
The spiders in Children of Time are noteworthy. Even though they share a common genetic ancestry with Humans, their evolution lead them down very differently ways of thinking and communicating.
Excellent video, as always; it also reminded me of Discovery, the gift that keeps on giving, sharing the valuable info that Enterprise crew are basically eating shit. Cheers!
There was the Pac'Mora, who didn't require special quarters, and seemed nice enough, but their eating habits made everyone else wish they did. To imply they stunk would likely be an understatement
@@davidconner-shover51 Ah yes, carrion eaters weren't they? Which I imagine would be something else other species could dislike them for due to societal or religious practices. If for instance you had very particular rituals about how a body is treated after death, as some religions do, then you might not want to think that the neighbours might eat said body. Still, it makes sense that a species could have that as part of their diet, it is an important ecological niche on Earth after all, the things that eat dead organisms help prevent disease and such from spreading.
my favorite example of multispecies habitation is in the book Project Hail Mary. the alien in the book requires an extremely dense and hot atmosphere. to be able to go aboard the human ship it first has to build a series sealed tunnels and rooms for it to exist inside of. these tunnels connect to the aliens docked ship to provide the correct pressure and temperature. the slien also does not see using light so the interior of its ship is in constant pitch darkness. it akso cannot see 2d monitors like tvs so they gave to come up with display systems tgat work in 3d to be able to view tge same media as humans etc. its a fascinating book!
On the matter of language, In my homebrew setting, there is an empire with different species that can't make all the same sounds, and one octopus like race that communicates with patterns of colors instead of sound. The many languages were becoming an issue for a unified empire, so they created a language based on abstract units I call sylunits. Thus, each sylunit can have a different encoding for each race. Thus the majority of the language needs learned once, and then just learn each species' particular encoding. Thus one sylunit might be "cho" for humans, a short nasally bark for another, and a flash of blue and gold slanted straight stripes for the octopus people. Currently I am working on the actual conlang.
For language differences, I love the 'Children of..' series by Adrian Tchaikovsky! The last book especially goes through the difficulties being overcome between 4 species (well technically 5 but we don't count Avana Kern since she is a literal God AI) with completely different ways of speaking (octopi = visual colours represented on skin, arachnids = vibrations through foot stomps, humans and corvids = speaking though in different ways)
Well, former god. Her worshipers gave up on religion when they actually met their former deity and found her not only rather less then omnipotent, but also an arrogant, egotistical, impatient ass.
I read a book where a human ship was visited by a delegation from a multi-species xeno-ship. The preperation (especially the atmosphere demands) were extensive to the point another delegate had to be sent in advance in order to mediate and ensure all the requirements are met. The delegate was of a species that communicates using pheromones. The humans had a translation bot, but it worked as best as the first version of Google translate.
The Temperature aspect does seem to be one good reason why Starfleet Crews tend to be predominantly of one species or another. An all-Vulcan crew's ship probably has an internal temperature closer to the warmth of Vulcan, while a crew of Andorians will prefer a colder atmosphere inside their ships. As Humans seem to be at a good middle-ground, it's likely the reason why Human-dominant crews see the most non-human members integrated into the crew, as they can tolerate middling Earth-range temperatures in most work areas, then adjust in their personal quarters, and still enjoy human visitors.
Honorable mention to B5 for specifically calling out multiple bathrooms for different species, Garibaldi even mentions the ones for methane breathers, which....yeah, that's gonna be spicy.
This is covered extensively in the Sector General series by James White. A multi-species hospital station in deep space. Environments from almost absolute zero and total darkness, to high gravity at temperatures that would boil iron. Medical knowledge is temporarily added to a doctor's memory with species specific tapes, but this does come with a price such as not being able to look at the food your eating or accidentally gaining a crush on a completely different species! One interesting thing is that all species have to use a four letter code to refer to themselves as automatic translation means that it doesn't matter what species a being is, they always refer to themselves as 'human'.
Sector General is such a good example of multi-species habitation. Having not just one but several different atmospheric considerations is really unique and I haven't seen it pulled off so extensively in any other series.
I was scrolling through the comments to see if anybody mentioned this series in this context. Its worldbuilding magnificence in relation to biological diversity, one I would recommend to any avid sci-fi reader... if you can stomach unpalatable amounts of sexism. I still recommend it, the sexism is of rather benign variety, "a product of its time" so to speak, it's just so rampantly present whenever the line between doctors and nurses is visible, it just sticks out by sheer amount, like a pound of salt in a gallon of broth. I find it ironic, almost to the point of this irony being the main take away from reading the series, how a person of such vivid imagination, imagination proven page by page, would be comfortable in assuming the structure of the human society would remain a carbon copy of early 20th century Earth. Hell, that's too generous of me - Earth as whole was a diverse place no matter which year in its history we make a freeze frame of. He just copied his own, quite narrow, social circles, and projected them not only on entire humanity of far future, but even many alien species. Just... how, man... how?
@@echinorlax It is something I noticed on later readings. I first came across the series when I was very young back in the eighties. Nowadays, looking back on it, the position of Murchison almost feels as if she's been lifted out of a Carry On film as a stereotypical nurse. I haven't read all the novels, but I believe that later she gets more agency as a full doctor. In that aspect it's an acquired taste, similar to Lovecraft where you have to get by his contempt of anyone who isn't "pure" bred. I do think that White comes from that era where science fiction writers were far more interested in the problem of their story rather than the characters. Clarke and especially Asimov seemed to love to use fiction to put forward a problem then have some clever solution put forward by a barely sketched out character.
The White Space novels have a very similar hospital - enough that I wonder if the author may have taken some inspiration from Sector General. The core hospital serves the entire galaxy, as a center for the most highly specialist care to which more generalised hospitals can refer patents with exceptionally rare or difficult conditions. Like Sector General it's a multi-species hospital partitioned into many parts of differing temperature, atmospheric mix and pressure. It's also spin-gravity, so the areas for low-gravity-adapted species are closer to the center and high-gravity on the rim. For part of the story there's a disruption to hospital systems that disables the lifts, so getting from one place to another often has to be done through several changes of environment suit and airlock.
One thing I used in a book I wrote set on a multi species space station was different species having different day lengths/sleeping patterns/regeneration cycles or whatever. Made it a real pain trying to arrange a meeting that wasn't in the middle of the "night" for someone.
The high gravity species from Orville bugged me. They should not even vaguely resemble a standard human. At best they should look more like D&D dwarves. Short, wide, thick with legs like a rhino.
Not necessarily. Some inhabitants of a low gravity world might look at us humans as wonder how come we look like them instead of being short and stocky.
@@112313 A humanoid that evolved or adapted to a low or no-gravity environment (The Intregal Tree for example) wouldn't look like us. They would view us as being dwarves.
The crossover between different ability and disability is interesting. I remember the Green lantern story about Rot lop fan. He is inducted into the Green lantern corps but his species lives in darkness and his whole species is blind and their language doesn't include anything about either light or vision. Which means that the universal translator built into the Green lantern ring can't convey concepts like light and green and lantern. It becomes a complete lacuna for him, so they have to sort of translate the concept into sound, he's not a Green lantern, he's the f sharp bell, and although he makes the same kind of light constructs as everyone else, his brain interprets it all in the context of sound.
"In loudest din or hush profound, My ears catch evil's slightest sound. Let those who toll out evil's knell, Beware my power: The F-Sharp Bell!" --Rot Lop Fan And he still manages to make it rhyme in English, at that! What a guy!
I think some of my favourite examples of this come from the Official Traveller Universe. While most of the species in the Third Imperium are oxygen breathers, many breathe different proportions of oxygen, or need the presence of something that is a contaminant to humans, so Concentrator Masks, Filter Masks and Breathers are relatively common. There's also the matter of sizes; some Sophonts are tiny (a Llellewyloly is a ball about 0.5 meters in diameter standing on meter-long legs/arms) and humongous (a Virushi is an eight-limbed, quadrupedal rhinoceros-looking behemoth that weights a metric ton and stands 3 meters tall).
This is one area I'd be interested in seeing how JMS reboots Babylon 5. Robotic surgery might be a way to deal with surgery through encounter suits and may change the B5 pilot.
Due to my scifi roots, I *love* including the language and biology challenges in my D&D games. Underground races that haven't seen the surface in hundreds of years? Why would they speak common? If they evolved underground, they don't even bother with light sources--they can see just find and their food is designed to grow in the dark. Going to the far north beyond the mountains? Completely separate language unlike anything the players have met, so a couple sessions just figuring out communication (when no one has Tongues or Comprehend Languages). It's one of my favorite curve-balls they don't expect. This video exemplifies why it's so much fun to throw such challenges at them.
There is one scene from the star fire series that I love, basically the carrier element of a multi species fleet got shot to hell, and as the birds are coming home controllers are scrambling not just to find bays for all the surviving fighters but bays on ships that can feed them and refill their environmental systems, assembling scratch squadrons based off of species that are physically capable of speaking the same language, because fighters are to small to carry translation software. There are scenarios where the pilots can understand the squadron leader just fine but are physically incapable of making the sounds to communicate back.
I kind of hope we get an obligate aquatic Federation ship in a future episode of Lower Decks, just for the sake of letting the writers and animators do something entirely new in the trek franchise.
I'll add another point (which usually comes up in softer sci-fi settings): what happens when two (or more!) alien species *look* fairly similar, but are quite different on the inside? E.g. consider so many of the different aliens shown in Star Trek: what happens to "bystander" first aid responses when someone would need actual training in order to tell several similar species apart? Is that person currently suffering a heart attack a Human, or a Vulcan? Is that person currently grabbing a piece of food from the serving tray a [Species_A] who can eat it just fine, or the similar-looking [Species_B] who will be poisoned by it (but might be new to the area and isn't aware). Etc., etc. Every year IRL, quite a large number of dogs and other pet animals die or are sickened by their loving human caretakers feeding them food (or providing other 'care' such as unusual exercise/lack thereof, nail 'trimming,' drinks, etc.) that is actually not healthy for them, and that's for species which we have evolved alongside for tens or hundreds of thousands of years! How common would it be for multiple aliens living alongside to genuinely make a mistake that harms/sickens a friend? (And the dark side: how easy would it be to cover up a murder when it's common enough to claim "I didn't know Centaurans were allergic to strawberries!")
There's a series of books about a space hospital called "Sector General", it's a mix of short stories and longer narratives. I might be misremembering, because it's been a good decade since I've read it, but one of those short stories focused on a wrecked ship found on the outskirts of charted space that had its discoverers baffled, since it didn't seem to make sense. One of those baffling aspects was a series of tubes running throughout the ship, each carrying a different gas, with vents in each cabin. The mysterious thing was, nobody could figure out why they were separated if they ended up going out through the same vents, and even more so since some of the gasses would cause some unfortunate reactions when mixed. In the end it turned out that each room got a different mix of gases to create a specific atmosphere because the ship was a space ambulance working for the uncharted space's equivalent of the titular hospital. The setting also had different stuff that covered multispecies habitation, like how everyone had a personal gravity generator - one of the recurring doctors was a giant mosquito-like creature that would've been squashed by the station's default gravity setting, so he had it set to like 0.25G, if not lower.
Yes, this was a great series that took all these things seriously. And often they had to treat unknown aliens, so first had to puzzle out what was what in their ships and their bodies. Really fun books.
The Sector General books are a good example on the medical side. Using different techniques in different environments for different species. And if necessary downloading the memories of doctors of the species being treated to have the proper skills to do so.
I had fun with this in a fantasy setting with the human protagonists suffering with dwarven architecture (the ceilings are too low, the seats too low and the beds too small) and low lighting (subterranean dwellers can see better in the dark) as well as being told they speak too loud (hearing becomes more acute in darkness). Dwarves in turn take days to adapt to surface light and noise. When dealing with a species of elves, the humans struggle with their food which (as forest dwellers) is primarily fruit, fungi and nut based unlike the cereal grains (wheat, barley, rye, oats etc) which are the staple of the human diet grown in open plains. Elves live off the produce of orchards of trees; not fields of grass. And of course orcs eat a lot of meat. Too much meat for the human digestive tract to comfortably process. Because of their size and strength, orcs have to eat more food and more often than humans and they tire quicker; lacking human stamina.
I've always thought of making elves obligate predators as part of the reason for their nebulously 'low population'. Like it's the easiest and cleanest way to make there actually be a clear reason that these nigh-immortal beings not able to not be able to get past the population problem over a certain period of time. Otherwise they stay identical, but their intrinsic desire for 'balance with nature' comes from the fact they don't have access to high calorie crops (though to note, this doesn't actually limit them to 'meat only' diets - it just means that they can't survive off grains like humans. Even cats eat vegetation, they just can't live without meat-derived-nutrients).
@@reganator5000 I always thought the immortal, low-population-growth aspect of elves was ridiculous. The result is either catastrophic over-population as every elf ever born doesn't die from natural causes, or they get into a war with a species that can replenish their losses in a generation and continue the war against an enemy that needs a 1000 years to recover from a single big battle. I gave them long life-spans, 500 years, and even that has many of the same problems. The Firire (Grey elves) in my story note that they still haven't recovered their numbers from the last war which at 500 years ago is a 2-3 generations for them. For the humans, 20-25 generations have been born since then. It's even worse for the longer lived race of elves that have 1000 year lives. The same Grey elf notes that between his grandfather and himself, humans have advanced from using bronze to steel.
Uhm, a human could actually survive off of an entirely meat diet. A person would likely have to eat a larger variety of the animals parts than just the muscle tissue and some fat, but it is actually possible. It's a full vegan diet that a human can't survive on.
@@commanderknight9314 you need quite a varied source of meat to do so - Narwhal is very important to most exclusively meat based diets today, though obviously in fantasy dragons, owlbears or giant spiders might fulfil a similar role. Though it's also worth remembering that most animals do not exclusively eat vegan or meat-only diets - they'll take what they can find. Cats must eat large quantities of meat to survive, but they still eat grass to help their digestion, and cows will happily stamp on small animals then eat them if they get too close.
@@commanderknight9314 The human digestive system is designed for an omnivorous diet. We don't have the digestive tract capable of subsisting off meat alone. Animals that do are able to digest all parts of their prey; including bone and fur/hair. In order to live off a meat diet, you would to eat only certain cuts of meat meaning 90% of the animal would be discarded and you would still be dangerously low on fibre and chronically short of Vitamin C and E. This is why sailors in the Age of Sail living off salted/dried meat and ships biscuits died of scurvy. The carnivore diet is also lacking in salt which combined with the lack of Vitamin C would impair kidney function. Basically, you'd die with bleeding gums while pissing blood with the lack of Vitamin E leaving you too weak to stand.
It's always been a major pet peeve of mine. How, in most mainstream sci-fi, all species eat the same stuff, get drunk or stoned the same way, all meds work the same, etc, unless there's a plot point requiring it to be otherwise. I love how this video takes it even further. One of my favourite examples of cross-species cohabitation is in the John Ringo/David Weber Prince Roger series. Our heroes are stranded on an alien world with a different biochemistry, and a very real concern they have is eventually dying from malnutrition due to some vitamins and amino acids not existing in the local biome. And at one point, our technologically advanced protagonists wind up being held hostage by a local low-tech potentate who tries to force them to cooperate by poisoning them with something that is tasteless and odourless to the locals and requires a steady supply of an antidote to be survivable, but to the humans it smells like sewage and tastes like rotten fennel, and it has absolutely no other effects on them. Another I really like is also by John Ringo in the Troy series. A human basically manages to uplift humanity to join the interstellar community by discovering that maple syrup has an effect more or less on par with a mix of tequila and cocaine on one alien species, and he sets up really lucrative trade with them.
I can think of three very different books that all come up with the same less-than-ideal solution: Take a cell sample and culture into meat paste in-vitro, to meet at least some of that nutritional requirement. One refers to the result as a "me-burger." The last one reminds me a bit of the Worldwar series too - among the many things which derails an attempted alien invasion of earth is the discovery that common ginger acts as a highly addictive drug best compared to cocaine. As the invaders long ago dealt with any dangerous recreational drug problems on their homeworld they have no knowledge of how to handle such a situation and much of their army is soon hooked on it. The human defenders are more than happy to manufacture it in great quantity and teach the lost arts of smuggling and dealing.
It's not a large scale established habitation like on Babylon 5, but Andy Weir's _Project Hail Mary_ showed nicely how to navigate around living in a hostile environment. Pressurization, temperature, air locks, different gasses and even absence of visible light.
The assorted “Sector General” stories by James White tackle most of the issues presented here as central elements of the setting on a multispecies hospital, most especially including the question of how to provide care for radically different aliens. Some elements of the books are pretty dated in the way a lot of classic Sci-Fi of the 1960s and 1970s can be, but they are really interesting reading.
Ian Douglas' Star Carrier series was good for multi-species groups. The antagonist Sh'daar are made up of lots of different species, from all range of homeworlds (and times). Three I remember clearly are- The 'diplomat traders', that refrain from eating in front of other races because they, well, vomit on their food before ingesting it. Think they were also the ones that talked by belching. One of the races spoke in pairs. They couldn't be translated at first because one of them would say one thing, the other something different. Then it was discovered when they talked together, their combined voices created a third harmonic that carried what they were actually trying to say. Another species, that used echolocation to 'see' and communicate, captured a human pilot, and were trying to learn about us and how to communicate. Their doctors couldn't figure out how humans generated or 'saw' sound like they did. The human's appendage on 'top' of their body clearly wasn't doing it, but they were curious if the fatty deposits on one side of the human's torso were their sound organs. (spoiler- the human was female) It was overall a good lesson on the problems of interspecies communication.
The book Project Hail Mary did a really good job at exploring a lot of these issues in depth That the book essentially only had 2 characters (1 human and 1 alien) made it really easy to delve deep on this at the individual level
In the novel, Children of Ruin, a cephalopod species has space travel in water-filled ships, with all the physics headaches for manoeuvring under G that entails.
I haven't seen much sci-fi but I think the use of telepresence robots could be helpful for multispecies habitation. Stick everyone into pods that take care of their biological needs and remote control robots to operate the ship.
Even with species that can mostly live in the same environment, there might be slight differences in preference, as Garak famously lamented. Exactly what level do you set the lights, how warm or how humid should it be, how long should the days be, etc. Some of this varies even between humans, not to mention with entirely different species!
The medical concern is something I considered in a sci-fi world I’m building. When humanity gained access to alien technology, our technology in regards to chemical engineering, metallurgy, space travel, weapons, etc. jumped forward by 1,000 years or more, but because medical technology and techniques couldn’t be transferred between species, it lagged. So while most technologies humanity has access to are in the year 3311, medicine is stuck in the actual year of 2311.
about medicen you could have a simpler kind of doctor that knows just enough for first aid for every kind of creature and specialists who do medical school about one spiecies! that way you could basicaly go to a nearby station for the simple stuff and if needed to go a bigger station for more complex stuff
If enough species are in the area, IA doctors might be the optimal solution since they could maintain optimal skill even on species they very rarely interact with.
Conspicuous by its absence was any reference to the "Sector General" series of short stories, novellas and novels, by James White. The plots generally revolved around the difficulties of treating patients that are very alien. One of the short stories is the response to a mass casualty event at an interstellar spaceport when a large passenger vehicle crashes into a terminal, but the terminal and vehicle have mutually incompatible atmospheres. Chaos ensues, because nobody knows enough other species medicine to properly triage the injured, let alone treat them. This turns out to be the event that inspired the creation of the first multi-species hospital.
I like the sci fi concept where species that resemble Earth ones, like anthropomorphic cats or reptiles, were actual lizards and cats that humans genetically uplifted and therefore can also live in Earths environment. Wheras the aliens are truly alien
Whilst I'm sure someone else has mentioned them, I didn't see it in ghe comments; Becky Chambers explored a lot of this in 'A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet' and the books sharing its universe. Neal Asher does also sort of touch on the food issue in the Polity books. And it is always good to see Adrian Tchaikovsky's 'Children of ....' books being brought up.
I like the way Star Trek TOS handled the medical care issue by mostly having Bones complain he didn't know WTF he was doing whenever he had to work on Spok or other aliens.
I have a (non-canon) Star Trek book about the TOS crew on their first adventure together. They established first contact with another alien race and beamed them aboard the ship, only to realize they weren't able to survive in the higher gravity on the ship. They had to beam them back real quick, and Mr. Spock accidentally got some of their personalities stuck in him when he unintentionally mind melded during the process. They were eventually able to host them on the Enterprise by reducing the gravity in specific areas, but not without Scotty spending several hours on it and covering Engineering with technical manuals and blueprints to figure out how. It was a fun book to read.
The medical side of things reminds me of the medical droids from star wars. During the animated movie, jabba's son was sick but the droid knew exactly how to treat him even though hutts are vastly different from most other republic species.
Boy howdy. Good knowledge in this one. Bit bummed you missed a banger of a Farscape clip in there, where they are all making their favorite foods. Very insightful episode all in all.
One nice touch I thought is the Boron in the X series. They are aquatic, require water, their ships are filled with "air" (not necessarily oxygen) because air is lighter than water. Filling a ship with water would make it too heavy. Instead they have tiny chambers full of water and passageways. They use what is effectively space suits to go around their own ships with robotic arms and hands. Co-habitation with them on their own ship would almost be weird. As an Oxygen breather you would be restricted to other parts of the ship.
It doesn't make sense for an aquatic species to have artificial ship gravity. Without that, they could have _mostly_ air, but hypersaturated with enough moisture for their gills/etc to function (and not dry out.) No suits required. They'd only flood the ship when they are on planets and the mass doesn't matter. (And being aquatic, they'd presumably have ships that land on (or in) water.)
@@1FatLittleMonkey i tried searching this, apparently the one time they took fish to the international space station to test, their bone density dropped almost immediately. 10x faster than humans. If this applies to all aquatics then artificial gravity would be even more vital for them.
One of my dreams is to make an animated series based on the Sector General series by James White. It's about a deep space hospital built specifically to house as many alien species as necessary, and the aliens are actually alien in appearance as well as behavior, you've got giant elephant things that wear symbiotic pets on their heads, giant silver caterpillars with literally no concept of tact, insects with a strong empathic power, sea monsters, radiation eaters, hive minds, even ones that breath superheated steam. This series does everything I love and does it great and I hope more people check it out ❤🎉
A very minor one I think but the Predators breathe slightly more oxygen and nitrogen than in the Earth’s atmosphere hence the inhaler thing in Predator 2
There's a HFY story i read a while back, that had literal Space Dragons. They lived on molten or high temp worlds, kinda like Venus. It was paced rapidly but the PoV character, (one of said Dragons) mentioned that the humans eventually developed suits and tech that could allow each side to visit the other for short periods, but otherwise didn't really co-habitate. It was a neat take on the subject, IMO.
*Fun fact:* In the Star Wars universe, the closest thing to a civilization whose lack of multispecies is as high as on Earth is the archaic and isolated planet Kesh, inhabited for thousands of years only by the Keshiri species and a group of Sith humans who crashed on said planet. Something quite remarkable about this society is that, when the descendants of the Sith found a holographic projection of the Sith Pureblood Naga Sadow, many were horrified by the "out of the ordinary" appearance of that being, not being aware until that moment that there were more species in the universe apart from the humans and the Keshiri. I think it's a pretty accurate portrayal of how people of our World would react when meeting an alien by first time
I really like the way this issue is treated in the Foreigner series by CJ Cherryh. The humans and atevi are only somewhat compatible - they're fine with the same pressure and atmosphere but atevi are noticeably larger and have a diet where many dishes have high levels of alkaloids dangerous to humans.
The Expanse has a really interesting take, Amos is just an absolute beast basically because he was born on and grew up on Earth. His bones and muscles had gravity to develop that most people in the belt didn't get, they basically got a worse version/substitute or a work around that just ain't as good as the real thing.
One Star Trek fanfic that I am reading currently actually deals with this slightly. While 90% of the Federation can handle O2/N2 atmospheres at 1 atmo pressure and around 70F temperature, some like Vulcans like it hotter and Betazoids like it colder. So you will often have a crew that is nearly or completely one species, so a Vulcan ship can be hotter and drier while a Betazoid ship can be colder and wetter. Human ships are notable for their mixed crews because they are basically smack in the middle of the usual range. That last 10% are those species that require vastly different food, atmosphere mix or pressure, and temperature requirements, and they ALSO get their own ships, and even their own Star Fleet Academy on a planet they can stand.
It would be interesting to see a fictional setting where two species rise to dominance explicitly because they both shard near identical tolerance and preferences for their environment. Cross haring of ships and resources is not a problem as their needs to be no special accommodations allow a level of cooperation that other species do not enjoy.
I can think of one way to get around reduced dexterity: Have the hands kept in the sleeves of the environmental suit and have them control mechanical hands that are part of the suit.
There's a lot of web stories that will for a time tolerate being realistic with a language gap or barrier but but then the author gets bored of the difficulties of minute gaps or as to yet unexplored concepts and hand waves to "they understand each other enough now" and you'll only ever hear about it again when they're interested in insert surprising cultural difference or similarity. I want to go about learning the tools and getting good at the basic elements, but at a point the struggles and difficulties mentioned in this video are the kind of things I get inspiration from, I hope at one point I'll be able to write something that what address both very difficult cohabitation situations and the surprisingly compatible ones. Because there's a different angle in the idea of everyone being incompatible, and that is you end up assembling a crew that is more compatible than a homogeneous one, where one's respiratory waste element is another's fuel element, now there's a lot of character drama to be had when the crew is making a full resource loop or a few with what they consume and what they have as waste.
Frankly, it's not just web stories that can give up on a language barrier like that. Stargate (the TV show) started with linguistic understanding of various civilizations of humans abducted by ancient aliens (and the ancient aliens themselves) being difficult as a major plot point, creating the requirement to bring specialists along. Fairly quickly, they dropped it and quietly made everyone start speaking modern English as they wanted to explore a larger variety of plots without the constant background challenge of communicating through interpreters and puzzling out a new set of languages and training interpreters every time they contacted a new group.
7:24 There is an example of this in a book series called The Commonwealth Saga, by Peter F. Hamilton, where an alien species communicates through the use of patterns drawn in UV light onto their "eyes".
These concerns are actually how I imagine xenophobes get their growth bonus in stellaris and similar games that give the same general buff to being xenophobic. It is not that they are growing faster, it is they do not bother with what other species need for the most part. The Drs.* are trained for one species, and food is for one species, the infrastructure etc etc.
what can we learn from this? purge the xenos!
@@enderfire3379 care for the citizens you have not everyone elses?
Based.
@@soul1dFOR THE EMPEROR!!!
For all mankind
I love that each sentence has its own basically totaly random clip from a totlally random movie game or show which still manage to convays the point at each given time just perfectly.
Our editor Charles did an excellent job!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Yeah the level of nerdiness necessary to pull that off is insane.
@@beskamir5977 We also understood the reference of each clip without the dialogue.
They showed some scenes from Star Wars, and I thought, Star Wars just ignores everything he mentioned. They have a basic language, and if not, C3PO is always there, theycan all mostly survive on the same atmosphere and ecosystems, though the book From a Certain Point of View mentions that the Bith hate Tatooine.
Bonus points for a clip with Steve Irwin regarding exothermic organisms
I like the inclusion of flaps to cover the ears in Babylon 5's breathing masks. Good low-budget acknowledgement that atmospheric differences go beyond just breathing.
Magnetic field is also a factor that I've not seen scifi really covered. While human doesn't really have interaction with ambient magnetic field, an avian species might as it might disorient them.
Or imagine if such a species were to try to co habitate with a species that naturaly emit fluctuating magnetic fields for their own communication and movement. It would be as if they were constantly screaming in your ear!
depends on the human. There's a tribe of humans somewhere that has an innate ability to know what direction they're facing at all times, it's theorized that it's something that they're sensitive to because they don't use the terms "left" or "right" but rather will give cardinal directions.
Such as "show me your North hand" they would mean the hand on the North facing side of your body... really fascinating and begs the question, do we all have this ability but it's undeveloped because we don't use it? We all (or are) those friends with an innate sense of direction.
He lives in a flatland and got up with the sun, and went to bed with the moon. You wouldn’t have the same issue with cardinal directions because you would see it constantly.
A magnetic field is essential for cell mitosis. Without it human life, and Terran life in general, would not be possible. If the field is too weak cells simply won't divide. If it is too strong they get fried. It would be a major concern.
From scratch a vet is probably a better start point for a cross species medic, already familiar with more environmental considerations and body plans as well as not always having the perfect tools / environment to work in.
Xenomedicine would I feel focus on chemistry biological theories and a whole lot of troubleshooting with massive reference libraries. A good space doctor would have to be able to look just about everything up.
@@cliffordsherman7702 I would agree with that being the ideal, perhaps even leaning on a neural interface or AI for rapid information downloading. But if there was need for a medic with minimal additional training a vet is likely to be a better choice.
I came here to mention this.🙂 It came up in a 1980s Star Trek book that had Robert April commanding the Enterprise, and delivering a shipload of diplomats from many species. The chief medical officer was trained as both an M.D. and a veterinarian.
Yes! That's one detail I loved in Star Trek: Enterprise. Dr. Phlox was always tending to his menagerie of animals from various worlds, showing the kind of researcher mindset needed for a doctor going into space for the first time.
story-wise, I could see a veterinarian also being controversial - "you brought a doctor for your animals to treat me? am I so below you, human?"
plus there's the considerations that alien biology might well be extremely different - a vet might have an advantage in terms of different body plans, sure, but on the very low level, every single (Earth) animal has a biology that will be quite similar to humans, and very different from that of aliens. For emergency and trauma medicine, they could maybe be useful, but for anything complex? Hit and miss, at the very best.
That's what I appreciated about the first Men In Black movie, they actually talked about aliens being on a different time schedule than humans. Zed said "it's a 37 hour day, you'll get used to it, or have a psychotic episode.".
Another thing that I don't see alot of sci-fi talking about is atmospheric pressure. There's no way that an alien who breathes methane could live in the same kind of environment that a oxygen-nitrogen breathing alien lived in.
Funnily enough if you break down the 37 hours into thirds it isn't too bad of a work schedule. 12 hours in the office, 12 hours for yourself and 12 hours of sleep in a day and a half Earth time. If you sleep in 6hr blocks you can have what feels like a full day off between shifts if you sleep before and after a work shift.
Aren't the Unggoy (Grunts from Halo) methane-breathers?
There are a group of scientists who were living like that with the Mars rover expeditions. living on Mars time at work.
Zed (Rip Torn) was underrated in that movie, including by me.
@@GmodPlusWoW I don't know about Halo but Babylon 5 has a toilet designated 'Methane Breathers Only'
One of my favourites in Babylon5 by G'Kar: "It's an earth food, they are called Swedish meatballs. It's a strange thing, but every sentient race has its own version of these Swedish meatballs! I suspect it's one of those great universal mysteries which will either never be explained, or which would drive you mad if you ever learned the truth."
Lol🤣
It's a reference to Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, which makes basically the same claim about gin and tonic, but decades earlier.
@@reliantncc1864 Hahaha, I was not aware of this, thank you for making me aware of this.
@@reliantncc1864 Except with Hitchhiker's it's the name that sounds vaguely similar, and the actual drink varies. From Chinanto/mnigs, which is water served slightly above room temperature, to Tzjin-anthony-ks, which is so potent it kills cows at a hundred paces.
@@jgraaay18 That doesn't change it being obviously inspired by the Hitchhiker's Guide.
The Orville has some other great and funny practicality moments, like the Moclans being able to eat a wide variety of solid matter and the cigarettes; not the crippling smoking addiction they get, but that fact the first thing Klyden does is eat one out of the curiosity of it's taste.
I don't know why but the Moclans and their smoking addiction had me crying. It was so funny, these massive bunches of cigarettes they had everywhere.
Futurama takes that Doctor point to hilarity with Dr. Zoidberg. He’s probably an excellent Doctor, knowledgeable in treatments and surgeries for numerous Alien Species. It just so happens Humans weren’t in his curriculum…
I totally expect them to use some Zoidberg clip in the Doctor segment.
I don't remember which season it was, but one episode brought this up: apparently, Dr. Zoidberg genuinely is a university-educated doctor, and his expertise helps the crew save the day.
It's just that his doctorate is in _art history,_ not medicine.
Throughout the series, it's implied that he is actually a brilliant physician when it comes to aliens, and he's simply out of his area of expertise with humans. For example, in season 6, episode 18, Mom tells Zoidberg that he could have been a millionaire with his own research lab if he had worked for her.
Nobody will mention White’s “Sector General” series of novels and short stories? They deal with a space hospital that treats humans as well as a bewildering array of non-human extraterrestrial species; the place is a huge space station that has to provide environments and supplies for a wide variety of physiologies (oxygen, chlorine, methane or superheated steam breathers; species that live in temperatures ranging from -80° C to + 250° C; a huge variety of biochemical barriers; translation and communication issues; the problem of being able to treat someone not of your own species…). It touches upon all the points mentioned in the video! I cannot recommend this series enough.
Fry: Uh, is there a human doctor around?
Zoidberg: Young lady, I'm an expert on humans.
The amount of times mass effect was or could have been referenced here. Mass effect barely scratches the surface of the practicalities of multispecies habitation, but it still puts in more effort than most.
That's why I always liked Dr.Franklin from Babylon 5. He left Earth to learn about other species and it took him years to get all the information and practical experience
I once designed an alien species that was similar to the Velociraptor from Jurassic Park. But they communicated with color changing skin like a Cuttlefish. They have underdeveloped hearing since the planet had constant wind noise so sound is a poor form of communication. Changing a core concept of communication can have a significant effect on how a species develops and interact with others.
Blindess for example goes from a serious disability that people can live fulfilling lives with to something that cuts you off from the world almost entirely.
That sounds like an excelent plot for an episode of a sci-fi show where that species and protagonists have trouble communicating until the protagonists get a painter involved.
@@Nitram4392 Or a kid with a Lite-Brite.
Crazy. In a short story of mine there were these raptor-like aliens, except they communicated with four-limbed sign language. Meanwhile, another species were like cephalopods changing patterns on their skin. Your combination is more truly alien I think.
Even just having a human who is mute has provoked some fascinating thoughts for myself about how they might communicate. There’s even variations in how mute someone can be.
I like Arrival because the how to communicate was pretty much the plot line altogether. Once the language barrier was crossed the final "power" so to speak was unlocked.
My favorite example of these issues is from Project Hail Mary by Andy Wier. It covers all these difficulties in a way that makes for a great story just with the two main characters learning how to interact.
This was exactly where my mind went first. PHM was a great example of the complexities of having two species with wildly different gravity and pressure needs. I also thought about how it affects the end.
When researching my second novel, A Hardness of Minds, I found out that dolphins can hold and send a 'mental image', including translating images of object they've only seen into the sound of that image returned through sonar. So the aliens under the ice moon of Europa, and pass images around to each other naturally.
Except for the fact that PHM handwaved the communication away by having a non-linguist create a translation device together in a few days. It's unlikely a trained linguist could pull that off in months.
@@DocXango Well, it's more that the Eridian form of communication just so happens to be in a form that computers can identify and parse effectively. And he creates the device only to record the sounds, he still spends weeks learning it himself full-time
@@DocXango sometimes you have to remind yourself that is just a show and to really should relax.
It also points out a basic issue with medical or biological assumptions; finding a comatose(-equivalent) Eradanian with it's digestive organs sitting on the floor nearby wouldn't be as much a cause for concern as a human in a similar state.
Valerian actually did a halfway decent job of addressing this. But most other species had their own pressure suits to compensate
i totally forgot about that movie! Drifting interstellar ecumenopolis is really cool as a concept, but sadly you need to get people to CARE about enough of the parties involved, and it's a shame the movie failed on that.
The movie did an okay job but I feel the original graphic novel was much better at showcasing the highly varied environments and cultures of Point Central. The station also makes recurring appearances in other volumes.
One of the species in my setting comes from an extremely cold planet, where their "warm" equator is equivalent to Earth's Canada or Siberia.
As such, they don't have sweat glands and have to wear suits with cooling tech to walk around on Earth. To appear more friendly to humans, they emote with LED animated masks, some individuals using more eccentric animations than others.
They're warmest place is Canada... and they have no sweat glands. I take it they use those suits on their homeworld too since they'd die in a Canadian summer. Edit: Source I'm Canadian.
I'm pretty sure you re invented what some degenerates would call a "protogen"
@@rvaughan74 Sorry. I meant northern Canada.
A planet of Daft Punks?
@@jakeaurod admittedly, yes
Stargate SG-1 was a good illustration of the translation problem. They dealt with different languages frequently early on, but there's only so many times you can do that before it goes all the way from fascinating to annoying, so in the end they just went with everyone speaking English.
Zootopia / Zootropolis does a rather nice job of showing many species of different sizes, shapes and environmental requirements living together.
SG-1 and Atlantis also did a pretty solid job of addressing the medical side of things. It's made very clear that the Tau'ri have some of the best doctors in the business, and they have ready access to a ton of spectacular equipment, but Dr.s Fraser, Beckett, Lam, and Keller were straight up about how they're regularly reduced to just feeling their way through how a given nonhuman's biology works, by blind trial and error as often as not.
@@tba113
Blind trial and error was pretty much how the medical profession mastered human biology; what happens if I poke this, how does this react to heat, why is this squidgy, why isn't this squidgy, what happens if I attach some cables and a generator to it?
Honestly, I could stand to see more of those kind of plots in SG-1, I feel like the later Unas-centric episodes were the closest SG-1 had to its own "Darmok". I mean, that's what Daniel is supposed to be there for, after all.
Michael Shanks (Daniel Jackson) was such a valuable character because of this. He was often required to figure out translations under a severe timetable, and the show made it make sense while keeping the tension high.
@@eskreskao
The 'Enemy Mine' episode of season 7 was always one of my favourites for this reason. The fact Daniel brings an intermediary along to negotiate is grounded in real-life practices and their problems communicating ('Right, why would you guys know what spaceship is...') and having to reduce concepts to their very basics to understand each other.
I think, for the most part, Babylon 5 highlighted the differences more than most other shows. Mostly because there was a visual representation for it.
I will always remember Babylon 5's "A Distant Star," and Sheridan's exchange with Ivanova about how accomodating an alien ambassador's request might "smooth any ruffled feathers." After a moment's pause, he then asks if the ambassador HAS feathers.
I’ve always felt like it would have to be unpleasant for species that have to wear specific breathing-equipment in earth-like atmospheres (Like the Kel-Dor in Star Wars or Zaranites in Star Trek) to have to spend the majority of their time wearing them. Imagine having to wear an entire gas mask all-day everyday and you can only (maybe) take it off in your bedroom.
Space suit exist
Really puts the people complaining about Covid masks in perspective :P
You'd think that that would be horrible, but I've worked jobs before where I had to wear respirators for the whole 40hr work week and do Darth Vader impressions with my coworkers, and then covid happened and we had to wear masks even outside of work if you weren't home. You can get used to it. Then again not everyone could get used to wearing covid masks in the end, so I guess it depends on the person.
Early Star Trek handled the idea of different air requirements briefly with the Benzites in Star Trek TNG with the "inhalers" they wear on their chests.
the Benzites were seen twice in TNG; Wesley's opponent in Starfleet Academy entrance exams in "Coming of age" and his brother Mendon who was an officer exchange candidate in "A matter of honor".
As for medical supplies, that was addressed in TOS! In "Journey to Babel", when Ambassador Sarek was stabbed, McCoy tells us the ship hasn't got enough T- (that's T-negative) Vulcan blood in ship's supplies to do surgery to save his life. Spock has the same T- type, but only an experimental drug that amplifies blood cell production in Rigellians and other species similar to Vulcans gives him the ability to produce enough blood for the transfusions... at risk to his life at that.
@@IffyJottere There was also the TNG episode where Worf refused to donate blood to save a captured Romulan and he was the only one on board with compatible cells. Crusher couldn't replicate anything as they didn't have experience with Romulan biology.
One of my favorite examples of extreme differences in atmospheric requirements were the Tholians from Star Trek Enterprise, They had to live in a super heated atmospheres of at least 200 degrees Celsius, anything below 150 and they would literally freeze solid and shatter like an ice sculpture.
Ahh, yes, IIRC torture scenes with them.
After an encounter with Enterprise, I could see why they were so Xenophobic.
Original series, wasn't there a rock blob monster that accidentally killed many humans that were mining it's food and eggs?
@@davidconner-shover51 I remember that episode it was a Silicon-based lifeform that Spock mind-melded with it.
Horta, accidentally destroying eggs@@davidconner-shover51
The Star wars complete cross-section books actually have some fun and interesting details regarding this in the pages for the galactic senate and home one, like the fact that the offices of the senator from Dorin are pressurised and filled with the same atmospheric mix as their homeworld so they don't have to have their breathing equipment on, or that the Mon Calamari/Qurren offices have bathing pools to rehydrate themselves, or that home one and other mon calamari ships originally had several important passageways completely filled with water for ease of travel by the mon calamari and when they were refit for used by the rebellion these passageways had to be drained and have flooring and stairs installed so that non aquatic species could use them and several important interfaces we're only designed to be used by mon calamari meaning they had to be replaced with more universal control systems for other species to be able to use them properly and they weren't properly standardised until the New Republic created the MC80B
I enjoyed seeing the inter species bridge in either Ahsoka or Andor
>several important interfaces we're only designed to be used by mon calamari meaning they had to be replaced with more universal control systems
OOH this explains why so much of the tech is so analouge and chunky. Making it more ergonomic would be to favour a single species.
Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series has quite a few interesting examples. An interstellar civilization of humans is complicated enough, but what if you add in spiders, ants, AI, octopi, crows and even bacteria?
I have some arachnophobia, so reading Children of Time was a strange aspect for me. But interestingly I found the spiders to be far more interesting than the Humans.
It is important to know that spiders communicate primarily through string tensioning, they are able to accurately interpret subtle vibrations through their webs and use it as a full fledged communication system.
But when a web is not available, they communicate through hand signals and body language that is just as effective, but completely alien for us Humans.
If we want to know what multispecies healthcare looks like, we can ask a veterinarian
We still share an evolutionary history though, so our internal organs aren't super different compared to other animals for example
Moreover, vets pretty much only treat mamals and reptiles, a very small and closely related set of animals.
Considering the huge proportion of genetic and metabolitic mechanisms we share with pretty much anything that lives on earth and the unlikelyness of an independant evolution taking the same root (I’m not saying they won’t necessarily don’t have the same basic building blocs, chemistery being the same everywhere, but for example, the way dna is translated to proteins is both almost universal on earth and apparently totally arbitrary), we can only imagine how different an actual alien would be.
Fair
@@franck3279 ALSO fair. Even assuming they have the same biomchemistry as us, which I don't find too unlikely, they would look completely different. the difference between treating a fish and a bird are enormous, and while we don't think about it, dogs, humans, and cats are pretty similar.
Spoilers for Project Hail Mary:
I loved that book because its clear Andy Weir considered each of these challenges when developing his alien life form and decided to set the bar at highest level of difficulty when solving for each, which makes their partnership/friendship feel all the more remarkable. The only real 'gimme' is that they both communicate at coincidentally similar vocal ranges which means that they can eventually talk and understand one another like Han and Chewie without Google translate.
The book discusses that - Rocky theorises that their hearing ranges overlap in the 'good for hearing danger' range of sounds made when things are banging together or a predator is approaching. And also notes that his own range of both hearing and vocalisation goes a lot higher that humans. Presumably he just speaks really deeply when using English.
I remember a Timothy Zahn book, Spinneret I believe, that had an aside that one of the space fairing races was aquatic, and as such their space craft were much heavier due to their "atmosphere" being water. This meant that each new ship launched from their planet was prohibitively costly, so they were trying to get the super material from this planet to make a space elevator.
A bit, IMO, We humans walk around in bags of ocean
Babylon 5 handles this very well, with the Vorlon encounter suit even having plot implications multiple times.
talking about needing a translator for strange alien species and cutting to the Hot Fuzz scene was a masterpiece of comedy
Love the classic XCOM score on this episode!
But you got to give it up for the coolest translation device ever. The Babel Fish, courtesy of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy!
Epically hilarious
Always love stories involving multiple alien species coexisting (or at least tolerate others).💚
I hope someday you review "Knights of Sidonia". Its my favorite.
Another one of my favorite stories about multiple alien species is the Saga comics that discusses the dangers and difficulties (and possibly futility) of multi-species relations.
Apparently the difficulty of communication between dissimilar species was one of the larger ideas in Knights of Sidonia (to the point of naming a place after Stanislaw Lem, who to my understanding really dug into that concept in his own works), though it wasn't very well displayed until the very end.
While the series is very soft-scifi in many respects, it stands out to me in how it revels in displays of megastructural engineering. Other sci-fi has huge ships and stations, but none I've seen communicate that scale quite as well as the "Sights of Sidonia" and the shows of how such an environment is incredibly dangerous such as how most clothing is equipped with tethers to prepare for the often-deadly emergency burns.
Two examples of this:
First - Morn from DS9 was bald because he has pure Latinum is one if his stomachs. Something we don't know because we've never seen another member of his species.
Second - the episode 9f Babylon 5 were Ivanova had to make a deal with an alien and the agree on contracts with sex. Ivanova was not down for that until someone pointed out that different species have different rules for things. She gets the idea that this guy has not idea what human sex is like, so she makes up some weird dance and calls it sex.😂
Yeah, that Babylon 5 episode was hilarious 😂
While never explicitly explored, the Pak'Ma'Ra, where well known to be complicated to exist around. Not only is their food inedible to other species (it has to be regurgitated), they live in a different atmosphere and their excrement is outright lethal to other species, to the point they have a completely separate waste disposal system dedicated exclusively to them.
@@Taronyu_SVK
Ivanova's crazy dance had me ROFL.
"Next time, my way."
And her facial expression was awesome when trying to explain the "gift" from the ambassador.
It was a good job that the alien didn't have a line like 'We have downloaded your Internet for the past 200 years and 99.99% of it refers to sexual interactions'.
The spiders in Children of Time are noteworthy. Even though they share a common genetic ancestry with Humans, their evolution lead them down very differently ways of thinking and communicating.
Excellent video, as always; it also reminded me of Discovery, the gift that keeps on giving, sharing the valuable info that Enterprise crew are basically eating shit. Cheers!
Babylon 5 was actually well grounded in these principles.
There was the Pac'Mora, who didn't require special quarters, and seemed nice enough, but their eating habits made everyone else wish they did. To imply they stunk would likely be an understatement
@@davidconner-shover51 Ah yes, carrion eaters weren't they? Which I imagine would be something else other species could dislike them for due to societal or religious practices. If for instance you had very particular rituals about how a body is treated after death, as some religions do, then you might not want to think that the neighbours might eat said body.
Still, it makes sense that a species could have that as part of their diet, it is an important ecological niche on Earth after all, the things that eat dead organisms help prevent disease and such from spreading.
my favorite example of multispecies habitation is in the book Project Hail Mary. the alien in the book requires an extremely dense and hot atmosphere. to be able to go aboard the human ship it first has to build a series sealed tunnels and rooms for it to exist inside of. these tunnels connect to the aliens docked ship to provide the correct pressure and temperature. the slien also does not see using light so the interior of its ship is in constant pitch darkness. it akso cannot see 2d monitors like tvs so they gave to come up with display systems tgat work in 3d to be able to view tge same media as humans etc. its a fascinating book!
On the matter of language,
In my homebrew setting, there is an empire with different species that can't make all the same sounds, and one octopus like race that communicates with patterns of colors instead of sound. The many languages were becoming an issue for a unified empire, so they created a language based on abstract units I call sylunits. Thus, each sylunit can have a different encoding for each race. Thus the majority of the language needs learned once, and then just learn each species' particular encoding. Thus one sylunit might be "cho" for humans, a short nasally bark for another, and a flash of blue and gold slanted straight stripes for the octopus people.
Currently I am working on the actual conlang.
For language differences, I love the 'Children of..' series by Adrian Tchaikovsky! The last book especially goes through the difficulties being overcome between 4 species (well technically 5 but we don't count Avana Kern since she is a literal God AI) with completely different ways of speaking (octopi = visual colours represented on skin, arachnids = vibrations through foot stomps, humans and corvids = speaking though in different ways)
Well, former god. Her worshipers gave up on religion when they actually met their former deity and found her not only rather less then omnipotent, but also an arrogant, egotistical, impatient ass.
I read a book where a human ship was visited by a delegation from a multi-species xeno-ship. The preperation (especially the atmosphere demands) were extensive to the point another delegate had to be sent in advance in order to mediate and ensure all the requirements are met. The delegate was of a species that communicates using pheromones. The humans had a translation bot, but it worked as best as the first version of Google translate.
The Temperature aspect does seem to be one good reason why Starfleet Crews tend to be predominantly of one species or another. An all-Vulcan crew's ship probably has an internal temperature closer to the warmth of Vulcan, while a crew of Andorians will prefer a colder atmosphere inside their ships. As Humans seem to be at a good middle-ground, it's likely the reason why Human-dominant crews see the most non-human members integrated into the crew, as they can tolerate middling Earth-range temperatures in most work areas, then adjust in their personal quarters, and still enjoy human visitors.
Except for Swedish meatballs. They are universal.
Trying to understand it will drive a man mad.
Honorable mention to B5 for specifically calling out multiple bathrooms for different species, Garibaldi even mentions the ones for methane breathers, which....yeah, that's gonna be spicy.
This is covered extensively in the Sector General series by James White. A multi-species hospital station in deep space. Environments from almost absolute zero and total darkness, to high gravity at temperatures that would boil iron. Medical knowledge is temporarily added to a doctor's memory with species specific tapes, but this does come with a price such as not being able to look at the food your eating or accidentally gaining a crush on a completely different species! One interesting thing is that all species have to use a four letter code to refer to themselves as automatic translation means that it doesn't matter what species a being is, they always refer to themselves as 'human'.
Sector General is such a good example of multi-species habitation. Having not just one but several different atmospheric considerations is really unique and I haven't seen it pulled off so extensively in any other series.
I was scrolling through the comments to see if anybody mentioned this series in this context. Its worldbuilding magnificence in relation to biological diversity, one I would recommend to any avid sci-fi reader... if you can stomach unpalatable amounts of sexism. I still recommend it, the sexism is of rather benign variety, "a product of its time" so to speak, it's just so rampantly present whenever the line between doctors and nurses is visible, it just sticks out by sheer amount, like a pound of salt in a gallon of broth. I find it ironic, almost to the point of this irony being the main take away from reading the series, how a person of such vivid imagination, imagination proven page by page, would be comfortable in assuming the structure of the human society would remain a carbon copy of early 20th century Earth. Hell, that's too generous of me - Earth as whole was a diverse place no matter which year in its history we make a freeze frame of. He just copied his own, quite narrow, social circles, and projected them not only on entire humanity of far future, but even many alien species. Just... how, man... how?
@@echinorlax It is something I noticed on later readings. I first came across the series when I was very young back in the eighties. Nowadays, looking back on it, the position of Murchison almost feels as if she's been lifted out of a Carry On film as a stereotypical nurse. I haven't read all the novels, but I believe that later she gets more agency as a full doctor. In that aspect it's an acquired taste, similar to Lovecraft where you have to get by his contempt of anyone who isn't "pure" bred. I do think that White comes from that era where science fiction writers were far more interested in the problem of their story rather than the characters. Clarke and especially Asimov seemed to love to use fiction to put forward a problem then have some clever solution put forward by a barely sketched out character.
The White Space novels have a very similar hospital - enough that I wonder if the author may have taken some inspiration from Sector General. The core hospital serves the entire galaxy, as a center for the most highly specialist care to which more generalised hospitals can refer patents with exceptionally rare or difficult conditions. Like Sector General it's a multi-species hospital partitioned into many parts of differing temperature, atmospheric mix and pressure. It's also spin-gravity, so the areas for low-gravity-adapted species are closer to the center and high-gravity on the rim.
For part of the story there's a disruption to hospital systems that disables the lifts, so getting from one place to another often has to be done through several changes of environment suit and airlock.
Thank you for giving me that wisdom.
One thing I used in a book I wrote set on a multi species space station was different species having different day lengths/sleeping patterns/regeneration cycles or whatever. Made it a real pain trying to arrange a meeting that wasn't in the middle of the "night" for someone.
The high gravity species from Orville bugged me. They should not even vaguely resemble a standard human. At best they should look more like D&D dwarves. Short, wide, thick with legs like a rhino.
Not necessarily. Some inhabitants of a low gravity world might look at us humans as wonder how come we look like them instead of being short and stocky.
@@112313 A humanoid that evolved or adapted to a low or no-gravity environment (The Intregal Tree for example) wouldn't look like us. They would view us as being dwarves.
The scene from Hot Fuzz was hilarious, and Space Balls is hysterical...
The crossover between different ability and disability is interesting. I remember the Green lantern story about Rot lop fan. He is inducted into the Green lantern corps but his species lives in darkness and his whole species is blind and their language doesn't include anything about either light or vision. Which means that the universal translator built into the Green lantern ring can't convey concepts like light and green and lantern. It becomes a complete lacuna for him, so they have to sort of translate the concept into sound, he's not a Green lantern, he's the f sharp bell, and although he makes the same kind of light constructs as everyone else, his brain interprets it all in the context of sound.
I found the concept of a completely blind Green Lantern fascinating.
"In loudest din or hush profound,
My ears catch evil's slightest sound.
Let those who toll out evil's knell,
Beware my power: The F-Sharp Bell!" --Rot Lop Fan
And he still manages to make it rhyme in English, at that! What a guy!
I think some of my favourite examples of this come from the Official Traveller Universe. While most of the species in the Third Imperium are oxygen breathers, many breathe different proportions of oxygen, or need the presence of something that is a contaminant to humans, so Concentrator Masks, Filter Masks and Breathers are relatively common.
There's also the matter of sizes; some Sophonts are tiny (a Llellewyloly is a ball about 0.5 meters in diameter standing on meter-long legs/arms) and humongous (a Virushi is an eight-limbed, quadrupedal rhinoceros-looking behemoth that weights a metric ton and stands 3 meters tall).
A wild GAB appears!
This is one area I'd be interested in seeing how JMS reboots Babylon 5. Robotic surgery might be a way to deal with surgery through encounter suits and may change the B5 pilot.
Due to my scifi roots, I *love* including the language and biology challenges in my D&D games. Underground races that haven't seen the surface in hundreds of years? Why would they speak common? If they evolved underground, they don't even bother with light sources--they can see just find and their food is designed to grow in the dark. Going to the far north beyond the mountains? Completely separate language unlike anything the players have met, so a couple sessions just figuring out communication (when no one has Tongues or Comprehend Languages). It's one of my favorite curve-balls they don't expect. This video exemplifies why it's so much fun to throw such challenges at them.
There is one scene from the star fire series that I love, basically the carrier element of a multi species fleet got shot to hell, and as the birds are coming home controllers are scrambling not just to find bays for all the surviving fighters but bays on ships that can feed them and refill their environmental systems, assembling scratch squadrons based off of species that are physically capable of speaking the same language, because fighters are to small to carry translation software. There are scenarios where the pilots can understand the squadron leader just fine but are physically incapable of making the sounds to communicate back.
I'm going to have to watch this at least five more times but this is a great writers guide on how to write multiple species
I kind of hope we get an obligate aquatic Federation ship in a future episode of Lower Decks, just for the sake of letting the writers and animators do something entirely new in the trek franchise.
Not so entirely new. The animated series had aquatic crewmembers, 50 years ago.
I'll add another point (which usually comes up in softer sci-fi settings): what happens when two (or more!) alien species *look* fairly similar, but are quite different on the inside? E.g. consider so many of the different aliens shown in Star Trek: what happens to "bystander" first aid responses when someone would need actual training in order to tell several similar species apart?
Is that person currently suffering a heart attack a Human, or a Vulcan? Is that person currently grabbing a piece of food from the serving tray a [Species_A] who can eat it just fine, or the similar-looking [Species_B] who will be poisoned by it (but might be new to the area and isn't aware). Etc., etc.
Every year IRL, quite a large number of dogs and other pet animals die or are sickened by their loving human caretakers feeding them food (or providing other 'care' such as unusual exercise/lack thereof, nail 'trimming,' drinks, etc.) that is actually not healthy for them, and that's for species which we have evolved alongside for tens or hundreds of thousands of years! How common would it be for multiple aliens living alongside to genuinely make a mistake that harms/sickens a friend? (And the dark side: how easy would it be to cover up a murder when it's common enough to claim "I didn't know Centaurans were allergic to strawberries!")
Thanks for the subtle XCOM rep in the background lol
"Peeing your bones out" is not a phrase I ever thought I'd hear, but it makes perfect sense in this context.
Conical spin-gravity on low-gravity planets, along with other novel facets to spin-gravity, could be an entire video on itself.
There's a series of books about a space hospital called "Sector General", it's a mix of short stories and longer narratives. I might be misremembering, because it's been a good decade since I've read it, but one of those short stories focused on a wrecked ship found on the outskirts of charted space that had its discoverers baffled, since it didn't seem to make sense. One of those baffling aspects was a series of tubes running throughout the ship, each carrying a different gas, with vents in each cabin. The mysterious thing was, nobody could figure out why they were separated if they ended up going out through the same vents, and even more so since some of the gasses would cause some unfortunate reactions when mixed. In the end it turned out that each room got a different mix of gases to create a specific atmosphere because the ship was a space ambulance working for the uncharted space's equivalent of the titular hospital.
The setting also had different stuff that covered multispecies habitation, like how everyone had a personal gravity generator - one of the recurring doctors was a giant mosquito-like creature that would've been squashed by the station's default gravity setting, so he had it set to like 0.25G, if not lower.
Yes! I had forgotten about Sector General. That was a great series of stories.
Yes, this was a great series that took all these things seriously. And often they had to treat unknown aliens, so first had to puzzle out what was what in their ships and their bodies. Really fun books.
The Sector General books are a good example on the medical side. Using different techniques in different environments for different species. And if necessary downloading the memories of doctors of the species being treated to have the proper skills to do so.
I had fun with this in a fantasy setting with the human protagonists suffering with dwarven architecture (the ceilings are too low, the seats too low and the beds too small) and low lighting (subterranean dwellers can see better in the dark) as well as being told they speak too loud (hearing becomes more acute in darkness). Dwarves in turn take days to adapt to surface light and noise.
When dealing with a species of elves, the humans struggle with their food which (as forest dwellers) is primarily fruit, fungi and nut based unlike the cereal grains (wheat, barley, rye, oats etc) which are the staple of the human diet grown in open plains. Elves live off the produce of orchards of trees; not fields of grass.
And of course orcs eat a lot of meat. Too much meat for the human digestive tract to comfortably process. Because of their size and strength, orcs have to eat more food and more often than humans and they tire quicker; lacking human stamina.
I've always thought of making elves obligate predators as part of the reason for their nebulously 'low population'. Like it's the easiest and cleanest way to make there actually be a clear reason that these nigh-immortal beings not able to not be able to get past the population problem over a certain period of time. Otherwise they stay identical, but their intrinsic desire for 'balance with nature' comes from the fact they don't have access to high calorie crops (though to note, this doesn't actually limit them to 'meat only' diets - it just means that they can't survive off grains like humans. Even cats eat vegetation, they just can't live without meat-derived-nutrients).
@@reganator5000
I always thought the immortal, low-population-growth aspect of elves was ridiculous. The result is either catastrophic over-population as every elf ever born doesn't die from natural causes, or they get into a war with a species that can replenish their losses in a generation and continue the war against an enemy that needs a 1000 years to recover from a single big battle.
I gave them long life-spans, 500 years, and even that has many of the same problems. The Firire (Grey elves) in my story note that they still haven't recovered their numbers from the last war which at 500 years ago is a 2-3 generations for them. For the humans, 20-25 generations have been born since then. It's even worse for the longer lived race of elves that have 1000 year lives. The same Grey elf notes that between his grandfather and himself, humans have advanced from using bronze to steel.
Uhm, a human could actually survive off of an entirely meat diet. A person would likely have to eat a larger variety of the animals parts than just the muscle tissue and some fat, but it is actually possible. It's a full vegan diet that a human can't survive on.
@@commanderknight9314 you need quite a varied source of meat to do so - Narwhal is very important to most exclusively meat based diets today, though obviously in fantasy dragons, owlbears or giant spiders might fulfil a similar role. Though it's also worth remembering that most animals do not exclusively eat vegan or meat-only diets - they'll take what they can find. Cats must eat large quantities of meat to survive, but they still eat grass to help their digestion, and cows will happily stamp on small animals then eat them if they get too close.
@@commanderknight9314
The human digestive system is designed for an omnivorous diet. We don't have the digestive tract capable of subsisting off meat alone. Animals that do are able to digest all parts of their prey; including bone and fur/hair. In order to live off a meat diet, you would to eat only certain cuts of meat meaning 90% of the animal would be discarded and you would still be dangerously low on fibre and chronically short of Vitamin C and E.
This is why sailors in the Age of Sail living off salted/dried meat and ships biscuits died of scurvy.
The carnivore diet is also lacking in salt which combined with the lack of Vitamin C would impair kidney function.
Basically, you'd die with bleeding gums while pissing blood with the lack of Vitamin E leaving you too weak to stand.
Discovery takes that rear barrier force shield for granted, you can't 100% guarantee it will always stay up
It's always been a major pet peeve of mine. How, in most mainstream sci-fi, all species eat the same stuff, get drunk or stoned the same way, all meds work the same, etc, unless there's a plot point requiring it to be otherwise. I love how this video takes it even further.
One of my favourite examples of cross-species cohabitation is in the John Ringo/David Weber Prince Roger series. Our heroes are stranded on an alien world with a different biochemistry, and a very real concern they have is eventually dying from malnutrition due to some vitamins and amino acids not existing in the local biome.
And at one point, our technologically advanced protagonists wind up being held hostage by a local low-tech potentate who tries to force them to cooperate by poisoning them with something that is tasteless and odourless to the locals and requires a steady supply of an antidote to be survivable, but to the humans it smells like sewage and tastes like rotten fennel, and it has absolutely no other effects on them.
Another I really like is also by John Ringo in the Troy series. A human basically manages to uplift humanity to join the interstellar community by discovering that maple syrup has an effect more or less on par with a mix of tequila and cocaine on one alien species, and he sets up really lucrative trade with them.
I can think of three very different books that all come up with the same less-than-ideal solution: Take a cell sample and culture into meat paste in-vitro, to meet at least some of that nutritional requirement. One refers to the result as a "me-burger."
The last one reminds me a bit of the Worldwar series too - among the many things which derails an attempted alien invasion of earth is the discovery that common ginger acts as a highly addictive drug best compared to cocaine. As the invaders long ago dealt with any dangerous recreational drug problems on their homeworld they have no knowledge of how to handle such a situation and much of their army is soon hooked on it. The human defenders are more than happy to manufacture it in great quantity and teach the lost arts of smuggling and dealing.
It's not a large scale established habitation like on Babylon 5, but Andy Weir's _Project Hail Mary_ showed nicely how to navigate around living in a hostile environment. Pressurization, temperature, air locks, different gasses and even absence of visible light.
The assorted “Sector General” stories by James White tackle most of the issues presented here as central elements of the setting on a multispecies hospital, most especially including the question of how to provide care for radically different aliens. Some elements of the books are pretty dated in the way a lot of classic Sci-Fi of the 1960s and 1970s can be, but they are really interesting reading.
Ian Douglas' Star Carrier series was good for multi-species groups. The antagonist Sh'daar are made up of lots of different species, from all range of homeworlds (and times). Three I remember clearly are-
The 'diplomat traders', that refrain from eating in front of other races because they, well, vomit on their food before ingesting it. Think they were also the ones that talked by belching.
One of the races spoke in pairs. They couldn't be translated at first because one of them would say one thing, the other something different. Then it was discovered when they talked together, their combined voices created a third harmonic that carried what they were actually trying to say.
Another species, that used echolocation to 'see' and communicate, captured a human pilot, and were trying to learn about us and how to communicate. Their doctors couldn't figure out how humans generated or 'saw' sound like they did. The human's appendage on 'top' of their body clearly wasn't doing it, but they were curious if the fatty deposits on one side of the human's torso were their sound organs. (spoiler- the human was female) It was overall a good lesson on the problems of interspecies communication.
Aye, love that series. Hard sci-fi with so many tech that are possible postulations of current ones!
The book Project Hail Mary did a really good job at exploring a lot of these issues in depth
That the book essentially only had 2 characters (1 human and 1 alien) made it really easy to delve deep on this at the individual level
This is why I love the world of 40k. All of the several excellent questions you proposed share the same answer.
In the novel, Children of Ruin, a cephalopod species has space travel in water-filled ships, with all the physics headaches for manoeuvring under G that entails.
I haven't seen much sci-fi but I think the use of telepresence robots could be helpful for multispecies habitation. Stick everyone into pods that take care of their biological needs and remote control robots to operate the ship.
Even with species that can mostly live in the same environment, there might be slight differences in preference, as Garak famously lamented. Exactly what level do you set the lights, how warm or how humid should it be, how long should the days be, etc. Some of this varies even between humans, not to mention with entirely different species!
Was not expecting a _Spongebob Squarepants_ clip to show up in a Spacedock video.
The medical concern is something I considered in a sci-fi world I’m building. When humanity gained access to alien technology, our technology in regards to chemical engineering, metallurgy, space travel, weapons, etc. jumped forward by 1,000 years or more, but because medical technology and techniques couldn’t be transferred between species, it lagged. So while most technologies humanity has access to are in the year 3311, medicine is stuck in the actual year of 2311.
about medicen you could have a simpler kind of doctor that knows just enough for first aid for every kind of creature and specialists who do medical school about one spiecies! that way you could basicaly go to a nearby station for the simple stuff and if needed to go a bigger station for more complex stuff
If enough species are in the area, IA doctors might be the optimal solution since they could maintain optimal skill even on species they very rarely interact with.
Conspicuous by its absence was any reference to the "Sector General" series of short stories, novellas and novels, by James White. The plots generally revolved around the difficulties of treating patients that are very alien. One of the short stories is the response to a mass casualty event at an interstellar spaceport when a large passenger vehicle crashes into a terminal, but the terminal and vehicle have mutually incompatible atmospheres. Chaos ensues, because nobody knows enough other species medicine to properly triage the injured, let alone treat them. This turns out to be the event that inspired the creation of the first multi-species hospital.
I like the sci fi concept where species that resemble Earth ones, like anthropomorphic cats or reptiles, were actual lizards and cats that humans genetically uplifted and therefore can also live in Earths environment. Wheras the aliens are truly alien
That sounds like Red Dwarf (although it doesn't have true aliens).
Good examples:
1. The City of a Thousand Planets in Valerian
2. Citadel in Mass Effect series.
3. Federation ships in Star Trek series
Glorious. The best example of translating between languages is represented by translating Deep Somerset-> Bristol -> London. A perfect example
The concerns of different needs of healthcare for different species is the reason why Medical Robots are created in Star Wars universe
The tmnt cartoon from the early 2000s actually had a lot of fun with a lot of this stuff surprisingly for a kids cartoon
Whilst I'm sure someone else has mentioned them, I didn't see it in ghe comments; Becky Chambers explored a lot of this in 'A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet' and the books sharing its universe. Neal Asher does also sort of touch on the food issue in the Polity books. And it is always good to see Adrian Tchaikovsky's 'Children of ....' books being brought up.
I like the way Star Trek TOS handled the medical care issue by mostly having Bones complain he didn't know WTF he was doing whenever he had to work on Spok or other aliens.
I have a (non-canon) Star Trek book about the TOS crew on their first adventure together. They established first contact with another alien race and beamed them aboard the ship, only to realize they weren't able to survive in the higher gravity on the ship. They had to beam them back real quick, and Mr. Spock accidentally got some of their personalities stuck in him when he unintentionally mind melded during the process. They were eventually able to host them on the Enterprise by reducing the gravity in specific areas, but not without Scotty spending several hours on it and covering Engineering with technical manuals and blueprints to figure out how. It was a fun book to read.
The medical side of things reminds me of the medical droids from star wars. During the animated movie, jabba's son was sick but the droid knew exactly how to treat him even though hutts are vastly different from most other republic species.
Boy howdy.
Good knowledge in this one.
Bit bummed you missed a banger of a Farscape clip in there, where they are all making their favorite foods.
Very insightful episode all in all.
One nice touch I thought is the Boron in the X series. They are aquatic, require water, their ships are filled with "air" (not necessarily oxygen) because air is lighter than water. Filling a ship with water would make it too heavy. Instead they have tiny chambers full of water and passageways. They use what is effectively space suits to go around their own ships with robotic arms and hands. Co-habitation with them on their own ship would almost be weird. As an Oxygen breather you would be restricted to other parts of the ship.
It doesn't make sense for an aquatic species to have artificial ship gravity. Without that, they could have _mostly_ air, but hypersaturated with enough moisture for their gills/etc to function (and not dry out.) No suits required. They'd only flood the ship when they are on planets and the mass doesn't matter. (And being aquatic, they'd presumably have ships that land on (or in) water.)
@@1FatLittleMonkey i tried searching this, apparently the one time they took fish to the international space station to test, their bone density dropped almost immediately. 10x faster than humans. If this applies to all aquatics then artificial gravity would be even more vital for them.
One of my dreams is to make an animated series based on the Sector General series by James White. It's about a deep space hospital built specifically to house as many alien species as necessary, and the aliens are actually alien in appearance as well as behavior, you've got giant elephant things that wear symbiotic pets on their heads, giant silver caterpillars with literally no concept of tact, insects with a strong empathic power, sea monsters, radiation eaters, hive minds, even ones that breath superheated steam. This series does everything I love and does it great and I hope more people check it out ❤🎉
A very minor one I think but the Predators breathe slightly more oxygen and nitrogen than in the Earth’s atmosphere hence the inhaler thing in Predator 2
There's a HFY story i read a while back, that had literal Space Dragons.
They lived on molten or high temp worlds, kinda like Venus.
It was paced rapidly but the PoV character, (one of said Dragons) mentioned that the humans eventually developed suits and tech that could allow each side to visit the other for short periods, but otherwise didn't really co-habitate.
It was a neat take on the subject, IMO.
*Fun fact:* In the Star Wars universe, the closest thing to a civilization whose lack of multispecies is as high as on Earth is the archaic and isolated planet Kesh, inhabited for thousands of years only by the Keshiri species and a group of Sith humans who crashed on said planet. Something quite remarkable about this society is that, when the descendants of the Sith found a holographic projection of the Sith Pureblood Naga Sadow, many were horrified by the "out of the ordinary" appearance of that being, not being aware until that moment that there were more species in the universe apart from the humans and the Keshiri. I think it's a pretty accurate portrayal of how people of our World would react when meeting an alien by first time
Not seen the vid yet, but who cares - B5 thumbnail!
I was wondering what that was from.
At first, I thought it was from Star Trek: Enterprise.
Agreed. So excited for anything that showcases Babylon 5 lol
@@mitwhitgaming7722ST aliens have the bone structure on the front of their head, it’s TOTALLY different😅
I really like the way this issue is treated in the Foreigner series by CJ Cherryh. The humans and atevi are only somewhat compatible - they're fine with the same pressure and atmosphere but atevi are noticeably larger and have a diet where many dishes have high levels of alkaloids dangerous to humans.
The Expanse has a really interesting take, Amos is just an absolute beast basically because he was born on and grew up on Earth. His bones and muscles had gravity to develop that most people in the belt didn't get, they basically got a worse version/substitute or a work around that just ain't as good as the real thing.
You're so good at that lowkey/deadpan comedy. I couldn't stop laughing at the use of the Hot Fuzz clip, lmao
One Star Trek fanfic that I am reading currently actually deals with this slightly. While 90% of the Federation can handle O2/N2 atmospheres at 1 atmo pressure and around 70F temperature, some like Vulcans like it hotter and Betazoids like it colder. So you will often have a crew that is nearly or completely one species, so a Vulcan ship can be hotter and drier while a Betazoid ship can be colder and wetter. Human ships are notable for their mixed crews because they are basically smack in the middle of the usual range. That last 10% are those species that require vastly different food, atmosphere mix or pressure, and temperature requirements, and they ALSO get their own ships, and even their own Star Fleet Academy on a planet they can stand.
It would be interesting to see a fictional setting where two species rise to dominance explicitly because they both shard near identical tolerance and preferences for their environment. Cross haring of ships and resources is not a problem as their needs to be no special accommodations allow a level of cooperation that other species do not enjoy.
I can think of one way to get around reduced dexterity: Have the hands kept in the sleeves of the environmental suit and have them control mechanical hands that are part of the suit.
There's a lot of web stories that will for a time tolerate being realistic with a language gap or barrier but but then the author gets bored of the difficulties of minute gaps or as to yet unexplored concepts and hand waves to "they understand each other enough now" and you'll only ever hear about it again when they're interested in insert surprising cultural difference or similarity. I want to go about learning the tools and getting good at the basic elements, but at a point the struggles and difficulties mentioned in this video are the kind of things I get inspiration from, I hope at one point I'll be able to write something that what address both very difficult cohabitation situations and the surprisingly compatible ones. Because there's a different angle in the idea of everyone being incompatible, and that is you end up assembling a crew that is more compatible than a homogeneous one, where one's respiratory waste element is another's fuel element, now there's a lot of character drama to be had when the crew is making a full resource loop or a few with what they consume and what they have as waste.
Frankly, it's not just web stories that can give up on a language barrier like that. Stargate (the TV show) started with linguistic understanding of various civilizations of humans abducted by ancient aliens (and the ancient aliens themselves) being difficult as a major plot point, creating the requirement to bring specialists along. Fairly quickly, they dropped it and quietly made everyone start speaking modern English as they wanted to explore a larger variety of plots without the constant background challenge of communicating through interpreters and puzzling out a new set of languages and training interpreters every time they contacted a new group.
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There is an example of this in a book series called The Commonwealth Saga, by Peter F. Hamilton, where an alien species communicates through the use of patterns drawn in UV light onto their "eyes".
I'd love to see you do a breakdown of Robotech Mechs and space carriers
What a nightmare.
The Imperium is definitely onto something...