Are UFO's Advanced Science craft?

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CaptainBeowulf
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Post by CaptainBeowulf »

Actually Seedload, however you may feel about GIThruster, Kean's book is just about the best one on the subject. It's the most objective one I've read, with no real attempts to propose convoluted conspiracy theories or to propose exactly what the UFOs are. Kean seems to lean toward the aliens explanation, but she and the other contributors seem pretty straightforward that there's not enough information to say exactly what UFOs are.

What is useful about her book is that she demonstrates that a small percentage of UFO observations remain unexplained. This means that for that small percentage of cases, no mundane plausible explanation has been found - pranks/hoaxes, "witnesses" who are BS artists, witnesses who were drunk/high/having mental illness issues/night terrors; ice crystal debris, ball lightning, insects flying past a camera lens, optical illusions, etc. etc. etc.

I believe she puts the number of unexplained reports around 5% - this is probably where GIThruster is getting his numbers from. She seems to have done a fairly extensive analysis, but as mentioned up-thread, it's likely no one could analyze all the UFO sightings out there. I personally suspect the number of credible reports is lower - but even if it's lower by an order of magnitude - say 0.5% are unexplainable - that's probably still over a hundred over the last century. So, as long as you can't explain them by any conventional means, then you can also consider what you might normally think are bizarre possibilities, including interstellar travel.

Kean seems to have taken to making occasionally posts on a blog associated with the Huffington Post. You can read three here - although the second one seems a bit more sensationalist than the attitude she takes in her book:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leslie-ke ... 94028.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leslie-ke ... 42585.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leslie-ke ... 24008.html

Here's a rebuttal to criticism of her book by Oberg that she wrote in MSNBC:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38977500/ns ... DWOa6NSQrU

And here, you can read a summary and a few pages of excerpts on Google books:

http://books.google.ca/books/about/UFOs ... edir_esc=y

For the purposes of this discussion, that should really suffice.

CaptainBeowulf
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Post by CaptainBeowulf »

Also note in this context that most UFO sightings are in the US.
Skipjack, from what I've read about UFOs, including but not limited to Kean's stuff, this is not the case.

It seems that France and South America generate a lot of reports, and a decent number out of the UK as well.

I'm not saying that this means it's more likely they're aliens with M-E drives, just that it's not mainly an American phenomenon to see or believe you've seen UFOs.

CaptainBeowulf
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Post by CaptainBeowulf »

The only thing more pathetic would be if we were to develop interstellar technologies of our own, travel to a distant civilized planet, and then spend millenniums popping in and out, grabbing aliens, taking samples, shoving sticks up their orifices, randomly slaughtering their food, ducking in and out of their volcanoes, making pretty circles in their crops, and randomly getting caught by witnesses who always don't seem to have the least bit of ability to properly document or record the event.
:lol:

But dude, looking at human history I think that's exactly the sort of thing we might do. I mean, look at what we did over the last century. We developed rockets - we probably spent enough money on them as a civilization to have fully colonized the moon by now. However, 99% of the money we spent on rockets was to either shoot them at each other, or build tens of thousands pointed back at ourselves ready to shoot if we got into a really big squabble.

We've probably spent enough on atomic/nuclear devices to have things like relatively clean, safe thorium reactors and possibly things like Polywells by now. However, most of that money went on testing explosive atomic devices and then manufacturing tens of thousands of warheads to stick on our rockets and point back at ourselves.

It's easy for a sapient species to do stuff that seems totally bizarre when you step back and look at it objectively. Take a differently evolved neural network but let it be as nutty as us, and maybe landing on other planets to do cow surgery is what you get. :P

----------

In all seriousness, though, I don't take the cow surgery/crop circle/orifice probing by aliens accounts very seriously. IIRC the small number of people like Kean who look at UFO incidents seriously don't really find these sort of accounts to be particularly credible.

There's a very slim chance that a few of the accounts of aliens abducting people, taking tissue samples and sticking some sort of chips in them might have a logical basis (although the accounts generally sound more like hallucinations/dreams/misinterpretations of reality brought on by paranoid psychotic states to me). We go around throughout nature "abducting" other animals, taking blood or tissue samples, and sticking tracking chips in them, usually in tags stapled through their ears or fins. We do it to bears, we do it to sharks, we do it to all kind of things. We don't try to converse with those creatures, because we don't think there's any point: they wouldn't understand us. Why do we do this? To learn more about other species - partially just curiosity, the desire to have a complete record of the behavior of all species, because we have Phd candidates in biology, zoology, animal behaviour, ichthyology etc. who need a subject to write a Phd thesis on, and at times because we either want to try to preserve a species or, on the other hand, prevent it from expanding its range. Aliens could be doing exactly the same thing with us, especially if they believe that we're technologically on the cusp of developing deep-space travel. Better to study and decide whether to extend greetings or exterminate before we get there.

This is not an explanation I particularly subscribe to, but it is an internally consistent reason for something to show up, fly around and examine what's going on here while avoiding direct contact.

If that's what's happening, which no one has proven.

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

If you have a suggestion for a viable alien form that is not "human-like" I would certainly be interested in considering your alternative. In the absence of that, I would suggest that the necessary physiological requirements for a species capable of producing high technology is very likely going to resemble a human form.
Plenty of them. You are even assuming that an intelligent alien life form would require a planet with a similar environment to what we have here on earth. What about (slightly) stronger gravity, a different atmosphere, maybe limited visibility on that planet, causing them in turn to develop some sorts of built in radar, or some orientation via sound (like bats)?
I'll bet good money that higher lifeforms are more or less familiar everywhere they form.
Based on what evidence? How many extraterrestrial life forms have you examined, has anyone here examined?

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

What is useful about her book is that she demonstrates that a small percentage of UFO observations remain unexplained.
So because nobody has come up for an explanation for them yet, means that it HAS to be aliens, hu?
One might just as well claim that it was the government putting chips in peoples heads to make them see things or "them jews poisoning the water"...that one is always popular (please note: lots of sarkasm in that sentence).
All are at least as likely as an explanation containing aliens and for all of them there is just as much evidence: none.

CaptainBeowulf
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Post by CaptainBeowulf »

If you have a suggestion for a viable alien form that is not "human-like" I would certainly be interested in considering your alternative. In the absence of that, I would suggest that the necessary physiological requirements for a species capable of producing high technology is very likely going to resemble a human form.
Seems you and Skippy are on the opposite ends of the spectrum here. I tend more to agree with you, that humanoid is a logical form to evolve assuming that convergent evolution happens across the universe, not just on one planet.

Other body plans I suspect would be quite common:

1. Relatively hard-limbed/hard bodied form with multiple appendages, like a large, sapient spider. Essentially, the entire body functions as a hand, instead of having hands at the end of limbs. Seeing what it's doing need be no problem - once again, if it's similar to a spider, it probably has secondary and tertiary eyes arranged at various points around its head - not just main eyes pointing straight ahead. Even a sentient trilobyte might have evolved in this direction, but perhaps with more than 8 limbs.

2. Soft-limbed/soft-bodied form with multiple appendages, like a squid or an octopus. Again, the whole body can function as a hand, but each tentacle is likely quite dexterous on its own. This creature would definitely be more dexterous than the spider-form (spideroid?), and would probably out-compete it if both evolved on the same planet.

3. Forward-leaning biped with long stabilizing tail. This form has evolved repeatedly - large herbivorous dinosaurs, most famously the "duckbill" species; both small and large carnivorous dinosaurs, from dienonychus to tyrannosaurs; and kangaroos (although the last hop rather than walk). Various lineages could develop fully dexterous hands together with binocular vision. Perhaps there will be a tendency to evolve towards a fully upright humanoid form in order to better balance a large brain on top of the body trunk, but that doesn't seem absolutely necessary. Various skeletal or muscular tricks could probably evolve to hold a large brain without requiring the animal to develop a completely upright stance.

4. If you're terrestrial you don't have to be optimized for running around on the ground. Obviously squidoids/octopusoids might well live in aquatic environments, although some may also have adapted to land. However, if you get humanoids you could just get something built more like a chimpanzee. I see no reason why you couldn't reach human-level intelligence and make tools with dexterous hands but continue to spend a lot of time up trees instead of running around on the ground.

Then, there are the totally different biologies, which I suspect also exist. I wouldn't be surprised if speculation about things like sentient clouds living in gas giant atmospheres turns out to have some merit. There are probably things we wouldn't even recognize as life when we first saw it. However, based on growing recent astronomical evidence that rocky planets in zones around stars where liquid water can exist are not incredibly rare, I suspect that vaguely recognizable forms such as those described above may appear from time to time.

Note: this is merely convergent evolution in form. There is no reason to think that, as on Star Trek shows, you could interbreed with an alien humanoid. Your DNA would almost certainly bear more resemblance to a fruit fly's DNA than to the alien humanoid's DNA. The alien humanoid may not even be based on DNA, but perhaps RNA or some other combination of nucleotides, and it may not be structured into cells as we think of them, but instead have "super-cells" or lots of tiny differentiated cells, equivalent to our organelles, resident alongside each other in each tissue type. However, in terms of large-scale mechanical structure you would be vaguely similar.

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

I tend more to agree with you, that humanoid is a logical form to evolve assuming that convergent evolution happens across the universe, not just on one planet.
How can it happen the same way, when the planets can be so very different. There could be planets where life has never developed on land at all.
Heck, I could imagine aliens with feathers (very common among the dinosaurs and the also very intelligent birds on earth), or something that resemles feathers. Crabs have mouths that open sideways and so on and so forth. I think that your example with tentacles is actually pretty good. Also why only two arms and legs? Why legs at all? Maybe wings instead and just hands to hold onto things when they are not flying.
I can think of a bazillion examples.

CaptainBeowulf
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Post by CaptainBeowulf »

Given life formed on another planet there's little reason to suppose it formed here independently. Our planet could have been seeded with life and that's why it bears a resemblance.
GIThruster, I've heard people make this argument a few times since the idea of seeding life became popular. I don't really understand why.

I would say it's possible that life here could have been seeded, either deliberately or by natural "panspermia" via asteroids. However, the simplest and easiest explanation seems to me that life likely arises wherever the conditions are correct. So, for whatever reasons early earth was conducive to the emergence of single-celled organisms, and it went on from there.

CaptainBeowulf
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Post by CaptainBeowulf »

Skipjack - obviously the more different the planets, the more likely you are to get different body plans.

The details could vary quite a bit. You could quite possibly get humanoids with sideways opening mouths, or feathers instead of hair. The hands to hold on to things when not flying is borderline - this would sort of resemble what an owl or a crow can do. They can use their feet quite efficiently as hands, with crows sometimes even holding sticks as tools. However, it probably becomes difficult to remain a flying animal when you develop a heavy neural network. Perhaps the equivalent of the central nervous system can be spread out in tendrils across the length of the body and the wings, I don't know, but it seems likely what you end up with is something equivalent to a large flightless bird. At that point it's stuck using the legs both to run around and to use tools, which is kind of a compromise, although not much worse than the spider-form, I suppose. Perhaps there are some pretty small, low density rocky planets with low gravity but still with thick atmospheres where an intelligent flying creature would live.

Overall, though, I think what people are thinking is that if you get rocky planets made up of similar elements, you get many familiar environments. In those cases, some of the time you'll get something similar simply through convergent evolution. Something that could be mistaken for a human? No, but I'd say that a "gray" is possible. Grossly similar structure, although quite different in details (stature and proportions of limbs, head and body; mouth with no lips, different type of skin, differently shaped eye sockets with differently shaped pupils, mouth with no lips, no external ear, etc).

It seems to me that such a level of convergent evolution isn't much more extreme than getting a duckbill dinosaur and a kangaroo - an obvious difference being that the human and the hypothetical gray aren't as different in overall size.

Is it likely that out of all the possible combinations, it was humanoid aliens who found us and started poking around here? No, it doesn't seem so. On the other hand, if the different types of craft GIThruster likes to talk about - triangular ships, saucers, "tops" and cigars - all represent different species or coalitions of species, then they might have decided to select one of their humanoid species to examine us, on the assumption that with similar evolutionary histories they might understand us better. Or, perhaps we just get visited most often by grays because they're more interested in us since we're similar to them, whereas the bird-people think a bunch of monkeys are pretty boring. So, again you can find logical reasons depending on how far you're willing to speculate.

However, I don't really find accounts of encounters with grays to be credible. So, I don't particularly believe the explanation I just wrote - it just seems to me that grays are not completely beyond the realm of possibility.



NB - one popular interpretation amongst UFO "believers" has been that the aliens are indeed genetically related to us in some manner, as GIThruster suggested above, and that this is why the grays look similar. These theories usually include some sort of argument that we're an experiment being run by the grays, or that the grays are some sort of guardians or "watchers" who want to protect us from ourselves. I've seen theories extended to include the belief that the grays are in fact manufactured from human DNA or fetuses taken from abducted humans by the genuinely different aliens who we've never seen - that the genuinely different aliens from other planets want to manufacture the grays to act as local caretakers. And so on. I would say that my explanation for the appearance of grays, if they were to actually exist, is simpler and more reasonable than most of these convoluted UFOlogist theories.

CaptainBeowulf
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Post by CaptainBeowulf »

So because nobody has come up for an explanation for them yet, means that it HAS to be aliens, hu?
One might just as well claim that it was the government putting chips in peoples heads to make them see things or "them jews poisoning the water"...that one is always popular (please note: lots of sarkasm in that sentence).
All are at least as likely as an explanation containing aliens and for all of them there is just as much evidence: none.
I'm not GIThruster man, you don't have to argue with me about it.

The point is that those observations are unexplained, so you have to entertain some bizarre possibilities.

Aliens from other star systems is one. Aliens from alternate dimensions is another.

More complex ball lightning doing stuff that we're unaware that it does could explain some of the situations. If ball lightning can roll along the roofs of cars or appear to "follow" you, maybe it "follows" aircraft because of atmospheric pressure, E-M output from the aircraft, etc.

Secret government programs is a fourth. However, I find it difficult to believe that anyone would really be bothering to build things like fifth generation fighters (F-35s or the equivalent MIGs or Chinese things on the drawing board) if they had things like these at an operational capacity. Tens to hundreds of billions is a bit much to spend on a massive coverup program - to just build conventional jets as misinformation when you have something better. Also, I don't believe that vast government conspiracies are workable over long periods of time - they fall apart and get exposed. So I don't really think any country is operating hyper-advanced craft.

Fifth is the idea, already jokingly proposed around here in recent days, that they're our own descendants from the future, coming back for whatever reasons (maybe to try to change history, maybe because the world is wrecked and they want to collect samples from the good old days to colonize another planet with, but they know that some sort of chronological protection mechanism will kick in if they try to do anything more).

I dunno, there are probably more options...

I just don't find the UFOs being alien spaceships explanation completely unbelievable. So, since we finally have a thread devoted to this discussion, I decided to state why in detail.

CaptainBeowulf
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Post by CaptainBeowulf »

I wanted to make another post on the subject of government conspiracies, since GIThruster seemed to indicate that he believes there is some sort of vast U.S. government conspiracy over in the M-E thread. He seems to have based this, in part, on his reading of Kean's book, as well as other sources.

I don't believe any government, including the U.S. government, is "covering up" the existence of aliens. I suspect that what happened was that after a couple of decades of detailed study by some departments of the U.S. government, such as the Air Force, they came to the conclusion that they didn't really know what was going on and even if they did, weren't in a position to do anything about it.

Like Kean and agencies in some countries like France and Chile have suggested, they probably found a very small percentage of events where something appeared to have been genuinely observed and wasn't explainable. Whatever was causing this didn't seem like an immediate threat, because it had been around at least 20 years and hadn't caused damage. If it *was* advanced science craft, from wherever, there was nothing that could be done about them. It had been established that they weren't Soviet advanced science craft, so no immediate worries.

At the same time, the U.S. was at the time one of two superpowers and was continually positioning itself as the leader of the free world. If there was any suspicion that further research would reveal that these were extraterrestrial advanced science craft that you couldn't do anything about, it might make America's large military investments look pointless and impotent. So, better to ignore it.

I've studied bureaucratic politics in governments in some detail. Governments are, of course, actually hundreds of large bureaucratic organizations, which are further subdivided into thousands of smaller ones. They actually fight among themselves the whole time - sometimes simply because the standard operating procedures of one organization conflict with those of another, in other cases because bureaucrats in charge of one organization want to gain more power at the expense of other ones. Due to its nation's demographic size and economic and military power, combined with the expansion of government first under FDR, and then as a result of WWII and the Cold War, the U.S. government was an especially large and unwieldy one. Its reaction to something it couldn't explain or confront would not have been to coherently get together, sit down and plan out a huge conspiracy. The easiest reaction - and historically, large organizations tend to "satisfice" or take the first adequate solution that comes along - would simply have been to dismiss the whole thing. The alternative, a complex conspiracy, would have fallen apart after two or three decades.

So, in the U.S. government you simply have a "dismissiveness" of UFO reports due to an attitude which became entrenched before the current bureaucrats ever worked for it. They don't necessarily understand why, just that everyone treats UFOs as a taboo subject that you can at best only occasionally joke about - they just take that attitude because everyone else does. Normal human organizational nature.

As for attitudes towards UFOs in the general public and among physicists, well:

1. See how guys like GoatGuy react to M-E theory. So far as I'm concerned, jury is still out on whether Woodward is right, but people like GG seem to see violations of the laws of thermodynamics, GR, SR, entropy etc. in anything they consider "fringe," and "fringe" propulsion to them pretty much includes anything that isn't some sort of rocket, thing fired from a gun or maglev rail, or a sail of some kind. Heck, IIRC several years ago some people tried to even claim that solar sails wouldn't work because they violated some sort of principle or other. A lot of people are invested in current theory or, on the engineering side, in current practice (like rockets) and seem to instinctively get defensive about anything that might rock the boat too much. And, legitimately, we see a lot of BS like Rossi's schemes, so people's BS detectors are on a hair trigger and likely go off when they shouldn't. In that sort of environment, aliens in UFOs are anathema because a spacedrive powerful enough to enable practical interstellar flight is anathema.

2. Most UFO accounts are BS. Kean seems to put around 95 percent of them as either honest mistakes that can be explained after research, or deliberate BS that can be debunked after research. I wouldn't be surprised if that's more like 99%. The public is used to hearing BS about UFOs and aliens. If the government is dismissive, and many physicists are dismissive, and everyone treats the subject as a joke... that's what everyone will do.

3. Many "UFOlogists" have added to this by writing science fiction accounts of alien abductions, government conspiracies etc. which they've presented as fact. These accounts generally fall apart. People notice this, and think UFO=BS.

4. Characters like Von Daniken somehow get on TV channels that used to be serious, like the history channel, with shows like "Ancient Aliens". The Nazca lines as landing symbols for interplanetary spaceships? I kind of think that if the ships could fly between star systems, they would have some sort of radar they could use to land, and if they'd been to earth many times before, they would have some sort of record of how to identify their favourite landing site (like the equivalent of a GPS coordinate or a transponder buried in the ground under the landing site). Much more likely that the ancient south americans had developed hot air balloons (IIRC there is some circumstantial evidence for this) and so could enjoy their own giant drawings on the ground. People watch these things for a good laugh and sometimes because they "want to believe," but in the end these shows tend to stretch things beyond credulity, so again, BS detectors are set off.

This is why you can't have a serious discussion about UFOs in the U.S. in particular, and only some of the time in most other places around the world. No vast conspiracy, just the result of predictable bureaucratic and cultural processes.

AcesHigh
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Post by AcesHigh »

about the Nazca lines, they were made to the gods. And gods live in the sky in most human cultures. Not because they are aliens. But because the Sun, the Moon, the stars and the wandering stars (planets) have always been misterious and powerful in the human psyche.

as for all the rest Daniken published, its all rubbish. There are tons of huge mistakes as well as direct FORGERIES AND LIES in Daniken´s books.

CaptainBeowulf
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Post by CaptainBeowulf »

however, I am still appaled that any super advanced UFO craft has ever been downed by malfunctions or by primitive human missiles/rockets.
Because I don't believe in a vast, sustained government conspiracy, I don't really think anyone has any captured UFOs. However, in theory:

Human missiles/rockets very unlikely. Why are malfunctions surprising?

Is there some sort of principle by which technology becomes less fallible as it becomes more advanced? I almost get the opposite impression: technology becomes slightly more fallible as it becomes more advanced, because the number of failure modes increase. This is partially compensated for by an increasing ability to build in back-up systems and to build in error-checking devices, such as computer modules which are dedicated solely to monitoring the health of a specific part of a device or vehicle. However, you can only have so many error-checkers and backups before your vehicle becomes unwieldy and wildly over-engineered.

Furthermore, if the aliens from other star systems theory is correct, then these spaceships have presumably recently traveled at least a few light years to get here (Barnard's Star would be their closest possible base in a star system, though they might have a base in interstellar space or a staging area at the edge of our solar system - say in a large Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt asteroid, where they could stop in for refit). More likely, they'd have traveled tens or hundreds of light years, or thousands. Presumably, like any vehicle, they get worn out.

Finally, atmospheric operations may be as stressful as anything else to them. There's a deep gravity well, thick atmosphere, all sorts of weird E-M interference - for instance, one might speculate that our Van Allen radiation belt could be a relatively uncommon type of radiation belt for a life-bearing rocky planet. This might all be just as - or maybe more - stressful for the ship than sitting in flat space surrounded by some Alcubierre-style warp metric (to cite one example of how an advanced science craft might work).

So, it doesn't seem inconceivable to me that starships would occasionally crash on a planet during exploration/reconnaissance/scientific study missions. Especially if, as someone else suggested, they're automated probes... and therefore prone to wonkier behavior than something truly sentient.

Actually, come to think of it, chopping a cow up with a laser might be "logical" for a somewhat wonky probe to do: its instruction set tells it to gather data about local lifeforms, and that if they don't appear to be sentient it can dissect them... one probe stuck in a logic feedback loop might just fly around for a couple of decades chopping up cows until it finally resets itself. :lol:

AcesHigh
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Post by AcesHigh »

If you have a suggestion for a viable alien form that is not "human-like" I would certainly be interested in considering your alternative. In the absence of that, I would suggest that the necessary physiological requirements for a species capable of producing high technology is very likely going to resemble a human form.
how about a Pierson´s Puppeteer?
Image
Wikipedia wrote:Pierson's Puppeteers are described by Niven as having two forelegs and a single hindleg ending in hooved feet and two snake-like heads instead of a humanoid upper body. The heads are very small, containing a forked tongue, extensive rubbery lips, rimmed with finger-like knobs, and a single eye per head. The Puppeteer brain is housed not in the heads, but in the "thoracic" cavity well protected beneath the mane-covered hump from which the heads emerge. They use the "mouths" to manipulate objects, as a humanoid uses hands. The Puppeteer's native language sounds like highly complex orchestral music, but they seem to be able to reproduce human language without difficulty or device, as well as the Heroes' Tongue (Kzinti), suggesting their vocal arrangement may resemble a pair of avian-like syrinx rather than vocal cords

Biologically, Puppeteers are highly intelligent herbivores; a herd animal, Puppeteers prefer the company (and smell) of their own kind. Their cycle of reproduction is similar to that of Earth's digger wasps: the Puppeteers consider themselves to have three genders (two male, one female): the two "male" genders are the equivalent of human female and male (one has an ovipositor, the other produces sperm) and the "female" is a (non-sentient) parasitised host into which the ovum and spermatozoon are deposited.

Socially, two notable traits of Puppeteers are their racial/cultural penchant for cowardice and their tendency to congregate in herds. The cowardice is thought in Puppeteer society to originate with the Puppeteer instinct for turning one's back on danger. However, the trait is thought by many to actually originate from their herd instinct, as the instinct to turn one's back is linked to an instinct to kick the hind hoof at an attacker.

Another behavioral trait is the coma state, broadly a cognate of the human fetal position–in the same way that ostriches are said to bury their heads in the sand, Puppeteers fold up into a ball, tucking their three legs and two heads underneath the padded cranial bulge. This is, in part, an explosion reflex, learned during childhood. Their cowardice is also reflected in their architecture and object design, as all the Puppeteer-designed rooms and vessels have no sharp edges, everything curves into everything else, giving a "half-melted" look and meaning that objects are less likely to damage someone inadvertently, through their own carelessness.


see, you just need knowledge of biology AND good imagination, like Larry Niven.


even if aliens are humanoid, very possibly they would be as different from us as Star Wars Mom Calamari or aliens from District 9
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtJVd28JJxE

CaptainBeowulf
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Post by CaptainBeowulf »

What about large cat-like aliens with bat ears and rat tails? :twisted:

(Niven just put all his xenobiology effort into the Puppeteer and then went for a biological kitbash) :P

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