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How 'Alien' Might Aliens Be? (Biologically; Mentally)?

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Human Morphology comes about as a consequence of the evolutionary processes which actually occured on this specific planet. Now, with even the very rudimentary knowledge we have of the cosmos, it's pretty clear that in a solar system where Planetary Formation actually takes place, there exists a huge degree of differenance in both Composition and Mass.

Not only are the 9 planets in this Solar System all very, very different to the earth, they remain all completely different to each other. A great many of these same Planets have satelights, which equally differ hugely not only from the planets which they orbit but from each other as well......

As well as all being completely different from the Earth.

In short, the Earth is a hugely unique place. And were the Earth say, just two thirds of the actual mass it is, Gravity would be appreciably lower as a consequence. Morphologies necessary to function here as they both do and have would be, on such an earth as this, radically different from the sorts of evolutionary consequences which were in fact possible here.

In short, it would be bucking both an observable trend as well as the odds to expect an exact Twin of the earth to exist elsewhere out there.

And an exact twin is what would be necessary for any chance of Humanoid Physiology to come into being in the first place......

But then again, even if that were in fact the case. The chances of evolution taking exactly the same course as it did here in producing us happening again independantly on this other, Alien Earth, remain stageringly against the odds.

And, in order for Humanoid Evolution to have taken place out There that deep unlikely hood would remain necessary for it to have any chance of actually happening.....
 
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Interesting thread. A couple of points if I may.

First of all, has anyone considered the idea that this part of our Milky Way galaxy was "seeded" by some very advanced race, which planted the "blueprint" of an intelligent humanoid onto lots of different worlds? Gravity, atmosphere, climate and stuff would do the rest. This would account for why UFO occupants seem to be almost always (but not always) humanoid in physical shape. If you think this is a piece of absolute bunk, I will not be offended.

Secondly, is it not true that for a life-form to develop intelligence, it would have to have hand/arm/leg equivalents? I mean, if a creature was like a slug, why should it develop intelligence? We have large brains partly to control our limbs - particularly our hugely versatile hands. Has anyone seen that model in the Natural History Museum, where the parts of the body are scaled up or down according to how much of the brain is devoted to them? The hands on this model are enormous. It also has a very large...well, never mind. But the point is that you may need some kind of manipulative body parts for intelligence to develop, so a humanoid or something similar might be a logical choice for evolution on any planet.

Also interesting to look at how science fiction deals with this. Star Trek is fairly unimaginative, with most of the aliens being humanoid, more or less. Larry Niven does better with his brilliantly-imagined Puppeteer race - surely the finest non-humanoid intelligent beings in the annals of SF.

Big Bill Robinson
 
Originally posted by Big Bill Robins
Interesting thread. A couple of points if I may.

First of all, has anyone considered the idea that this part of our Milky Way galaxy was "seeded" by some very advanced race, which planted the "blueprint" of an intelligent humanoid onto lots of different worlds? Gravity, atmosphere, climate and stuff would do the rest. This would account for why UFO occupants seem to be almost always (but not always) humanoid in physical shape. If you think this is a piece of absolute bunk, I will not be offended.
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Bunk?! Not at all, it's a very tempting notion. Von Danikin made a mint out of it back in the 70's floggin it around with the ageless question Was God an Astronaught?.... certainly got people thinking....

I mean, it explians a great deal. If you can peg the origin's of a species with capacities appreciably close enough to ours as being in some way the consequence of Alien Intervention then in one stroke you're both successfully answering the question of How there can be both intelligences and physiologies appreciably similar to our own out there, and equally you can explain why, though we have a huge degree of similarities between ourselves and such things as Primates, Why we are so very, very different to them in all those truely important ways.

Such a process could indeed have been brought about by some form of general "seeding" process, as you suggest, or perhaps more directly and specifically by these other intelligences finding the most suitable candidate evolutionary process chooses to bring forth, and then in some way augmenting that consequence, giving rise to a new, separate and very different species than it's original natural proginator.

Homonid to Homosapiens in one fell swoop.

It's a lovely idea. Has a lot going for it. Just one minor question left to answer and the whole thing can be wrapped up and considered done and dusted..... That question being:

By what process or mechanism did this Alien Proginator Species come to aquire it's advanced intelligence and capacity to develope scientific understanding into technology, as we do?

.... and that get's to be the problem. Y'see, if everything we are isn't a consequence of the natural process of blind Evolution and random chance, but one of Deliberate Intervention from some other external intelligent species which already pocesses these exact qualities and through technological means passes them on:

How do the Aliens get to come about?

If life such as our own is seeded everywhere else and they are the direct cause, what caused them.....?

If we answer that by saying they themselves are the process of some other even older Alien Species, then we are just passing the buck farther back in time. The same question still remains, we just have to explain what caused them instead.

If we answer via a process of evolution we end up saying that the idea of Evolutionary Process giving rise to something like us as a consequence if fine, as long as it doesn't actually happen here but else where on some other, as yet undisclosed planet, which we ourselves can't actually know the first thing about.

But the idea of the same thing happening here as a consequence of blind random luck? Nah, couldn't happen without help......

....Sort of all rather fall's apart abit after that, doesn't it? : )

Secondly, is it not true that for a life-form to develop intelligence, it would have to have hand/arm/leg equivalents? I mean, if a creature was like a slug, why should it develop intelligence? We have large brains partly to control our limbs - particularly our hugely versatile hands. Has anyone seen that model in the Natural History Museum, where the parts of the body are scaled up or down according to how much of the brain is devoted to them? The hands on this model are enormous. It also has a very large...well, never mind. But the point is that you may need some kind of manipulative body parts for intelligence to develop, so a humanoid or something similar might be a logical choice for evolution on any planet.
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It all depends on your own philosophical stance that.

Certainly, if you're thinking about the developement of an intelligence capable of Technology, hands, oposal thumb's, brain to operate them with.... all that sort of stuff I'd perfectly agree would most probably have to be in the mix there somewhere or other...

Preferably on the end of recognisable arms.

But as to Human intelligence being the be all and end all of what the word Intelligence actually means.....? Mmmmmmm, now that I'm not entirely sure about.

Personaly, and this is purely personal I fully understand, but I'm not wholey convinced that art, literature, culture and technolgy tell us a very great deal about the actual nature of intelligence itself. More, I'd say, an understanding of Human Intelligence.... This doesn't actually preclude the existances of intelligences every bit as profound as our own existing elsewhere in terrestrial nature, just centered around equally speciesist concerns....

But that all gets rather philosophical, so best left unless you want to pick me up on it.

Also interesting to look at how science fiction deals with this. Star Trek is fairly unimaginative, with most of the aliens being humanoid, more or less. Larry Niven does better with his brilliantly-imagined Puppeteer race - surely the finest non-humanoid intelligent beings in the annals of SF.
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:) Oh, absolutely! Couldn't agree with you more on that. Strikes me far too much of the Ufological perception of what Alien means centers around more the theatrical convention of television and film.... Y'know the sort of thing, slap a bit of spam on a chaps head, pop him in a wig voila! An instant Noble Klingon.... Prat around with the ears a bit, give 'em a terrible hair cut: Instant cold yet logical Vulcan.... etc etc.

Sci-fi fiction at least doesn't have to cope with such a thing as bugetary constraints and so can afford to be far more adventourous... But then again, wouldn't the Pupeteers be qualifying as visually the very cheapest theatrical option of all?

T;)
 
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From the FT news front page 25/07/2003
Aliens more like Arnie than ET
By Leigh Dayton, Science writer
July 24, 2003
IF extraterrestrials exist they look more like the steely Terminator than cuddly ET, say scientists on a cosmic quest for smart aliens.

"The rise of the machines? There's a lot of Hollywood in there, a lot of crashing and smashing about, but it's possible," astronomer and science historian Steve Dick said of the Terminator movies.
According to his new view of ET, intelligent aliens long ago dispensed with weak flesh-and-blood bodies in favour of steel-hard sinews and silicon brains.
Dr Dick, of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, based his argument on the "intelligence principle" - when a species can improve its intelligence it will do so.
"If you don't get smarter you get left behind," Dr Dick said yesterday at the International Union of Astronomy conference, meeting in Sydney.
He said the earliest that "post-biologicals" could have evolved in the oldest and most distant galaxies was 7.5 billion years ago.
That's a mere 6 billion years after the big bang that created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
According to Dr Dick, such superior beings would have begun existence as dim-witted primordial life, evolved into intelligent but biological lifeforms, and then made the evolutionary leap to brainy machine life.
Seth Shostak, an astronomer with the SETI Institute in California, yesterday agreed with Dr Dick, who will publish his ideas in an upcoming edition of the International Journal of Astrobiology.
"It's an idea I've been pushing for 10 years, Dr Shostak said.
"It's fairly obvious that the assumption the aliens would be soft and squishy little grey guys ... is clearly provincial. They might be grey, but they won't have big almond eyes."
Instead, Dr Shostak speculates that machine life would have a utilitarian appearance because "they don't have to appeal to mates".
As well, he predicted the machines would be compact, because their intelligence would be limited only by internal connections, running at the speed of light.
And if and when we find the new ET, will he, she or it be dangerous?
"Well, I have some goldfish, and I'm a lot smarter than they are, but I don't wake up thinking I've got to kill those guys," Dr Shostak said.
"I don't think we need to worry about the machines."
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I will be interested to find out the logic behind the idea that that earliest extraterrestrial could have evolved was 7.5 billion years ago. Given that we know that the universe was onto its second generation of stars by 870 million years after the big bang.

This is a theory that I have held dear for some time now. It is just so obvious. I believe that evolutionary rates change dependant on the reproductive method of the ideas/enhancements.

In the beginning there was:
Biological evolution, where the improvements were made without a view to the end product and can only be improved upon by each generation.
An improvement on this is the creation of tools to provide the advantage and these can be improved on regularly and they reproduce by demonstration among the individuals using the tools.
An improvement on this is tools making the tools i.e. the industrial revolution. This appears to cause a huge surge in development.
The next leap comes in the information age, where the means of sharing the information extends beyond the individuals i.e. the library at Alexandria or the internet.
The next step we are looking at is the stage of designing a computer so intelligent that it can design and program a computer more intelligent than itself. A computer to do this need not be sentient.

At the last stage I assume that generational length is relatively short and the ability to reproduce is very high. I would think that after a few generations of sentient machines producing even more sentient machines, it will be pretty obvious that mankind is obsolete. We will either upload or just die off to be replaced by the next creature to take over our niche in the evolutionary jungle.

If you want a great fictional example of this, read the first four books by Ken McLeod, I think the Stone Canal is the book that deals wit this issue. In my own opinion, we are about 50 years away from building the first machine to start designing machines and within 40 years of this process starting we will have sentient computers and we humna will be obsolete… and I wont be there to see it…damn.
 
I will be interested to find out the logic behind the idea that that earliest extraterrestrial could have evolved was 7.5 billion years ago. Given that we know that the universe was onto its second generation of stars by 870 million years after the big bang.
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I have always tended to a similar figure to the good Dr Dick, but a survey of opinions from professional astronomers came up with some much earlier dates for the first intelligent life; an assistant professor of astrophysics (who shall remain nameless) said he could imagine intelligent life half a billion years after the big bang.

This seems a little early to me, but I suppose it is just possible given ideal conditions.

Oh and yes, robots and AI will be the logical state for a space-faring race; perhaps they will keep us around like pets...
 
"The rise of the machines? There's a lot of Hollywood in there, a lot of crashing and smashing about, but it's possible," astronomer and science historian Steve Dick said of the Terminator movies.

Dr Dick, of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, based his argument on the "intelligence principle" - when a species can improve its intelligence it will do so.
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Yeah. if the aliens had the same sort of intelligence as the anal retentive, gung ho, ashamed to be a human of flesh and blood, wanker spouting the guff above.

What are the chances that extra terrestrials will have the same peverse ability to fetishise, lust after and envy synthetic materials and technology, like some of our terrestrial boffins?

The film 'Dick' needs to promote isn't 'Terminator III,' it's, Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer;)
 
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I've thought for a long while that the next, natural (well, unnatural), evolutionary step for mankind would be the creation of cyborgs - basically putting our brain inside an immortal machine. Then we can finally conquor the universe!
 
Researcher challenges movies unscientific aliens



Is there life on other planets? And if so, are they the little green men of science fiction?
Professor Ian Stewart from the University of Warwick thinks there is life on other planets and while it could be little and green, it’s highly unlikely to be anything we would recognise as men. Despite our fascination with science fiction it seems our imagination rarely extends beyond pointed ears and different coloured skin when we picture alien races. Now an exhibition at London’s Science Museum addresses just what alien life might look like when it develops on planets with different physical and chemical properties to our own.

Apply scientific principles and alien life might be very alien indeed. As a scientist who is also a science fiction writer, Professor Stewart was one of the early advisors to the Exhibition and is uniquely positioned to comment on what alien life could really be like!

Professor Stewart argues that popular culture fails miserably to give us anything approaching a scientifically sound idea of what an alien could look like. Many authors and film-makers simply rely on making their aliens in our humanoid image such as Star Trek's Mr Spock or Klingons. Even when a bit more imagination is used science is ignored in favour of simply reproducing the cosyily familiar such as the teddy bear like Ewoks in the film Return of the Jedi, or the remarkable resemblance of ET to the size and behavior patterns of a human toddler.

When they are not being cuddly The aliens on our TV and film screens have become a "quasi-scientific stand-in" for ghosts, ghouls and fairies, or modern-day bogeymen or drawing on our phobias of real and mythical animals like spiders, snakes and dragons.

The most famous unscientific dragon shaped alien comes from the Alien series which has an unlikely life cycle which faces a number of serious scientific problems as Professor Stewart says:

"The dragonesque alien queen lays her eggs, which are apparently about the size of a football, in the open where they apparently wait for thousands of years for a spaceship to land near them. When it does, any that have survived hungry egg-eaters for all that time hatch out. They have the immediate ability to invade terrestrial mammalian hosts and live inside them, where the nutrients are just right for them. How did they become able to avoid our tissue-recognition immune system? Or how to design just the right local anaesthetic so that the host doesn't know he's got an object the size of his heart - extra - in his chest? Are they turned to people, in fact, or are they general-purpose parasites - a concept that would make any parasite specialist scream?"

Professor Stewart argues that "We've got to get away from all those comfortable ideas that aliens will be just like us, except for a few minor differences that don't challenge our imagination. - real aliens will be very alien indeed."

The truly alien may inhabit planets utterly different from earth. Many different habitats can theoretically support life, not just a water and oxygen based planet. Anywhere that physical matter exists and there is an energy source could lead to the development of something of sufficient complexity that we would categorise it as "life".

Even on earthlike planets life could be very different - The development of spines and skeletons is, he says, an evolutionary accident that could well be unique to Earth. "If you ran Planet Earth again, the chances are you wouldn't get vertebrates. You wouldn't get creatures with a jointed spine."

Source: University of Warwick
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http://www.physorg.com/news7949.html
 
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The dragonesque alien queen lays her eggs, which are apparently about the size of a football, in the open where they apparently wait for thousands of years for a spaceship to land near them. When it does, any that have survived hungry egg-eaters for all that time hatch out. They have the immediate ability to invade terrestrial mammalian hosts and live inside them, where the nutrients are just right for them. How did they become able to avoid our tissue-recognition immune system? Or how to design just the right local anaesthetic so that the host doesn't know he's got an object the size of his heart - extra - in his chest? Are they turned to people, in fact, or are they general-purpose parasites - a concept that would make any parasite specialist scream?"

Professor Stewart argues that "We've got to get away from all those comfortable ideas that aliens will be just like us, except for a few minor differences that don't challenge our imagination. - real aliens will be very alien indeed."
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He criticises a fantasy alien for not behaving as he expected from terrestial knowledge and yet says "We've got to get away from the aliens will be just like us" .


It's science fiction, mate. Why is there always the sound of a explosion in space when there is no air for the soundwaves to travel in?

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I think he's making the (IMO probably correct) assumption that certain things would still be the same in the workings of evolution itself, even if the products of it themselves are not, or are entirely alien. I see what you mean though.
 
Much as I share Professor Stewart's boredom with Star Trek style rubber-headed aliens, the conventions of dramatic narrative make it very difficult to create films with genuinely 'alien' aliens. Dialogue requires aliens that talk English, action requires aliens that indulge in fisticuffs or tote big guns, and plot development requires aliens to have comprehensible motivations.

The only two films I can think of which come close to making their aliens truly inscrutable are Solaris and The Mothman Prophecies (not strictly aliens in the latter, I know).
 
Other films with non-humanoid aliens;
2001 (a big shiny black domino with no spots)
The Andromeda Strain (a virus)
The Thing (a nonspecific shapeshifting creature)
Dark Star (a beachball covered in vomit)
The Blob (a blob)
The Quatermass Experiment (something very similar to the Thing)

As you can see, film aliens are rarely well-thought-out heterotrophic zoomorphs with an independent evolutionary heritage. They tend to be shapeless and quite impractical if not humanoid.
 
H.P. Lovecraft - the colour out of space. Now there is an alien :)

I think the Alien in Alien is very imaginative actually. And they do make very clear that they weren't expecting anything like it with their level of scientific knowledge. It's hardly humanoid and operates on systems very different to those of humans.
 
the conventions of dramatic narrative make it very difficult to create films with genuinely 'alien' aliens.
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I wonder if there's a way around that, like actually acknowledging the problem itself within the narrative, that they are difficult to relate to and that is part of the challenge. Trying to think of a few examples that come close - the Star Trek deep pan pizza monster, Vger, the alien that was the spaceport in TNG, the unspecified aliens in the movie of Contact*, can't think of one where they don't cop out by dropping in some flavour of telepathic thing to tidy things up.

Don't care too much for Alien Nation but wonder if that wasn't a step in the right direction, the unsubtle race allegory as a starting point for how people can see each other as aliens/other/outsider transposed into an actual alien encounter.


I'm told the book has a more interesting ending, but haven't got around to reading it yet!
 
I would broadly agree with it, however.
Xenobiology is not yet a science, so wild-assed guesses are the best we can do;
but technically it is true that no members of the subphylum 'Vertebrata' could evolve on any other planet.

There may well be animals with jointed backbones on many worlds; but the details of those joints will be different, to a greater or lesser extent.

Such creatures might be classified as 'Vertebroid' or some such thing.
 
As a speculative fiction writer, what you can NEVER do is make an Alien so alien that the reader cant' identify with it (that's what editors will tell you, and it's a valid market observation).

Aliens, inevitably become monsters, or supernatural beings, or mysterious forces rather that exotic tourists with language problems, say...
 
sunsplash1 said:
Aliens, inevitably become monsters, or supernatural beings, or mysterious forces rather that exotic tourists with language problems, say...
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They were going to invade Earth but we couldn't work out that the clicks they were making meant "take us to your leader" so they got bored and tried Proxima Centuri instead.

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See?

And there's nicer ruins on Proxima Cent. But just try and ask for a cup of swx...
 
graylien said:
Much as I share Professor Stewart's boredom with Star Trek style rubber-headed aliens, the conventions of dramatic narrative make it very difficult to create films with genuinely 'alien' aliens. Dialogue requires aliens that talk English, action requires aliens that indulge in fisticuffs or tote big guns, and plot development requires aliens to have comprehensible motivations.
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Also there is cost - until relatively recently you just couldn't have a lot of aliens that weren't based on the humanoid bauplan as you realy could only get actors in suits and/or stick bits too them (it always amuses me they can travel aorund in Star trek and the aliens are just like us but with a nobbly nse or pointy ears - OK they developed a backstory to cover it but still...). Even when they aren't strictly humanoid they often fudge it by making them energy creatures (Vorlons when not in their encounter suits) or they'd tend to either have just one.

I suppose Starship Troopers realy helped advance things and as CGI gets ever cheaper they can push the envelope further. Star Trek has also tinkered around with the idea even though they are the worst offenders when it comes to going for a light makeup job. TNG did push the envelope as mentioned with the aliens at Farpoint and also the Crystal Entity. Voyager also tried it with the sentient space station and also with Species 8472 which just about worked given the level of TV CGI at the time. Hell even the shape shifters of the Dominion could largely cheat - its either a man in a suit or a bucket. In Enterprise the Zindi had Insectoid and Aquatic "races."

The real trap though is bilateral symmetry even when they are trying to make things alien they more often than not go down this road even when the aliens are pure CGI and you could do anything (the Bugs in Starship Troopers, Zindi and Species 8472 for example).
 
Isn't it all just a case of cutting their cloth and shifting their shape to suit the zeitgeist, though? I mean, we're talking about imagined beings here...of course they are going to have to fit in with our ideas of lifeforms..we make them in our image.

My personal wildest constructs of alien beings have all been in dreams..they all conform to what I am familiar with, though...a morphing undulating diamond in the sky...an Icke-ish lizard in a trenchcoat in the desert...a cartoon pea with one eye. I think that any transdimentional lifeform/consciousness is going to have to appear to us in a recognisable form, else how are we going to perceive it?
 
Engineering Aliens


for Astrobiology Magazine
Moffett Field CA (SPX) Nov 15, 2005
What would you call an alien if you encountered it on the street tomorrow? What if that alien didn't come from another world but rather was created in a laboratory right here on Earth and functioned differently from other Earth life?
Either way, Peter Ward has the beginnings of an answer. In a new book, the University of Washington paleontologist puts forth an expanded "tree of life," or biological classification system, to account for a variety of life forms that would not fit in the current system.

Among them are viruses, long considered to be non-living bits of protein and nucleic acid but which Ward argues are as alive as the many parasites that infect humans and other organisms. The revamped classification system also would include life based on RNA instead of DNA, and life found away from Earth that likely would be based on silicon or elements other than the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen mixture that is the backbone of life on Earth.

"To get to DNA life you had to go through non-DNA life, which we no longer have," Ward said. "But just because a type of life goes extinct doesn't mean you don't classify it. Otherwise you wouldn't have dinosaurs on the tree of life. And until now there hasn't been any place to put RNA life."

In the current popular classification system the highest levels are three domains - bacteria, archaea and eukarya, the last of which includes all animals. Ward's plan places those three domains within a larger dominion, which he calls "terroan" to signify Earth origins. Another dominion he calls "ribosa" because it is based on ribonucleic acid, or RNA. Other dominions could be formed to cover life discovered to have a different base than DNA or RNA.

The dominions would be placed within broader classifications called "arborea," which contain life that does not mix with that of other arborea. The Earth arborea would contain all life forms found on this planet and other arborea would contain life found away from Earth.

Ward presents his new model in a book called "Life As We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life," published by Viking and being released Thursday.

The new system is already necessary, he said, because "alien" life has been created in laboratories on Earth. That includes microbes with at least one amino acid beyond the 20 in the DNA of native Earth life, or organisms that have been genetically modified, Ward said. It also includes some life forms that have been modified to be much simpler than what is normally found on Earth.

"We may never find other life away from Earth, but we have already made aliens on this planet and we will continue to do so at an increasing pace," he said. "In the last five years we've come to realize that we can make microbial life in a lot more ways than Mother Earth did."

Ward believes that if life is found away from Earth, at least some could be based on elements such as silicon, perhaps in combination with carbon. Because environments are far colder on moons and planets farther from the sun, he said, it is less likely that life on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, for instance, will use water as Earth life does. Instead, those organisms are more likely to use compounds such as ammonia that remain liquid at very low temperatures.

Ward is one of several faculty members in the UW's groundbreaking graduate program in astrobiology. The program, the first of its kind, started in 1998 with a grant from the National Science Foundation and has since been bolstered by funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Students work in a variety of areas, such as astronomy, microbiology and oceanography, to prepare themselves for the search for life away from Earth.

Ward also was a co-author, with UW astronomer Donald Brownlee, of a popular book called "Rare Earth," published in 2000. The book advanced the idea that simple microbial life might be very common in the universe but complex life is probably so rare and dispersed that Earth inhabitants might never encounter another intelligence.

Ward said his beliefs haven't changed from the basic "Rare Earth" premise, but it is becoming clearer that simple life found away from Earth could take forms not previously expected. That's already happening in Earthbound laboratories.

"I hope people will wake up and realize this is a whole new biology," Ward said. "There's going to be a zoo of aliens on Earth in the next two decades just from what we make."
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http://www.spacedaily.com/news/life-05zzzzzzzy.html
 
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are we not a virus/bacteria?

we arrive...then destroy in ever increasing circles.
 
Think the same could be said for locusts, goats and a whole lot of other species.
 
Xanatico said:
Think the same could be said for locusts, goats and a whole lot of other species.
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as we have an aposable thumb,it puts us at the top of the pile.
 
AndroManFeckit said:
Prospect said:
Then we can finally conquor the universe!
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It's like 'Flash Gordon' in here with you lot, sometimes! :p
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Hot Hail!!

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I suspect it'd be less jamming our brain into robot bodies and more a gradual increase in augmentation - depending on timing this could also invovle nanotechnology. So yes Tetsuo not Terminator - who'd win in a fight though?

I find the idea of us being able to download our minds into a machine unlikely for the time being and (as has been said many times over) what about buggy software and/or viruses, etc.??
 
Mighty_Emperor said:
I find the idea of us being able to download our minds into a machine unlikely for the time being and (as has been said many times over) what about buggy software and/or viruses, etc.??
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Personally, I probably wouldn't notice the difference.
 
Well, if we do start to have neural interface computers we might have to worry about people hacking our brains even without the. Like in Ghost in the Shell.

We could make ourselves machines. Problem is they do not go against entropy in the same way as a living organism. If you go on a trip through space, you might have to bring spare parts for everything. Instead of being able to regrow things yourself using a few simple nutrients. If the problem is physical weakness, perhaps a better idea would be an exo skeleton of chitin like beetles and such have. The growthspurts that go with that would also help us against radiation dangers.
 
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