Really alien aliens

[Hood]

Hive mind things always seemed quite plausible, as you don't need a huge or complex physical body to do very extraordinary things. I`m pretty sure Bees are in unison smarter than several actual people I`ve met, and I have private suspicions that the way they communicate and so on (if you include things like genetic memory) is a lot more involved than just the waggling dances they`re known to do.

Bees have much more intelligence than we would often credit them with. Indeed it seems that intelligence seems to vary with genius and dumb bees - just like you experience with humans. I suspect other insects are smarter than we often think too.

‘Bees are really highly intelligent’: the insect IQ tests causing a buzz among scientists

We all know these busy insects are good for crops and biodiversity, but proof is emerging that they are also clever, sentient and unique beings

www.theguardian.com

Should think if ants had ever found a way to harness fire and metallurgy that they would be pretty formidable*. My hunch though is that 'hive minds' might not be experimental enough in their approach. A formulaic approach to life might stifle innovation - why would an ant for instance attempt to knock two pieces of flint together when its too busy fetching food or digging earth?

*in theory, I suspect that scale plays a huge role in this. Yes ants and termites can build huge structures, spiders like big webs, but generally they are pretty small. Said ant igniting a match is likely to get seriously burned by the explosion of energy. An ant-scale crucible of iron would provide a fairly tiny amount of metal. I'm not sure how scalable technology is. Imagine three stegosaurus sitting in a moon rocket - a Stegurn V hoho! - that's 15 tons of mass to lift for a start, factor in 5-7m long couches in the capsule as a sense of scale required! It may well be that outside of a certain range of physical size (and motor ability of course) that technology just doesn't scale for practical use.

 

[Antonio]

pretty small

Do not under estimate some variables. Bacteria are pretty small and simple but their metabolism has effects on a planetary scale, just only perceptible when considering their total mass and very long periods of time.

 

[Rhinocrates]

Hive mind things always seemed quite plausible, as you don't need a huge or complex physical body to do very extraordinary things. I`m pretty sure Bees are in unison smarter than several actual people I`ve met, and I have private suspicions that the way they communicate and so on (if you include things like genetic memory) is a lot more involved than just the waggling dances they`re known to do.

Just a bit of historical precedent on such speculation, from 1905:

The Empire of the Ants

Free Books of English Literature in English, PDF, ePub, Mobi, Fb2, Azw3, Kindle

onemorelibrary.com

 

[Rhinocrates]

In defence of HP Lovecraft...

Lovecraft is usually thought of as a pure fantasist (specifically, of the Weird), but he was a keen amateur science journalist and while many of his imaginary beings seem supernatural, in his later writing he turned a little more to science fiction in that his descriptions of explicitly extraterrestrial (rather than supernatural) beings are consciously more clinical and strive to give a logic to their forms, however strange they may seem.

He almost certainly would have seen a copy of Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur / Artworks of Nature (1904) and the Elder Things from 'At the Mountains of Madness', the Mi-Go from 'The Whisperer in Darkness', and the Great Race of Yith from 'The Shadow Out of Time' seem to have been inspired by it, such as the illustrations of echinoderms and siphonophores.

Kunstformen der Natur - Wikimedia Commons

commons.wikimedia.org

(You can google illustrations of Lovecraft's ETs yourself. I'm very disappointed in most attempts to illustrate them - they're usually crude, graceless assemblages of parts, taking his itemised descriptions too literally and not integrating them.)

 

[publiusr]

Forget visiting dinosaurs—if I had a Time Machine…I’d take HPL back to 1982 for the first screening of THE THING.

 

[martinbayer]

Forget visiting dinosaurs—if I had a Time Machine…I’d take HPL back to 1982 for the first screening of THE THING.

Seems just a tad trivial to me to simply want to re-experience a sensationalist schlock movie premiere. The only direction I would ever take a truly functional time machine would be going forward - the past is the past, but the future holds everything, from next week's lottery numbers to humanity's fate at large - climate change, pandemics, earthquakes, demagogues/mass manipulators, and our species reactions thereto, including potential geo/bioengineering and/or spreading our seeds/seedlings throughout our solar system and who knows how much further out. I think the biggest regret I will have on the day that I die (other than perhaps not getting enough high strength painkiller, if I'm even sufficiently conscious to reflect on that fact at that time) will be missing out on what will happen on the day thereafter, and the next day, and so on...

 

[Rhinocrates]

Seems just a tad trivial to me to simply want to re-experience a sensationalist schlock movie premiere. The only direction I would ever take a truly functional time machine would be going forward - the past is the past, but the future holds everything, from next week's lottery numbers to humanity's fate at large - climate change, pandemics, earthquakes, demagogues/mass manipulators, and our species reactions thereto, including potential geo/bioengineering and/or spreading our seeds/seedlings throughout our solar system and who knows how much further out. I think the biggest regret I will have on the day that I die (other than perhaps not getting enough high strength painkiller, if I'm even sufficiently conscious to reflect on that fact at that time) will be missing out on what will happen on the day thereafter, and the next day, and so on...

A very good reason not to choose a one-way trip to the distant past is dentists. Another is toilet paper. Temporary trips though... well there is so much that has been lost, from the destruction of the library of Alexandria to the untold generations and culture before. The sentimental side of me wants those lives to be discovered. Otherwise, forwards - although I'd cross my fingers.

 

[Hanz2k]

but the future holds everything, from next week's lottery numbers to humanity's fate at large

We’ll, why not take already known number and buy ticket in the past.

Why not move to the past and kill Hitler and Stalin. Or just nuke Rome around Julius Caesar and completely fuck up West Europe Domination. Or just hit Alexander the Great. Or Ebola the China ? The risk of using bioweapon till ca. 15-century is relatively low due to long travel times.

 

[Antonio]

We're already going off topic here.

 

[Michel Van]

We're already going off topic here.

Total off Topic here
we talk about Aliens

Alex Ries made very intrigue alien design the birrin

 

[martinbayer]

We’ll, why not take already known number and buy ticket in the past.

Why not move to the past and kill Hitler and Stalin. Or just nuke Rome around Julius Caesar and completely fuck up West Europe Domination. Or just hit Alexander the Great. Or Ebola the China ? The risk of using bioweapon till ca. 15-century is relatively low due to long travel times.

Because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox

 

[Rhinocrates]

You may be surprised that Jordan Peele got a consultant biologist to conceive the creature in Nope, Jean Jacket. She gave it the binominal Occulonimbus edoequus.

NOPE's Science Consultant Reveals the Name and Inspiration for the Movie's Alien

Nope's science consultant Kelsi Rutledge shares exclusive insights about designing the movie's alien, its name, and upcoming bonus features.

nerdist.com

How a UCLA fish scientist helped the alien in Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope’ seem terrifyingly real

Doctoral student Kelsi Rutledge helped make “Jean Jacket” scientifically plausible.

newsroom.ucla.edu

The Surprising Animal Science Behind Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope’

Spoilers abound! Learn how Jordan Peele’s new film 'Nope' used inspiration from the oceans to make its new creature.

www.sciencefriday.com

 

[publiusr]

At the end it no longer looked like a saucer.