this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] reminiscensdeus@lemm.ee 52 points 1 year ago (3 children)

A brain covered in knives does kinda seem like a sleeper S tier build

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago

That guy with the mouth 30cm away from the face doesn't care.

[–] anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 year ago

Add a giant eye and you have the zerg overmind.

[–] supercargo@r.nf 3 points 1 year ago

A brain covered in knives does kinda seem like a sleeper S tier build

[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 32 points 1 year ago (3 children)

.... and it was all by chance and luck

I'm sure that there are planets all over the galaxy where the same or similar creatures evolved and didn't get wiped out but instead evolved into higher animals.

Our lineage was lucky to go on to create humans because all the other ones got wiped out in the Cambrian for some reason.

If those same creatures had survived, they would have evolved into more unique forms of life and we would have called them aliens.

Funny part is, those same creatures I suggested that might exist in alien worlds might one day run into us and look at us like some kind of weird animal that might have evolved out their own planet's Cambrian extinction event.

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

"Bipedal???? WTF?"

Or simply "They're made of MEAT?"

[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago

"They reproduce by doing what? Why? How? Wait almost a whole solar cycle? Give birth? Then they can't take care of themselves? ... How did these beings even survive this long to evolve?"

[–] chunkyrice@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Oh man, you brought up a good YouTube memory:

https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

“They’re made of MEAT?”

Now, that was a different story. "Talking meat? You must be joking!"

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The biggest fiction (constrained by budget obviously) of shows like Star Trek is that most of the intelligent creatures we might possibly meet will look almost exactly like us. I don't think even the people coming up with Star Wars aliens have the imagination to get it right. They still base it on what we are limited to thinking up as humans and our own likely narrow understanding of what is life and what is intelligence.

The second-biggest fiction is that it would be possible for us to coexist on one planet's surface considering our needs when it came to gravity, atmospheric pressure and basic atmospheric composition would be very unlikely to be the same.

But that would narrow the scope of a lot of sci-fi, so I let it go.

[–] Smokeydope@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I always felt that humanoid aliens were also a way to get the audience to more easily emotionally connect and treat them as characters. Its hard to portray a truly alien lifeforms with alien behavior like you would find in a speculative evolution fiction art book while also giving them a human understandable emotionally driven narrative and space age tech for the plot of a story. Its easier to relate to blue cat person than to the Blob I guess is my point.

I really like the comic Humanity Lost for its better representation of alien life in its story. The author really cares about that kind of world building ad im here for it really great stuff.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

The amazingly innovative 1930s science fiction author Olaf Stapledon has an invasion from Mars in his epic history of the future of humanity and its various evolutionary stages, Last and First Men. The Martians are a gaseous life form that can come together to sort of form a jellylike mass. They originally think radio signals are Earth's dominant form of life and everything else is their livestock. That feels much more believable to me in terms of how we would relate to each other.

[–] stringere@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

I always liked the Hooloovoo, from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

"The Hooloovoo resemble a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue."

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 10 months ago

i mean it seems to me that aliens are likely to either be completely different from us or remarkably similar, depending on their environment.

Like look at how things on earth look: stuff in the ocean is either a fish or something completely unique and fucked up, and on land we have a series of ecological niches that reappear across time and location to the point that it's kinda hard to tell the different incarnations apart.

I don't think it's that unreasonable to expect the odd humanoid alien, we should just also expect a bunch of them to be crabs and slime molds and fish.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

There is a hypothesis that an alien might actually look like a crab. Because life somehow managed to create crab-like creatures from a number of different evolutionary lines. Which shows a certain advantage that seems to be there with this specific form.

Ok but now we have taxes and seasonal depression, so, like, who really won that game?

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 year ago

Everyone was doing weird shit in peaceful mode, just vibing and experimenting, and then that FUCKER on the bottom right turned on PvP. Being festooned with knives is how they said "I'm tryna get these nutrients, don't @ me."

[–] DrBob@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 year ago

PRE-Cambrian my dude. The Cambrian explosion of life is associated with conventional body plans.

[–] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 16 points 1 year ago

tbf there are some pretty weird looking creatures in the ocean even now. Like, would the giant deep sea Isopods really look that out of place next to stuff like Anomalocaris? We still have plenty of spiky worm shaped things living on the bottom of the ocean. And for the softer side of animals, would things like siphonophores really look that out of place in a lineup of Cambrian fauna, if placed there and shown to someone who wouldnt have the knowledge to recognize what they actually were?

[–] kryptonidas@lemmings.world 15 points 1 year ago

Basically what my creations in Spore looked like.

[–] Spacehooks@reddthat.com 12 points 1 year ago

Cambrian seems like heavens design team didnt have an established meta and were just having fun with it. Once the horse design got approved the engineering team got lazy and used it as the base for everything.

[–] MeatPilot@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

God was overwhelmed with the editor and just kept hitting "randomize".

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

"Why did I make the undo button a flood? They're underwater!"

[–] Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.org 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

wtf Cambrian

Bunch of blood type: blue-looking mfs.

[–] NoForwardslashS@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 year ago

These are all immensely powerful evolutions. We got the Knifey Tortoiseshell, Cheval De Frisetipede, Sucky Long Mouth Humpback Trilobite and Sabertooth Flatworm. All the greats!

[–] unbanshee@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

I didn't see anyone make puns about it sounding like Kamala Harris. 😤

[–] DoomHorizons@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

To be fair bottom right ended up an apex predator for a while

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Look at human mechanical inventions from, say, 1900-1930. Same deal.

[–] actually@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

All of us had ancestors hunted by one or more of those

[–] adam_y@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Don't mean to make this all serious but sure you could talk about how god or a designer was just playing around or you could think about how the environment and the selective pressures were different during this period of the planet's history.

[–] DrownedRats@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Leave them be, everyone goes through an experimental phase. They're just working themselves out. Give them time.

[–] CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago
[–] ceiphas@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

look like my last creatures from the spore

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Us much more sensible cephalopods came about at the end of that era and you can see why we kicked those weirdos out of the biosphere.

[–] Mechaguana@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

They look like organs

[–] TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

reminder of this YouTube gem: Tribute to anomalocaris