Country Loon (probably not his real name) writes:

>New to this group but an ardent evolutionist I have a question.
>I have noticed a similar thread but this is not quite the same.
>
>Suppose a spaceship lands in central park and out pops the aliens - what
>(logically) will they look like? For instance they are unlikely to look like
>a green blob of jelly as they would have no mechanism for building tools and
>steering a spaceship.Can we therefore assume that such creatures would have
>hands similar to us, one head,two eyes and two ears and probably two legs.
>Maybe the star-trek idea of alien life is not far from the truth. I am not
>saying that green blobs will not exist but that space-travellers must
>necessarily look similar (though not identical to us). A dolphin cannot
>pilot a machine however smart it is unless there are 'speech' driven
>controls and even then there would have to be an evolution in technology
>from the primitive stage to get there in the first place.Or is this
>arrogance?Can somebody invent a fictional character that could pilot a
>spaceship that was radically different from the basic human form and that
>makes sense in an evolutionary framework.

The problem isn't piloting the spacecraft. The problem lies in the organism
having evolved the manipulative and perceptual capabilities to construct it in
the first place. If it has that capability, finding a pilot will be easy.

If we're going to require that much in the design of the alien, then we can
also say with some certainty that the organism will almost certainly have an
encephalized architecture and be at least generally bilaterally symmetric.
Distributed neural nodes have never worked as a functional design, either in
life on this planet or in our computer networks. It seems that there must
always be a central point of command and control if any form of coordinated,
gracile motility is to be enacted. Similarly, symmetry seems necessary for the
same reasons, although appendages not used primarily for locomotion are free to
become enlarged or shrunken over time, as in the claws of a lobster.

Eyes (photoreceptors) and ears (mechanoreceptors) are similarly likely, if not
outrightly required. The image-forming eye has evolved three times on Earth,
with each instance completely independent of the other two, and yet the same
basic structure has been formed each time. Because image interpretation
requires complex processing capabilities, its design appears inherently much
more constrained than that of an acoustic receptor. On Earth, ears have been
been evolved from hairs and plates in a great variety of manners, but they too
function in basically the same manner and serve the same purpose.

And finally, of course, the alien must be colored primarily either green or
gray. No other colors have been deemed appropriate in the pulp literature over
the last half century.

Wirt Atmar
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