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.
Smokeydope@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I always felt that humanoid aliens were also a way to get the audience to more easily emotionally connect and treat them as characters. We have a hard time recognizing sentience and the capability of feeling in other animals. Its easier to relate to blue cat person than to the Blob
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 6 months 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.