New life, and new life forms

Time for you to put on your imagination caps. What would alien life forms be like?Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with science fiction knows that the vast majority of alien life forms in television and movies are bipeds with at least a vague resemblance to humans. Obviously the reason for this is pragmatic. It's just easier to make a humanoid alien if a human is going to portray that alien. But is there any particular reason to suppose that an alien life form would be humanoid?Is bipedalism a particularly advantageous form such that we might expect it to be common throughout the universe? And what about tetrapods? Is it nothing more than mere happenstance that intelligence is most highly evolved in bipedal tetrapods or might a different body shape would just as well?I've read a couple of science fiction novels with quite unusual depictions of alien life. In Dragon's Egg, Robert Forward describes how life might evolve on a neutron star. As you might imagine, it's completely foreign to any life on earth. In Code of the Lifemaker, James Hogan describes how an entire ecology might evolve from a single Self-replicating spacecraft damaged in transit.The first thing that occurs to me as a necessary component to anything that I would call life would be reproduction. Beyond that, I'm not sure I can think of anything else that life would have to include. Perhaps someone else can come up with a reasonable description of life that would not include any reproduction in any sense.Put your imagination to work, along with whatever relevant knowledge you might have in a particular field, if any, and paint a picture of alien life.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

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We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

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It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

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...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn\'t take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--\'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong\'.... -- archaeologist

In Star Trek, they even tried to explain the similarities between Terran life and alien life, with Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development.I absolutely agree with you about one thing. Wherever there is anything analogous to life in whatever form, if that environment also has limited resources, Darwinian evolution will take place. Perhaps an interesting challenge from a science fiction point of view would be to devise a plausible environment where evolution doesn't take place. I'd be most curious to hear a chemistry type muse on the possibilities of life based on something other than carbon.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

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We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

​

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

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...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

Yup. And that's all that I intend this thread to be; pure entertainment with no particular practical result.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

​

We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

​

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

​

...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

True.Speculating, I can imagine that that might be a common pattern. Smaller organisms that produce numerous offspring that are relatively short lived would be more likely to develop into many different species and have bigger populations than larger organisms that produce fewer offspring.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

​

We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

​

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

​

...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

What are you talking about? They can be found on the entire surface of the planet, although are concentrated on land. They are vastly outnumbered by those that don't use technology, but that's not nearly the same as non-existent.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

​

We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

​

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

​

...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

Can you fill that in a bit more? How might something like that work? I'm having a hard time grasping the concept.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

​

We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

​

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

​

...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

Ah, so you're talking temporally, not spatially.True, as far as that goes. But it at least suggests the possibility of long term continued existence, potentially even beyond the life span of the sun.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

​

We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

​

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

​

...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

Technology has existed for only the tiniest fraction of the time that life has been here. But technology might allow us to spread life from this planet to others, where it might have a continued existence for longer than the planet does.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

​

We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

​

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

​

...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

I didn't intend my comment about life to limit the discussion. It was simply my opening salvo about minimum requirements.I don't disagree with your suggestion in the abstract. But in the context of this thread, I'd like to see a description of how such a condition could be reached. Perhaps an example of a single such life form would be V'Ger from Star Trek: the Motion Picture. Can you imagine a way for a civilization of such beings to come into existence in the absence of any reproduction?

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

​

We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

​

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

​

...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist