Along the way, the science fiction stories I'd been writing since I was 13 began to grow more believable. With my BS in biology and a fascination with genetics, I started to use more science in my fiction.
After reading hard SF for the past 50 years, and writing hard SF successfully for the past 20, I've started to dig deeper into what it takes to create realistic alien life forms. In the following series, I'll be sharing some of what I've learned. I've had some of those stories published, some not...I teach a class to GT young people every summer called ALIEN WORLDS. I've learned a lot preparing for that class for the past 25 years...so...I have the opportunity to share with you what I've learned thus far. Take what you can use, leave the rest. Let me know what YOU'VE learned. Without further ado...
FEELINGS
Definition: “Feelings. Both emotional experiences and physical sensations — such as hunger or pain — bring about feelings…Feelings are a conscious experience, although not every conscious experience, such as seeing or believing, is a feeling...”
EMOTIONS:
Definition: “Emotions…“can only ever be felt…through the emotional experiences it gives rise to, even though it might be discovered through its associated thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions. Emotions are not conscious [and] manifest in the unconscious mind. These emotions can be brought to the surface of the conscious state…”
From Sachchidanand R. Swami (Internationally Certified Facial Micro-Expression Detection Expert, Human Behavior Researcher, Analyst and Profiler), we have: “…if any biological species has evolved and survived in its local environment…then it must have…senses, reflexes, emotions, temperaments, traits and different kinds of defenses...if they want to survive, evolve, and expand their horizons then they would venture into the outer space. If any species wants to be more advanced, it has to be able to monitor emotions consciously and remain composed for most of time so that physical, psychological and mental efficiency and capacities could be enhanced…[and] controlling or dominating others technologically could be the sole purpose and goal.”
From Neil DeGrasse Tyson: He “responded to Demi Lovato’s claim that calling extraterrestrials ‘aliens’ is ‘derogatory’ by telling the singer that aliens ‘have no feelings.’” He added, ‘All the aliens that I’ve ever met…have no feelings.’ He did say that Lovato was just being “considerate,’ but he also wondered why they were ‘worried about offending them by calling them an alien.’ He insisted we don’t know what ‘is going on in the head of species of life from another planet.’ Tyson added: ‘When I refer to aliens — just to be specific — I always say ‘space aliens’. And then, what we used to call aliens on Earth — undocumented immigrants, that’s what the new term is for them, and I’m all in on that. … So what that means is — if we all do that — the only invocation of the word ‘alien’ is for creatures from outer space that want to kill us all.’”
So…there may or may NOT be a chance that there is alien life “out there. Some people seem certain; others skeptical. So, let me speculate.
Say we have a star with not much energy – called a Type M star. According to current classifications, two thirds of stars are in this category. The least common stars are the most energetic or Type O stars.
What would be the advantage of crystalline life evolving under each type of star? It seems likely that a crystalline life form would come into existence in order to gather enough energy for survival – in other words, to get smart, it would need to get more energy than any of the other competing lifeforms. Humans grew smart because having a big brain allowed them to gather more food than any other kind of life form – the smarter you are, the bigger the brain, the bigger the brain, the bigger the head, and the more you fed the brain, the more brilliant ideas it would have to keep the rest of the body alive. [This is HUGE over-simplification of how evolution works, but I’m going to keep it for now.]
So, we have some kind of crystalline intelligence developing in order to gather more light – and concentrate it better. Imagine a wide, metallic mirror – maybe aluminum. We’ll start with creatures called “amphipods” who concentrate aluminum and use it to strengthen their exoskeletons to better withstand the pressures of the deepest parts of the ocean. Under a Type M star, the oceans might be shallower – except for perhaps huge cracks in the planet’s crust, like the Earth’s Marianas Trench; where our aluminized aliens dwell.
They change over time – there’s lots of time with a class M star. They burn slowly and can last a long time. So, they begin to group together into colonies, rather like the Siphonophoria I started exploring here: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2023/04/writing-advice-creating-alien-aliens.html
Only instead of long, thin tentacles, these form into sheets. Aluminized sheets, their skeletons strengthened. The wee beasties [Name for a story???] (“In the 17th century, Van Leeuwenhoek looked through a microscope at a drop of water and found it teeming with microscopic life. He was the first recorded person in history (that I know of) to see microbes. He called them “wee beasties”. The science has survived and thrived, sadly the quaint term hasn’t.”) grow in sheets. When peculiar currents well up from below, while the flat sheet is drifting one day, the uneven currents lift the edges but leave the center lower. The effect is startling – focused sunlight carries more energy and the “beasties” in the center are energized. The current persists, and the alteration allows for more emphatic breeding; the adaptation increases the survival rate of colonies that can concentrate sunlight…
OK – enough of life changing over time. Let’s get to the point of this exercise: what kinds of thoughts and emotions and feelings would a colony of aluminized wee beasties that looks suspiciously like a sheet of mylar. While the aspects of a living sheet of BoPET (biaxially oriented polyethylene terephthalate) is starting to interest me, I’ll yank myself back to the topic at hand…
So, based on the quotes above, emotions would come first. Postulate: a floating piece of BoPET would probably be excited the closer it got to the surface of the ocean it lives in. Firstly because it would be able to pull more and more energy from the sunlight as it got brighter and brighter. It would be more energetic. At first, this would just be more energy to reproduce. But as time passed, our BoPET bowl would discover that close enough to the surface and under certain conditions…I’m going to call the creatures Biaxteres…they might catch sight of things above the water. Floating things.
Again, time passes and the Biaxteres discover that they can flex their film bodies and see what the things are that pass overhead ARE. At this point, emotions might spill over into feelings. Probably what we would call curiosity would pop up. What are the things above their world might become a driver of curiosity.
At the same time, they would discover that the “bowling” faced downward might allow them to “see” things both smaller and larger – magnifying and telescoping through the water. They might discover that visible light isn’t the only part of the spectrum there is. And underwater sound might ALSO be magnified by the bowl-effect.
And now we have both emotions and feelings. Emotional “highs” we might call wonder, curiosity, desire…though NONE of these would be emotions and feelings as we would experience them. They also wouldn’t be about things we could see: the Biaxteres would see differently than we would, being creatures of the air, we wouldn’t perceive the flyers or the creatures of the deep as they would. For them, it might be more visceral. Certainly, the other life they experience in this ocean would be threatening in a way we wouldn’t be able to understand – life as aluminized film wouldn’t be the same as life as flesh and bone.
Would it even be comprehensible to us? Could a civilization develop on the Biaxtere’s world? What kind of a civilization would a lifeform that was (merely?) a thin, aluminized film of microscopic creatures? I’ll need to explore that.
For now, we might share excitement and curiosity with them. We might share a sense of exploration with them. HOWEVER, Biaxtere civilization might not be recognizable to us as such. While we may share some emotions and feelings – what else might we share and how might we communicate?
I’ll be thinking on this more in the future…
Source: https://counseling.online.wfu.edu/blog/difference-feelings-emotions/, http://www.nonverbal-world.com/2014/09/would-aliens-have-emotions.html, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/neil-degrasse-tyson-welcome-to-the-universe, https://medium.com/@leecadesky/wee-beasties-d303c7caf019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BoPET
Image: https://image.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/alien-human-600w-136457129.jpg
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