Alien Definition and 127 Threads

[long post, lots of brainstorming] Hi, for quite a while, I've been trying to come up with a reproductive scheme that's sufficiently different from ours to have interesting implications, obvious as well as less obvious ones, without getting too complicated or contrived. This would be the...

A lot of terrestrial biology has specific chirality, the 'Other Hand' being bio-unavailable or toxic... As 'our' set is product of aeons of happenstance and evolution, alien biology probably differs. ( I'm thinking genuinely alien 'alien' rather than eg 'seeding' or panspermia...) Can...

Even an offhanded remark by some character in a sci-fi story can have major implications. With my story based on a generation ship in the late 25th century, I considered it self-evident that humanity would already have explored most of the planets and moons within the solar system before trying...

The Threat Of A.I. Is Already Here: “…Bill: So what is it? Can you give an example? How will it be different from these rudimentary forms of A.I.? Gideon: “The public is now getting a glimpse of it. You would want to reference the project known as OpenAI and ChatGPT. Also, Midjourney is very...

I would like a reason why their blood is Cooper/ Rose gold color. They evolve from a dinosaur bird like creature but in their current timeline they are human looking. One of their most strange characteristic is they got cooper looking veins and their blood is rose-gold color. Which gave the...

(edit.. not the red light, that's my emergency power outage light in every frame, I'm referring to 3:57am and exactly 15 seconds, blink and you will miss it) turn up the volume Strange white/yellow flash appeared in my room and the sound it made when the light hit my security camera sounded...

Recently viewed video about wormholes that required negative energy to create it. Suppose hypothetical aliens have discovered this technology. Spaceship enters in first point and exit at second. To prevent spaceship destruction they might have technology to smooth gravitational waves on exit...

We on extant Earth meet a certain choice of biopolymers. Structural biopolymers include proteins. Most of the rest of the structural biopolymers are polysaccharides. But with one conspicuous exception: lignin which is a polymer of p-propylphenols. The most common structural polysaccharide on...

Perseverance's successful landing has scared up some UFO conspiracists online. I used to be like them and I was into Charles Forte as well, encouraged by people who should have known better (yes I AM looking at you Arthur C. Clarke) until I realized I just really wanted to believe rather than...

An ocean world navigational map will not have any reason to chop up its navigational maps into artificial pieces to accommodate continents. That disqualifies several projections to start. I want to figure out what kind of a projection they would use. Since they would be doing all their...

I think this is important not just for the extraterrestrial part but it can help explain how life starts on planets through Panspermia. https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-claim-to-have-found-the-first-known-extraterrestrial-protein-in-a-meteorite This could really be groundbreaking. If...

SETI is searching for a signal from space. What is this signal supposed to say? Hi, here we are.? We were broadcasting signals into space for 50 years before we actually knew we were doing it. Those first signals are still going, but they are not traveling in a big sphere. They're going in the...

Was wondering this for a scifi alien race I have in mind, is it chemically possible to have a race with combustible blood.? The answer: Yes, but I wonder how close the blood will be to our own? Since oxygen carrying blood like ours is preferred since it can deliver more energy for the work the...

Scifi Humanoids by their very nature are'nt very alien. Where they compensate is how well they can interact with human characters. However, there are internal ways to modify them. Main question: I researched oxygen and learned that less oxygem breathed makes humans fatigued faster, while too...

In the USA if you go to Mexico your money is worth a lot more over there. Likewise if you are a scifi alien with a scifi starship your money should go much farther in the USA than it would on your homeworld.The question is... how far? How much would a human nation realistically let alien money...

The perodic table we learn in school. All the stuff on it is found on Earth, and some of it (not all of it) we can find on other worlds. So it got me thinking, what about alien scifi worlds? Unobtanium is a common scifi trope, and all too often scifi humans envy aliens having unobtanium. But...

This is purely for fun, as it won't affect my plot direction whatsoever. Which of my scifi created humanoid races would you prefer to work with and why? Which would you not want to and why? Based on their behavior only? Race 1: Take a positive view most all the time of situations, but can...

For me it is their behavior. How it is different from humanity. Some will seek to answer the why, but I am only interested in their ongoing goals. To a large degree that fits their behavior, since in my work, each fictional race I tailor made for a specific purpose which drives them to do what...

Suppose we are in communication with aliens who live in a different universe. I know, that's impossible, communication requires the exchange of mass or energy, which implies that we live in the same universe. But suppose it is true. I am wondering, can we and the aliens, via this communication...

Under what circumstances would a telescope be able to observe an alien city, supposing such a structure was present on a planet? Are the requirements so high, say the mirror size, that this is simply wishful thinking or is this actually possible? More specifically, suppose our imagined telescope...

Discussed here https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2018/10/29/on-oumuamua-thin-films-and-lightsails/ referencing this paper by Baily & Loeb @ Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics ’Oumuamua (1I/2017 U1) is the first object of interstellar origin observed in the Solar system. Recently...

If alien were to establish a colony on earth, do they need human permission? ----------------------------------------- let's say they show up on sky where not belong to any country and create artificial island on international water to set up their own colony. even assume that they were...

Jung Yul Kwon et al, How Will We React to the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life?, Frontiers in Psychology (2018). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02308 https://phys.org/news/2018-02-humans-react-pretty-news-alien.html#jCp Answer: probably well (this is a limited pilot study) The pilot study analyzed...

https://phys.org/news/2017-12-genes-space-successfully-unknown-microbes.html While debating the issue of clickbait headlines, I remembered that recently the Russians had embarrassed themselves with such a leap of flying unicorns...

OK, probably not extraterrestrial, but it did pique your interest. :) After my dishwasher recently stopped working I learned that it has a small filter/strainer located just before the water inlet valve so I disconnected the water supply and found this slimy wormlike mass completely clogging...

Hello, Suppose we humans traveled in a spacecraft to another Earth like planet with the same gravity and atmospheric composition as our own Earth. Suppose we landed on the surface. Suppose we opened the door of the craft, and walked onto the planet surface. Suppose we did not wear a...

Could calcium and copper and say - boron, be joined into one substance? If not boron, then which element? I am trying to design an alien skeleton with copper, calcium, and ? I love copper and part of the idea is its distribution throughout the universe. I am asking for a tip about where to look...

Last night I was watching the latest Alien: Covenant movie, where the crew and colonist are brought out of cryosleep to repair damages to the ship caused by a "neutrino blast". This didn't sit well with me, so I did some searching and thought I'd share what I found: Lethal Neutrinos...

What alien technologies are in Neill Blomkamp's "Rakka" and how far they are from real?

Have you guys seen the trailers yet for Alien: Covenant? While I'm not overly fond of the Horror genre I have to admit that the first time I saw the alien pilot corpse in the original Alien I couldn't help but to want to know more... much more about his/her/its backstory. The newest episode...

... in a syfy story that you think would be fun? I was imaging a race of quasi-crabs who entered the Empire of Man after having met only one human, an Oxford don type who gave them some ... interesting ... ideas of what the rest of the human race was like.

Can we please revive this thread with better references: My source for the Through The Wormhole Episodes is Wikipedia: Season 6 No. 2 : Can Time Go Backwards. There is a Youtube link: I was asking: "In Through the Wormhole Episode no.2 of the 6th series named Can Time Go Backwards (it starts...

In Through the Wormhole Episode no.2 of the 6th series named Can Time Go Backwards (it starts in the 6th minute what I am referring to), it is claimed by a university professor that it may be possible (especially by alien beings) to perceive and experience the passing of time not right now but...

Suppose a group of astronauts traveled to another Earth-like planet. They get off their space-craft, take off their space suits and begin sunbathing, unclothed. As their immune system has not evolved on this planet, would they immediately die as a result of exposure to alien microbes? So, even...

This is something that got me thinking for a while. Especially after learning the basic of physics and chemistry. Basically, pretty much every movies, novel, etc that feature an advanced race of aliens(or any alien in general), they gives them some sort of technology or their organic...

me and my friend were talking on facebook and we couldn't think of an answer to the question, would water pressure decrease in zero G, you can see how far along we got before getting stuck in the picture belowhttps://www.physicsforums.com/attachments/105576

In lots of sci-fi desperate survivors often eat native creatures on alien planets. Besides the obvious dangers like it having poison sacks or something, what would happen if we tried to eat it? Is our digestive system tied closely to the evolution of Earth life, or would it universally be able...

Hear me now? 'Strong signal' from sun-like star sparks alien speculation Interesting... Wait though With only one signal you just can't tell, and it certainly doesn't come up to scratch as "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.". It might have been just the cleaner in the...

How far in the Milky Way would one have to travel to land upon a planet where the night sky would have zero familiar stars? Basically, I'd like to set up a world somewhere so far from our section of the galaxy that the only things that are the same are distant galaxies (which I'm assuming would...

I have an alien in one of my stories that bleeds. I want to use science to determine what the range of possible colors would be. It's an oxygen breathing alien, so it's blood has to be efficient at transporting it. I know our blood is red because we use iron to do that. I don't know enough...

I have a fondness for the Moties from The Mote in God's Eye and it's sequel, The Griping Hand. They are a hierarchical society with a biological necessity to reproduce or die. This leads to incredible population pressure and resulting societal collapse. Being "trapped" in one solar system they...

Writing a sci-fi story, thinking of making the alien species ammonia-based. Obviously there are problems with that. On Earth, ammonia is a liquid under cryogenic temperatures. I think -28 degree Fahrenheit is its boiling point. Obviously, this is too cold for a human to survive for very long...

So I'm writing this comedy Sci-Fi story and I want it to have some realism. One of the main characters is a sentient alien, and I want to do a little better on the Sci-Fi hardness scale than "rubber forehead alien." The chances are high for any alien life we encounter to be synthetic, so to...

In a rather bad science fiction movie, astronauts Susie (mass 60 kg) and Fred (mass 86 kg) are investigating an alien probe. All of a sudden, the probe starts to produce a weird defensive force field. Their space ship's board computer scans the field and produces the above plot of the potential...

Are we alone AND what are the ways we can search alien life?

I'm getting some popcorn! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/08/nasa-alien-life_n_7023134.html

Hi all, I was thinking about the problem and can someone verify my solution : 1) Set up a Magnetic field going from down to up, i.e north pole is at the bottom. 2) Use the triboelectric series to charge some small particle positive (hair or glass with teflon) 3) Throw that particle in forward...

I've pondered this a lot recently. I am an amateur electronics enthusiast. Recently I've been trying to build my own capacitors, resistors and radio/tv receivers/transmitters from scratch. A thought occurred to me, what would alien technology look like? and would it evolve the same way ours did...

Uneducated writer here looking for a discussion on the perception of other dimensions, including time: If the fabric of our universe is space/time, I understand that as humans, we can only really perceive space, that is I can see space all around me. However, I can only perceive this actual...

In Aliens movies, the xenomorphs blood is such a strong acid, that if they are shot, they damage the surroundings. Does it have any plausibility, that an organic biological lifeform could create such a strong acid, have claws that could cut through metal?