I have a feeling that this story is going to end up on a space station - but I stink at making up aliens that are plausible! I would love suggestions.
I'm thinking of "Sector General" style aliens, where they are non-humanoid and have different methods of percieving the enviornment around them - different range of light vision, hearing, telekinetics, live off of sulfur instead of oxygen, communicate through pheromones instead of sound... the sky is the limit, but No Klingons!
Cultural suggestions for your aliens would help as well - what do they consider sacred, or offensive, how do they sleep, what do they eat? what did they develop to fend off preditors on their homeworld? What is the normal sky and sun color for them?
And most important of all, what are their physical weaknesses? If a sentient with the carrying/force capabilities of a five year old were to attempt murder, what would they do?
Please have as much fun with this as possible and be ridiculous! There is no such thing as too much detail for answering this question! Thank you TONS for all your help, I have had no internet access and no time to think for the past two months and am way behind on nano planning.
----------
50,477 / 50,000
oct. 25, 2009 - 21 27
Oooh.
Okay, a critter (asexual) that is a dodecahedron with an arm coming out of each side. The arms are not tentacles, but they have several ball joints that allow full range of motion. Each arm ends in something that most resembles a hoof (and is what they walk on, having no limbs other than these arms) but is really closer to a beak; it can open and a long prehensile tongue comes out. The beings use these tongues as hands. Most major organs are in the central dodecahedron (stomach, etc.) but the brain is in the hoof/beak area... that means it actually has twelve brains - they're linked but much like a squid there's a little bit of thought that goes on in one arm before the rest of it is fully aware. Sensory patches located between the arms, on the central body, act as eyes and ears. Hearing is roughly equivalent to humans in terms of range, but their vision is barely better than seeing light and darkness. Luckily the sensory patches also can detect electrical fields, much like sharks can.
The creatures tend to touch (lick) everything. Everything. They have no concept of personal space, at all. They tend to be very passive and friendly, refusing to take sides in arguments and avoiding politics whenever possible. That being said, if they feel threatened they will lash out with the hoof/beaks which can pack a serious punch. Certain electronics irritate them when active nearby, but most are just 'visible' to them without causing interference. They are highly religious but in such a vague way that it rarely comes up and they refuse to argue over details. In essence, they believe that there is a single god who created everything and that, upon dying, any intelligent creatures are absorbed into god. In terms of intelligence they are about the same as humans, although their thought process is very different. They tend to think about many things at the same time rather than focusing, which can lead to some excellent lateral thinking but means for any one simple problem they are slower than humans are.
One other exception to their otherwise calm personalities: if anyone ever cuts off one of the arms (or even just the end of one) they will be hunted down and killed without exception. In areas where the law forbids this, they will agree to respect the law but the person they were after will have an 'accident' at some point later. In the few documented cases of this there has never been any evidence to suggest a connection to these beings - everyone knows, but they can't prove it. This is generally pointed to as a reason that humanity in general should be greatful that these guys don't go into politics.
2,344 / 50,000
oct. 26, 2009 - 07 36
This can be really fun for you because how most people think of aliens they have earth specific traits. If you want to go really hardcore look up a planet and try to figure how an organism could possibly live there. I'm way into science so I would make my aliens as unearthly as possible. This means no know basis on anything you know. Go as far out as you possibly can while still being able to define your alien as living. Have fun with it.
80,029 / 50,000
oct. 26, 2009 - 08 18
Try something with Trilateral symmetry.
27,423 / 50,000
oct. 26, 2009 - 15 29
I agree, the most realistic way is to figure out where your aliens came from and then figure out what adaptations they would have evolved to survive there.
For example:
What is their food source? More importantly - how do they locate their food/water/other necessities? That will tell you a lot about what "senses" would be common on that planet. If visibility is low, (because their planet has constant cloud cover, or a sun that gives off mostly infra red radiation etc.) then they probably wouldn't "see" the way we do. It's likely that they would have some way to sense movements, so feeling or hearing, or possibly somewhere in between the two...
Their senses would in turn affect how they communicate with each other. If they can't see, they can't use visual signals. If they can't "hear" (or can't speak - vocal cords are not really "necessary" for life, so may not have evolved in other places) then they can't talk to each other. If they detect ground vibrations, they could maybe tap with their feet in some kind of morse code-ish language... Talking by tap dancing could be interesting :P I've heard of people using pheromones as language, but personally I think that would be excessively hard to write... can you have pheromone "words"? how would a race like that store data? etc...
Is the planet warm or cold? If it's cold, they need some way to stay warm enough for the chemical processes of life to occur - this could either be the fact that their particular biochemistry just works at lower temperatures, or they need to find some way to warm up... like perhaps dark colors to absorb sunlight, fur, feathers, layers of "fat" or other kinds of insulation... If they're used to a hot planet, they may not have any adaptations like this and may easilly die if it gets too cold... Or perhaps they need ways to exhaust excess heat...
What's the atmosphere and gravity like on their world? on lower gravity worlds things wouldn't have to be as "sturdy" in order to stand, and may travel in different ways, like jumping or flying rather than walking (flying is also easier with a thicker atmosphere). Maybe they don't live in the "air" at all, but rather in the water, where they swim. On a high gravity world, aliens would probably be shorter and sturdier... Maybe snake-like, as legs would be less efficient? Or some kind of wheel or tread like being that rolls along the ground?
I can't think of anything else at the moment, hopefully somewhere in my disorganized brainstorm of a post you can find some useful ideas ;)
50,941 / 50,000
oct. 27, 2009 - 19 09
Yeah definitely make their perceptual systems different! This is something that I don't think happens enough in sci-fi where there are aliens. There really can be lots of vast differences. They could see types of light that we cannot see (x-ray, infrared, microwave, etc - whatever was relevant to their ancestors during their evolution). They could hear frequences much higher than what we can hear, or much lower. Or they could have sensitivities to certain frequencies that we're not quite so sensitive to. For example, humans are very very sensitive to sound frequencies in the range of human voices, and we even process those sounds differently in our brain than we do other sounds - this happens right near the ear, before it even gets to the brain.
Apart from the sensory stuff, another thing I recommended to someone else was this:
The majority of life on Earth is tiny. Really, really tiny. Tiny life is usually very good at surviving, because environments are usually better at supporting tiny life. Maybe your aliens could either:
a) be tiny - as in really tiny - bacteria or virus tiny (although that would make interactions with humans problematic!), or
b) be colonial organisms, which are made up of lots of tiny tiny organisms. They are very interesting, and there's no reason why they can't be intelligent.
An example of a colonial organism that moves and seems to behave as an individual is this jellyfish thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophorae
If it's a colonial organism, maybe it doesn't sleep. :) Parts of it take turns at sleeping. This is like the dolphin - the dolphin sleeps with the left hemisphere of its brain while the right one is awake, then the right one goes to sleep and the left one wakes up.
Physical weaknesses? Well, perhaps the types of light that they can see but we can't see damage them immensely. Maybe they can see x-ray light because x-rays are as bad to them as fire is to us - they can see it so they can avoid it.
These are just a few ideas - I might drop by again later and put in some more, and maybe pick up some ideas for my aliens. This stuff is the fun stuff in sci-fi! :D