A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
If anyone is interested in "what could alien life look like?", I can highly recommend reading the Children Of Time trilogy by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
He manages to really have his alien species feel like truely something non-human.
Reading the novels feels like going on an adventure
Yep, especially the alien species in the second book. Which was basically The Thing, but much more interesting.
I echo this, I was truly astonished by how much empathy and connection I had with alien creatures.
I’ve not got round to reading the third book but this has nudged me to go get my e-reader out.
be warned that it feels different and sometimes confusing, narration-wise. Just keep at it.
Some people don't like it because of that, but I like it. The new species opens some interesting philosophy
To not quote tha author is a crime.
Shame on you, OP.
False Knees
I understand the sentiment, but there must be some number of common attributes all advanced intelligent species across the universe have. Tool use, for example, would require that the organism have some kind of appendage that can manipulate things.
Personally, I think a definition of life can be boiled down to whether something can record and then selectively rebroadcast information patterns in a different medium. Intelligence is a function of how long a delay there can be between recording and rebroadcast in addition to how much information is transcribed.
Transcribing DNA/RNA into peptide chains obviously meets the criteria.
Wildfires are ruled out since, although wildfires can propagate themselves, information in fuel is almost immediately lost during combustion; if wildfires are alive, it is only in combination with other life forms that can selectively preserve and sacrifice parts of themselves through fire, such as pine cones requiring fire to clear away undergrowth for new sprouts.
A computer meets the criteria, but the selectivity of information storage has historically been tightly controlled by humans. It's more accurate to say humans and computers form an augmented hybrid lifeform.
I would call something intelligent if it can smelt and cast metal, maybe
I mean, they do have an appendage to manipulate things, but a species that breaks our expectation is ants. In the plural, that is. We typically assume intelligence to be an individual trait. That you need to use tools, because you are an individual. Meanwhile, ants exceed our ability to collaborate in many ways. As such, they even build bridges, not with tools, but rather with more ants.
Okay, how then would you generalize this trait? We would expect an intelligent species to be social to some degree? It's hard to imagine how a species could evolve the capacity to achieve technological advances without cooperation between individuals.
Birds can use tools.
A beak falls under "some kind of appendage"
Not just any tool use either, New Caledonian crows can make and use hooks. That might not seem special, but the amount of planning it takes to make and understand how to use a hook to retrieve something hidden in a nook is much more sophisticated than figuring out that you can poke something in front of you with a sharp stick.
Or telekinesis.
Yeah... no, I don't think that can evolve naturally
I've always wondered how much alien life is out there that we've actually seen (or seen signs of) but not recognized because we're blind to life that doesn't seem earth-like.
Have you ever been to an asda?
The only "asda" I know are the letters I type when I'm trying to make sure my keyboard works. (Sometimes "f" sneaks in there too.)
It’s owned by Walmart and is not too dissimilar if that helps give some context. The big superstores much more so, the smaller stores have much less product variety.
Apparently 10% owned by Wal*Mart and 67% owned by TDR Capital.
Oh wow, I was way off with my info! Thanks for letting me know… I know nothing of TDR Capital and yet have a feeling I don’t even want to look into them for the sake of my mental health.
It's a cheap supermarket in the UK
It was a cheap supermarket in the UK. According to Which it’s more expensive than 4 or 5 other supermarkets now.
Hmm, I wonder how they named it? Maybe with a keyboard they weren't sure was working?
It has a close competitor named Qwerty
It's short for associated dairies
Thanks, that clarifies the... Aliens?
I think they're saying poor people are so weird and gross they must be aliens.
Nah, I just know the expression "Walmartians" and I wanted to translate it into a European context.