Building a more "realistic" Sci-fi Universe with aliens

[ray245]

A thread on another forum about the flaws of GRR Martin's world-building has largely sparked my interest in starting this thread. With most fantasy universe largely relying on medieval history to tell its story, we have a good reference point of criticise some of the problems in the depiction of fantasy cultures we've read or seen on screen. However, the issue with a sci-fi show like Star Trek, Stargate, Babylon 5 and even Star Wars, is they tend to depict their aliens as being fairly human.

This is in large part to ease storytelling, providing us with a good frame of reference to understand the drama of interstellar politics. But very few writers and show seem to have explored the topic of how difficult or interesting it would be to navigate the Interstellar politics with really, really alien creatures. How will we make diplomatic contacts with a hive-species, monosexual species and etc? How would we navigate interstellar alliance and shifting power structure with species that can be extremely hard for an average human to understand?

How would you create an alien political organisation that takes into account of the species biology, as well as avoid turning them into generic stereotypes? Human history is filled with a wide variety of political models, ranging from a nomadic tribal system, democracy, monarchy, communism, dictatorship and etc. How would you create an alien species that reflects their own diversity, with differing opinions about how life should be?

EDIT: Let's assume that the FTL part of this universe is not "realistic", as I am mainly interested in discussing the interaction between species.

[K. A. Pital]

Well, there's been quite some stuff already written what concerns contact with fundamentally alien civilizations that break the canon of typical space opera genre: Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco and Solaris, and China Mievilles's Embassytown come to mind.

[Simon_Jester]

Part of the problem is that a single novel-length story (let alone a single movie or TV episode) isn't enough time to detail more than one culture properly. So we often see aliens introduced as a single culture because that's what there's time for.

[Q99]

CJ Cherryh is your writer. She does aliens who think alien (to various degrees).

The Chanur books take place entirely within an multi-alien trade compact, and a lot of the books involve learning more of a few of the aliens and how to navigate them. Some of the aliens are... relatively comprehensible but have their own ways of looking at things that can be fairly different. Some of aliens are very difficult to communicate with. And some of 'em are, "Ok, we can't actually talk to them directly, but we can kinda-sorta communicate with this other species that can kinda-sorta communicate with them." This is a really good series, and there's species that seem weird and dangerous in their actions at first that you gradually learn about and understand.

40,000 in Gehenna is about an intended-to-fail colony put down on a world that has intelligent life that initially is not recognized as intelligent life, and what follows (the novel takes a multi-century view).

The Foreigner series is about an ambassador from a stranded human colony on an alien world that had major issues because at first both sides were, "Hey, these aliens are just like us, minus some physical and cultural differences!" until stuff happened and both sides realized, "Oh crap, no they're not, we do not understand these beings," so the humans all moved off to the island and the Atevi on the island got relocated to the mainland so the two species could have isolation... save for the lone ambassador that gets sent to handle contact. The Atevi themselves have multiple cultures (if one most-dominant one), and later books in the series introduce another species too.

[Zixinus]

The fundamental problem is that realistically, writing anything alien is creatively difficult. Giving a sense of alienation, strangeness, otherness can also be challenging. But really, the fundamental proble of figuring out true alien psychology rather than odd humans with non-human bodies is not as simple and easy as it seems. Writers struggle with believable human cultures, never mind alien ones.

The other problem is that the plot and story has to continue. At one point, your aliens have to talk and explain themselves for the plot to make sense. Oftentimes you need them to speak in English for the plot to move. Having them mysterious isn't the same as being alien. So you have to give way in making complete aliens.

This also runs intp problems with things like video games. There is a practical reason to make the main alien characters in, say, Mass Effect humanoid: they will be doing hundreds of animations and it is easier (read: massively cheaper) to make generic human animation with slight or no changes than completely figure out new animations for each alien species. Compare the difficult of that to making some of them four-legged and/or four-armed and/or radially symmetrical.
That said, Mass Effect really was stupid with the the Asari and their ridicolous all-races compatibility.

Making a completely alien culture is also not always necessary. If your aliens are one-note, you don't have to make them too deep as long as you keep in mind the limited scope of their role to their depth. Having an alien species you encounter be vicious, threatening and seem a bit barbaric when they are mad space-pirates. It makes sense that space-pirates can be like that.

The problems are writer-mindsets and following a few silly ideas. For example, taking your one-note space pirate species and trying to extrapolate them to the entire species is a bad idea. That's how you get Klingons (or whatever is a worse example) too obsessed with warrior-hood and war to the point that they cannot possibly have developed spaceflight. A better example might be the Kzinti, who were used as mercenary warriors and stole space technology.

Things to keep in mind, if I were asked by a sci-fi writer:
- They don't have to have mouths like us. They can still use sound but in a way that we don't to the point they can't speak even if they somehow knew human language. Also this problem vice-versa. There are examples in the animal kingdom of incredible vocal mimicry like parrots but this would be an exception.
- They don't live in similar environments. Not just "the have slightly higher oxygen ratio than us", but "they breath air that would be instant death to a human and vice versa, they would collapse under Earth gravity, they would also implode under air pressures humans consider just tolerable, they cannot tolerate human levels of light or see different parts of the spectrum and oh, they live in a -150C to -180C). These can be compensated with technological means of course but this should be kept in mind.
- They may be people and have broadly similar emotions like us (love, hate, sorrow, hope, etc.) but they definitely will express them in ways that does not necessarily make sense to a human and vice versa. Compare the body language readability of a dog (a species that has broadly learned some human communication), a wolf and an alligator and then a squid.
- Just because they are willing to live in peace doesn't mean that they can live face-to-face.
- Always make or imply space for more culture and ideas, to tell the reader/viewer/player/etc that they are viewing a small section of a greater, more complicated thing. That they are told the simplified version of the true reasons.
- One individual should never be the example of all of its kind. There is no real "statistical Joe Average".
- They should be people on some level. No super-autistic super-engineers that function for no other reason but to give advanced technology to species and civilizations that otherwise barely would be able to hold up a stone-age one. Or alien-but-not-really-alien space vixens.

How would you create an alien political organisation that takes into account of the species biology, as well as avoid turning them into generic stereotypes?

This is a difficult question.

I can see two (rather simplistic and in my own opinion, primitive) approaches:

First, take the physical characteristics and try to build a primitive society from there. Then build modern societies. Tend to be simplististic but tries to covers psychological changes due to physiological ones. Also may overemphasize the physical-driven psychology as opposed to real cultural ones.

The other is to take a human model and alter it systematically. This risks ideological axes to grind of the author leaking in very easily. Or making the making of a race-of-hats or even not making them really alien. However it likely makes the result mostly functional and complete in details that otherwise there was no attention paid to, such as how agricultural work is organised.

If anyone has better ideas I'd like to hear them.

[Elheru Aran]

While perhaps cliche it might work to consider animal life-forms on our planet and adapt them to fully sentient alien races. Ants are an obvious example and have been used in a wide range of adaptions-- they're a social life form, they've been studied in some depth so research on how their life cycle and hierarchial relationships function is easily available, they have a certain degree of specialization so one-note characters aren't necessarily bad. Ants or extrapolations thereof have been done, obviously, but there's potential. Apes-- definitely tool-using. Certain birds-- also tool-using, capable of verbal language, and so forth.

Logic does need to apply. Are they space-faring? Either they have to be capable of flying into space (bit of a trick, that), or they have to be tool-using, which mandates being able to manipulate matter in some fashion. They have to be either fairly intelligent, capable of complex mathematics (do they use numbers? they pretty much have to use SOME kind of numbers), complex thinking (A>B>C but C may >D or >E, either may result in X or Y, except if R or Q, and so forth)...

[ray245]

The problems are writer-mindsets and following a few silly ideas. For example, taking your one-note space pirate species and trying to extrapolate them to the entire species is a bad idea. That's how you get Klingons (or whatever is a worse example) too obsessed with warrior-hood and war to the point that they cannot possibly have developed spaceflight. A better example might be the Kzinti, who were used as mercenary warriors and stole space technology.

There is a tendency among writers to express how great humanity are with all these brilliant scientists we have, with alien species commenting on our pioneers like Einstein, Wright Brothers and etc. Yet, they often seem to forget that these alien races have their own version of Einstein, Newton, Galileo and etc.

A Klingon scientist is still a stereotypical Klingon, with the exception of being able to match the human scientist in a technobabble contest. They rarely paid attention to how other species would approach R&D.

[Q99]

The fundamental problem is that realistically, writing anything alien is creatively difficult. Giving a sense of alienation, strangeness, otherness can also be challenging. But really, the fundamental proble of figuring out true alien psychology rather than odd humans with non-human bodies is not as simple and easy as it seems. Writers struggle with believable human cultures, never mind alien ones.

The other problem is that the plot and story has to continue. At one point, your aliens have to talk and explain themselves for the plot to make sense. Oftentimes you need them to speak in English for the plot to move. Having them mysterious isn't the same as being alien. So you have to give way in making complete aliens.

Yes, it is very tricky. I think CJ Cherryh threads the needle well, and is good at transferring species from 'mysterious' to 'alien and different, but understandable with experience and knowledge of how they work,' and a few other writers can do it, but it is a hard task.

The key IMO is 'different, but not inferior.' A lot of SF make an alien alien by just removing part of a human (make them not get compassion, or emotion, or whatever) or, as you say, just make them mysterious and unexplained.

Atevi from the Foreigner series, the most important thing about them is how their loyalty works is fundamentally *different*. At a distance, looking at their towns and cities, you wouldn't even notice it, but the emotions underlying their social interaction is different. They don't Like people- liking is for inanimate things, like salads- their loyalty-esque emotion governs interactions more. And if you don't understand that interaction, they may take actions that seem sudden and extreme to you, but if you do, those same actions do make sense. You may not always be able to predict them- far from it, some Atevi are very unpredictable, just as humans are- but you can tell it's coming from a consistent place.

[Simon_Jester]

This also runs intp problems with things like video games. There is a practical reason to make the main alien characters in, say, Mass Effect humanoid: they will be doing hundreds of animations and it is easier (read: massively cheaper) to make generic human animation with slight or no changes than completely figure out new animations for each alien species. Compare the difficult of that to making some of them four-legged and/or four-armed and/or radially symmetrical.
That said, Mass Effect really was stupid with the the Asari and their ridicolous all-races compatibility.

Eh, I think it was an interestingly different idea. The asari are compatible with everyone, including relatively inhuman aliens like the krogan. It's a pity they didn't do more to explore that faster, but they do go into it. The real shame is that they made asari look a lot more like human women than they do like the females of any of the other species in the Mass Effect setting; if they were physically more alien (but still weirdly/inexplicably attractive to humans) it would make them if anything a better exploration of their concept.

Making a completely alien culture is also not always necessary. If your aliens are one-note, you don't have to make them too deep as long as you keep in mind the limited scope of their role to their depth. Having an alien species you encounter be vicious, threatening and seem a bit barbaric when they are mad space-pirates. It makes sense that space-pirates can be like that.

The problems are writer-mindsets and following a few silly ideas. For example, taking your one-note space pirate species and trying to extrapolate them to the entire species is a bad idea. That's how you get Klingons (or whatever is a worse example) too obsessed with warrior-hood and war to the point that they cannot possibly have developed spaceflight. A better example might be the Kzinti, who were used as mercenary warriors and stole space technology.

Well, for the Kzinti it's fairly explicit that left to their own devices they'd have fallen apart as a species, and they were so aggressive that as soon as they ran into a species that knew how to cooperate with each other and how to fight, they suffered so many casualties that sheer Darwinian selection blasted much of the aggression out of the species within a few decades.

One interesting idea is that aliens with a different psychological basis might approach science effectively, but differently. Just off the top of my head, I can imagine a Klingon scientist who views their research as a battle against the secretive forces of nature, debates the merits of ideas more bluntly and assertively than almost any human, and sees knowledge as a prize. They end up doing a lot of the same things a human does, just not for quite the same reasons.

While perhaps cliche it might work to consider animal life-forms on our planet and adapt them to fully sentient alien races. Ants are an obvious example and have been used in a wide range of adaptions-- they're a social life form, they've been studied in some depth so research on how their life cycle and hierarchial relationships function is easily available, they have a certain degree of specialization so one-note characters aren't necessarily bad. Ants or extrapolations thereof have been done, obviously, but there's potential. Apes-- definitely tool-using. Certain birds-- also tool-using, capable of verbal language, and so forth.

This is a good idea, though I'd like to point out that we know what you get when apes become fully sentient.

Us.

And that's also a caution- humans are very different in many ways than any of the other ape species, while being surprisingly similar in others.

[Q99]

The Kzinti are interesting because they used shortcuts-

They were a primitive species, picked up by a more advanced one, who took over then *engineered themselves* into their idea of what heroes were like, knowing the stolen tech but having their fairly primitive social view.

Time and casualties then began to push them onto a much more sustainable path than a species of 'heroes'.

[Simon_Jester]

That's actually a good example of the potential consequences of 'uplifting' a low tech species. If you give them atomic weapons and genetic engineering, and teach them what to do with those things, without teaching them the thoughtful, analytical mindset that gave rise to those technologies...

They may very well do something crazy. And then you have medieval crazies flying around in starships. Not goood.

[Zixinus]

Things I'd add to the list of things I'd advise to a sci-fi writer:
- Scapeflight (or any other industrial or higher technology) does not happen by accident. You can't have spaceships without rocket science and you can't have rocket science without all the regular science that makes up rocket science.
- The same goes for operation: to make a spaceship work you need to understand rocket science. You can't have gibbering morons unable to tie their own shoelaces piloting one, never mind do something purposeful like go to war. Even if they stole the technology, the ability to maintain and operate it should indicate intelligence.

There is a tendency among writers to express how great humanity are with all these brilliant scientists we have, with alien species commenting on our pioneers like Einstein, Wright Brothers and etc. Yet, they often seem to forget that these alien races have their own version of Einstein, Newton, Galileo and etc.

It is a problem that human imagination can only really work with generalities when it comes to something as big as a nation, never mind a species. When you created a big general picture, it can be difficult to realize that there is more than what's on the picture, such as an individual. A Japanese samurai is going to give very different impressions than a monk or farmer.
For example, you might get the repeated experience that a species is war-like, paranoid, prone to resorting to force, stubborn... if you only ever met the warriors/soldiers who need/encouraged to that way to be good at their job.

The real shame is that they made asari look a lot more like human women than they do like the females of any of the other species in the Mass Effect setting; if they were physically more alien (but still weirdly/inexplicably attractive to humans) it would make them if anything a better exploration of their concept.

A relatively simple solution would have been to make them artificial (a project of the Proteans, which is partially already role) and have many design elements (cosmetic, structural, psychological) eerily familiar with humans, hence their fascination with us. Then the "can get materials from other species" bit would make some sense.

Change the nature of their eyes (more colorful pupils, not white whites, maybe change from pupils to slits or bars like goats), remove or radically alter the nose along with non-moving parts of the skull and you would have had mostly the same without needing to change animations. They would have pulled it off. But most of the time they just come across as woman wearing the most bizarre makeup and bizarre enthusiasms for sex.

[Sea Skimmer]

That depends on what you think future technology is going to be like. If its like life is now then teaching someone how to build and upgrade it is going to amount to teaching a world view, one of science and engineering, an outgrowth of the math center of the brain, which will need to 'exist as a thing' as it does in humans. Otherwise you never get anywhere. That's a big problem for typical 'hive' races in particular as they show up in sci fi.

If we've reached the point of replicators make replicators, then all kinds of crazy things are possible.

[Zixinus]

That's kind of my point: you NEED to know the physics of how planets move, how orbits work, etc. to just operate a spaceship. If you are still stuck in the medieval perspective that everything revolves around your homeworld in perfect rings, there will be sooner or later one less spaceship.

The only way out of this is if there are AIs and such managing everything important and able to make important decisions but are hardcoded to follow organic directives. If the organics are the ones making mayor decisions, then sooner or later they are going to do something terribly stupid like cook the spaceship at a bad atmospheric reentry angle or worse. At which point, the real civilization is the AIs, the organics being mere slavers (even if they don't know about it).

The same thing extends to replicators. Yeah, you can replicate a replicator but what if it gets broken? You need to repair it, to maintain it and if you don't understand the working principles of it, you are short one less replicator. Sure, if it can perfectly replicate (something very unlikely) another replicator, you have a massive buffer for failure but stupidity is going to pile up to its measure if you have no idea what it is and how it works. Or even if that is not a problem, they'll do something else stupid like start replicating bombs to start a revolution to topple their existing power structure because it didn't rely on replicators. Or create gray goo or ruthlessly over-deplete a resource they shouldn't have or create environmental damage.

Give medieval vikings a nuclear sub and even if they diligently read every manual on-board on how it works and obediently follow it, they are sooner or later going to run into a problem that the manual doesn't cover. Or get into problems that even the original perfectly-trained crew can't handle because submarines are not designed to be completely self-sufficient for decades, they need prepared facilities to operate which in turn needs infrastructure, etc. Technology isn't just machines and blueprints, it is living expertise, it is a culture from which it is born, it is an understanding of the universe required to make it, etc. A different species will likely have very different ideas (or more likely, very different foundations and connections, logics and intuition) of what science is, but they have to describe the workings of the universe the same.

[Simon_Jester]

This argument is most likely valid, but I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it covers all possible cases.

Depending on how power structures work in their society, things could get more complex.

I mean, we have nations on Earth that operate on a nearly medieval attitude, but are still able to operate technology. It's at least imaginable that they could stretch to controlling people capable of manufacturing the technology. Or that elements of a primitive cultural mindset could hang on in the face of technological advancement, even as many other elements change. Or, for that matter, that a congenitally aggressive species could retain its aggression, altering it only slightly through a new lens, as it was given the means to build spaceships.

They'll still have to understand science and engineering in order to be anything other than space refugees, but I don't feel confident ruling out the idea that uplifted primitive species might show significant holdovers from their primitive cultural template.

[Zixinus]

This argument is most likely valid, but I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it covers all possible cases.

That is not my point. Societal, political, philosophical, even spiritual change is not tied necessarily to scientific change, yes. The idea that these are necessarily closely related is actually part of modern western mindset. Newer forms of government for example can be tied to simple sheer size of a society, where one idea that previously worked can no longer work.

My point is that using technology is tied to understanding technology with in turn is tied to understand the principles of the universe based on which those technologies rely. What's more, there will be people needed invested in doing just that. They can avoid clashing with societal concepts with their work, yes, but they still need to exist. There needs to be a selection of these people, that they need to be intelligent enough to create it, to manage keeping the existing knowledge alive and to develop it further and then to spread it so engineers can be born.

The thing that may be of issue is that in human culture, learning more about the universe has come into conflict with our beliefs about the world. Chief example is the tying of religious doctrine to such physical facts as the universe being centered around us as opposed to being one world among many. New ideas upsetting old ones. The thing to remember is that this is a case of western culture in a given moment. Alien cultures with different brains could simply connect ideas differently in a way that this this happens less (or more) often.

A greater threat is technology itself changing society rather than just science. A great deal of modern thought is there because we can live in ways that previously we couldn't. A mayor, recent example would be birth control: with it, we have separated the idea of sex and reproduction.

[SolarpunkFan]

I recall a section in Ring by Stephen Baxter about aliens with different morphologies (hive minds, amorphous creatures) would actually find arithmetic quite difficult compared to mathematics that seem "arcane" to our species.

Not much, but it could be something to contemplate on.

[Zixinus]

Math is hard precisely because our brain isn't designed for it, along with a great deal of other abstract thought like logical thinking. I think the same could be said for any other species. Hive minds could distribute parts of the problem, a bit like how computers reduce complex mathematical operations into very simple ones. That's a bit how human computers worked.

[SolarpunkFan]

Math is hard precisely because our brain isn't designed for it, along with a great deal of other abstract thought like logical thinking. I think the same could be said for any other species. Hive minds could distribute parts of the problem, a bit like how computers reduce complex mathematical operations into very simple ones. That's a bit how human computers worked.

I think what he meant wasn't that math is easy, rather that some mathematics might seem simpler to us than others because of our morphologies.

For example (working off of what I remembered from the novel): arithmetic comes to us easier than say... the Reimann conjecture (he uses an example of arcane-to-humans mathematics but I don't recall which) because our species consists of discrete organisms. Hive minds are different in that multiple organisms make up the individual. And "amorphous" organisms (not sure what he was implying with that, maybe the organism can grow or assimilate new thinking processes?) such as the fictional Qax would likely have different mathematics as well.

[Sea Skimmer]

Math is hard precisely because our brain isn't designed for it, along with a great deal of other abstract thought like logical thinking. I think the same could be said for any other species. Hive minds could distribute parts of the problem, a bit like how computers reduce complex mathematical operations into very simple ones. That's a bit how human computers worked.

To make a distributed system like that work each node has to be pretty damn smart in the first place though, it has to be able to understand what and why it's to do something. For a hive mind to distribute complex mathematical and engineering processes it would need one heck of a communication system, it's hard to see how this could ever evolve without some kind of magic telepathy or biological radio possibly. Computers work because the hardware is precisely rigid and reliable in a way biological things just aren't. And if we rely on telepathy, then the obvious question in sci fi becomes does that work FTL or not? Because otherwise you've got a problem spreading this past a single planet. At C the communications delay would quickly be enough to cause the hive mind to start to breakup.

[K. A. Pital]

Biological computers (brains) are surprisingly resilient, compared to human-built hardware. A small component defect could render an entire human computer system unable to function, but brains will often keep functioning - if in a much-decreased capacity - even when lots of neurons die.

[Q99]

A weird thing is, our brains are *great* at some types of math, just not great at translating it into numbers and words.

Complex trigonometry is used in throwing things. The amount of math needed to throw a ball is *massive*.

[Batman]

No it's not. The amount of math needed to have it land where we intended it to is. And a lot of us suck at that.

[Broomstick]

Yes, but most of us can get better with practice even if we've never seen a symbolic abstract representation of a number, much less trigonometry, in our life.

The ease with which living creatures handle moving in three dimensional space is really amazing... except to us it's so common we think it's easy. It's not, look at the difficulties researchers, governments, and militaries have had in getting machines to do the same thing.

[Zixinus]

To make a distributed system like that work each node has to be pretty damn smart in the first place though, it has to be able to understand what and why it's to do something.

The idea of a hive mind means that the species's can link together to work together as a whole. It does not necessarily mean that the component parts, the individuals, are completely retarded or utterly non-sentient by themselves.

If I were to think of one, I'd have the species have two communication systems: one long-distance communicaton that uses sound like speech for relatively simple communication like "hey, there are distant predators here". This form does not have to be too complex. And one contact-based communication, perhaps based on electricity or something that can transfer information with similar efficiency, that connects the brains more completely connecting and allowing hive-mind thinking. Individuals can huddle together to combine brainpower, with runners handing out and collecting tasks. There would be people in the hive doing more complex thinking and handing out tasks.

More magical hive-mind with radio communication would be a new, technology-archive thing. To a human observer they would look like a hive-mind: individuals are relatively stupid and have near-animal level limitations but groups act out and follow plans.