Making Aliens

Why have aliens in a roleplaying game/session? Why not just create an outrageous human society?

Well, maybe because from a story standpoint, you can't use humans. The mirror is just not warped enough. Or it's about the first humans to get to place X and what they meet there.

You can start with:

• a story function
• a place
• a biology

But first we have to think about aliens in general.

ABOUT ALIENS

I'm going to make some assumptions here. They're my assumptions and I'm allowed to make them. If you don't like'em, make your own, but don't criticize my conclusions because you don't like my assumptions. Criticize them because they don't follow from my assumptions.

I recognize that many of these axioms contain weasel-words, like "language" and "art" and "intelligence". So be it. I'll try to make my meanings reasonably evident.

• Life can exist on other worlds. This one's required by the task at hand.
• With a small amount of qualification, all life-forms:
• are organized structures (even the monerans)
• take in energy and nutrients to sustain themselves and release waste products
• reproduce in some fashion; the copies may not be perfect duplicates.

That doesn't define life-forms, but it narrows the scope of discussion. I'm going to use terms like "gene" and "DNA" but I'm not biochemically savvy enough to know if they are the only options. I doubt it.

To continue:

• Bigger, complex organisms eventually evolve on most life-bearing planets because "more complex" is the only way you can go from the primordial unicellular life-form.

Given that I'm accepting evolution (and why shouldn't I?), the current taxonomic structure (kingdom, phylum, etc.) will probably still be useful. (Though plants are less stringent about reproductive isolation; a multicellular organism with that trait could exhibit Lamarckian evolution.) The actual taxons (mammalia, insecta) won't. I suffer a failure of imagination here and accept Monera and Protista as being pretty much inevitable and required for the development of multicellular life.

I'll follow popular bias and use the word "dominant" to mean the organism occupying same status as mammals: they're not autotrophs and they're big, which is probably a prerequisite for intelligence. Though really, in terms of geographical diversity, number of niches filled, and sheer biomass, unicellular organisms are the probably dominant form on every planet.

• Species are shaped in part by accident. We have five fingers on each hand because somewhere along the line, having seven fingers fell out of the model, not necessarily because five fingers is some kind of digital optimum. (This means that evolutionary biology will never be a predictive science.)
• Neutral mutations may accumulate in a population. As external conditions change, those mutations may cease to be neutral.
• Knowing the genetic structure is not enough; the environment is also important. When is the gene triggered? What else is there at that time? Is there an alternate mechanism of inheritance?
• The changes effected by mutation depend upon the biological system being changed. Small changes can have large effects on the organism, either by changing the thing being grown (a leg instead grows as an arm) or by changing the timing of development (the brain and skull grow for twice as long).
• Using historical examples for rates of mutation and time required for facility X to evolve is fine but not required. We have only one sample and no idea if it is representative.
• While similar problems do admit of similar solutions (streamlined shape for swimming), they don't *require* them. If notochords never develop, then the intelligent alien may look like an octopus, not like a biped. (And I think that some similarities in convergent evolution fall out of the genetic mechanism, rather than from mechanical concerns.)

Part of the problem with developing an alien species is the same as with develping a model language: you have to develop the language or species or world that was parent to the one you're developing.

On intelligence:

Nobody actually knows what intelligence is. Like art and like pornography, we're all pretty sure we'd know it if we saw it. We're all wrong, as we'll discover if we ever meet an alien intelligence.

People differ on their beliefs about whether we could understand an alien intelligence. Would aliens really be fundamentally alien? The choices are infinite but we can group them broadly as:

1. The fundamental requirements of biology are so strict that intelligence pretty much must develop like human intelligence. Of course we'd understand them. But let me quote Will Shetterly here, from a post he made to rec.arts.sf.written:

   "Unless you're writing for a humorous effect, elves or space aliens and all creatures who aren't human should at least be as strange as, oh, the French."

   The overlay of culture on intelligence is significant and complicating in human cultures; we should not expect less from aliens.

2. There may be differences stemming from natural evolution and environment, and we (humans) can project ourselves into the aliens' viewpoint with varying degrees of success. We will always understand their science and mathematics, insofar as they model the same reality that our science and mathematics model.
3. The aliens may be so alien that we'll argue about whether or not they even qualify as intelligent.

From a scientific standpoint, we can't decide. We have only one evolutionary system to examine and that's insufficient data. A lot of people whom I respect hold the first position; I tend to the second position because it provides the most variety and chance for mutual understanding and communication; and the third, I think, represents the actual state of things on Earth, let alone in the universe. Are dogs intelligent? Cats? Dolphins? Gorillas? Octopuses?

One can, of course, argue that to accept propositions 2 or 3, you are defining "intelligence" so broadly that the word loses meaning. And maybe you're correct. But (from a science fiction standpoint) I think it's a mistake to assume so at the outset. If there are any intelligences that are fundamentally different, you may end up slaughtering them.

(And there's a basis for a long arc in a science fiction campaign. The colonists are destroying an alien intelligence, and it fights back. See, for example, the Star Trek episode, "Devil In The Dark.")

• Intelligence is not necessarily a survival trait. It is not "required" to evolve anywhere. Nonetheless, we'll examine it because we want to deal with intelligent aliens.
• Intelligence derives from the structure of the brain or the nervous system analogue.
• For our purposes, intelligence includes both the ability to learn from experience and the ability to reason abstractly.
• Further, anything that humans would recognize as a comparable intelligence would involve complex language, capable of discussing both food-gathering and aesthetics. (And yes, I know I'm implying that both would be important to an intelligent species.)
• Similarly, humans would best recognize an intelligence that involves time-binding: a way of teaching the children. This allows civilization to build upon the achievements of its forebears. It doesn't have to be language. Maybe the memory is chemical and is absorbed from the parent. Maybe the entire intelligent brain is a symbiont made from community of Mycoplasma-sized cells, and it divides, infecting a child with the "parent's" personality when the child reaches puberty. (There's a way for your r-strategists to pass on intelligence...)

Role-Playing

Well, how useful is this for role-playing?

Depends on the story and the role-players.

Look at the three kinds of alien intelligence

For role-playing purposes, let's say that any intelligent species intended as a regular antagonist for the PCs will need to be (a) technological, (b) equipped with some kind of manipulators, and (c) have at least enough social behaviour that language and time-binding could happen.

Note that "technological" doesn't necessarily mean machines. Maybe it's nanotech controlled by weak psi forces; maybe it's all genetic engineering; maybe it's whatever you can come up with. But they have tools of some kind to manipulate their environment.

• I rather like the idea that cursorial hunters are more likely to become intelligent tool-users than other hunting styles.