Alien Intelligent Species
   Joerg Rhiemeier

What elves, orcs and dragons are to fantasy, are intelligent (and
non-intelligent) aliens to science fiction. Of course, there is lots of science
fiction (even lots of excellent science fiction) which does not involve alien
races, but many stories and campaigns do. However, if you are going to write or
play science fiction, these aliens must of course respect scientific facts. One
of these issues is which kinds of stars can have habitable worlds; this is
addressed in Stars, Planets and Life. This file deals with the aliens
themselves.

How alien are they?

We have no idea what life on other planets, if it exists at all, looks like. We
can't tell how similar or how alien the aliens are. Hence, a science fiction
author has quite much leeway in this respect. However, most scientists assume
that they are much more alien than we can imagine. Life has taken many forms on
Earth, and on a different planet with perhaps vastly different environmental
conditions, it might have taken any of the infinitely many paths life could
have taken on Earth but didn't -- or perhaps one that life couldn't have taken
under Earth conditions.

Of course, there are natural laws which hold everywhere in the universe. Living
organisms use up energy, and therefore need some energy source. Sunlight, as on
Earth, is an obvious choice, especially for life on the surface of an
Earth-like planet. However, intelligent beings probably don't harvest solar
radiation directly, but consume organic matter built up by other organisms.
This is because this way, they can access the solar energy of an area much
larger than their own skin. This is why life on Earth is divided into the
realms of plants (sessile, light-harvesting organisms) and animals (mobile
organisms feeding on other organisms' organics).

One aspect which is often insufficiently considered in designing alien
intelligences is alien psychology. Why should beings of an entirely alien
design, living in an alien environment, think and act like humans? It is much
more likely that they have concepts and motivations entirely incomprehensible
to us.

Some of these differences are not that hard to understand at all, as they are
consequences of different environment and sensual organs. Imagine a dialogue
between a human and an alien (I admit this is a silly example, but I think it
marks out the point):

Alien Here's my e-mail address. (Passes a slip of plastic.)

Human Where? I can't read anything! That card is just plain black!

Alien Oh sorry, I forgot that your primitive eyes are insensitive to
infrared... by the way, why are Terran Navy uniforms black?

Human One point for me: our Navy uniforms are not black, they are blue!

However, there might be differences which are far less intelligible than that.
The aliens might do things which, to us, just don't make any sense. To them, it
might be entirely logical! Or they might display patterns of behaviour we would
abhor, and vice versa. (`What? You human females don't eat your males after
mating? What a disgusting habit! And I can't imagine that anyone in power can
be so stupid to ask her subjects every four years whom they want to govern them
next, and if the subjects want another government, just resign, instead of
killing and eating her opponents?')

Even more alien in their thought patterns would be aliens which live in
environments entirely different from ours. A being from an Earth-like planet
might (or might not) be able to appreciate the beauty of a clear summer
saturday afternoon on Earth, but a being from a Venus-like world certainly
couldn't -- just as we cannot appreciate what to them is good weather; and on
the other hand, for a being coming from an icy liquid-methane environment like
Titan, our Earth is just a searingly hot place where much of the rocks is
molten.

Some alien races might be so highly developed that they don't even consider
humans intelligent. They might be thousands of millions of years ahead of us,
which means that they are as advanced over us as we are advanced over bacteria.
We cannot say how such beings react to us. They probably ignore us -- but they
might ignore us so utterly that they don't care about our existance! They could
scramble down onto Earth to dismantle it (because they need building material
for some vast, incomprehensible mega-engineering feats), not caring at all
about what lives there.

Roleplaying aliens

Aliens are, as the term implies, alien. And that makes them hard to roleplay.
The more alien they are, the harder they are to roleplay. This poses big
problems with roleplaying. Aliens are very hard, if not impossible, to
roleplay. In many (bad) games, the aliens are, like in many bad movies and pulp
booklets, nothing more than humans in weird disguise.

Another problem is that alien characters are usually not easy to integrate into
a PC group. Most aliens just won't join a team of human adventurers. This is
especially true if they live under hostile environments, or are mentally
hostile to humans. Some aliens are so alien that they are not even suitable as
NPCs, but only as a part of the campaign background.

Scattered humans

Many authors and gamemasters want cultures which are strange, and evolved
independently from Earth, but not really alien. Often they want these beings to
be biologically compatible with Earth-humans, to the point that they can breed
with humans.

However, the chance that there are alien species which look, think and act like
us is very small, and the chance that they could breed with humans is as good
as zero. Such aliens regularly occur in bad SF, but if there is no convincing
explanation for their similarity to us, the work does not deserve the name of
science fiction.

Coming up with a reasonable explanation for parallel evolution is a scientific
tour de force. A better and more convincing explanation for the humanlikeness
of the `aliens' is simply that they are really no aliens at all. They are
humans, just like you and me. The only difference is that they live on alien
planets, have developed strange cultures, and that their origin lies hidden in
the obscurity of the past. Often, only one thing is certain: they came from
Earth some day. Their genes prove that.

Of course, there must be a reason why they are out there. There are basically
two possibilities:

  1.  There has been a technical civilization on Earth thousands of years ago,
     which colonized many planets and later vanished, leaving behind humans
     scattered about dozens, hundreds or even thousands of planets, without any
     way to contact each other.

     This is especially appropriate for campaigns in the far future.

  2.  An alien species colonized the space around our solar system long ago.
     For some reasons, they took humans from Earth to their planets (numerous
     reasons can be imagined for this: using humans as slaves or pets,
     scientific curiosity, etc.) Then the aliens vanished. The humans survived,
     but failed to take over the aliens' technology. Either it was destroyed
     during the catastrophe which wiped out the aliens, or it was simply
     incomprehensible to the humans.

     A campaign using this approach can just as easily be set in the near
     future, or -- if Earth itself doesn't play a part -- even in the past. The
     things described above could have happened as far back in the past as
     50000 B.C.; on some planets, people might already have FTL starships right
     now.

Both paths lead to the same result: as many planets as you like, inhabited by
low-tech (perhaps even stone age) humans. These human societies, isolated by
the impassable vastness of space, then evolve as separately as real aliens,
leading to a vast diversity of cultures, among which any kind of imaginable
human culture might exist.

However, scattered humans also have one drawback. You can't set up something
biologically alien. The scattered humans are still humans; they don't lay eggs,
they have no antennae, they can't hear radio waves or see infrared, they don't
change their gender, they won't form hive-mind societies, etc. At least unless
you go for posthumanism (see below). Of course, a campaign might feature both
scattered humans and real aliens.

Posthumans

There is no reason to assume that evolution stops with humans. We will evolve
into something different. This might be biological evolution, or something
else. The posthumans might be degenerate, or superior. There might be one
single successor species, or many of them. The posthumans might remember us, or
we are to them just an object of palaeontological research, or merely a legend
most scientists don't take seriously.

Posthumans might occur in very different forms. They might be genetically
engineered humans. They might be cyborgs. They might be artificial
intelligences, either centralized or distributed, residing in computers or
networks, or in artificial bodies. They might even be non-corporeal beings.
Accordingly, they might be deliberately alien in psychology. If they coexist
with humans, they might look down on the latter (`What? You are so primitive
that you still believe in flesh and bones?'). In short, these posthumans might
be almost deliberately alien! A good collection of ideas for posthuman beings
can be found on Anders Sandberg's Transhumanism pages.

Examples of alien species

The following alien species are just a few examples, meant to give you some
idea for your own species designs.

Kla

Taken from my `Humanworlds' campaign

The Kla are a very old race of bipedal, winged reptiloids. They are mentally
extremely flexible and of a striking, unfazable calmness. They have promoted
about a dozen other species, i.e. taught them their science, technology and
philosophy. These species form a loose-knit community called the Family; some
of them have even promoted `grandchild' species. This is to some extent similar
to David Brin's Uplift, but does not involve genetic engineering of the client
species.

The Kla themselves have colonized a large area streching from about 60
light-years east of our solar system to beyond the Orion Nebula. The
farthest-out Kla worlds are more than 1500 light-years away. The Kla are
believed to inhabit more than 10000 planets; the areas inhabited by their
client races are estimated to comprise about 4000 planets. The Kla are
technologically superior to even the most advanced humans. However, this
advantage lies in perfection and enhancement of technologies known to humans
rather than in technologies entirely unknown to humans.

Kla usually don't meddle in human affairs and rarely travel among humans. If
they do, they are usually accompanied by 'Nbuur (the 'Nbuur are a scattered
human culture which was promoted by the Kla).

Roleplaying: The Kla are very hard to roleplay; they should only be played by
very exprienced roleplayers, or declared NPC only.

K'kreete

A Family species from my `Humanworlds' campaign

The K'kreete are a Family species, promoted by the Kla at least 400000 years
ago. They are oxygen-breathers evolved on an Earth-like planet, but cannot be
easily likened to any class of Earth animals. Judging by their exterior, they
seem to combine elements of birds, insects, mammals and others.

Living more than 500 light-years away, they very rarely have contact with
humans, and little is known about their biology and psychology.

Roleplaying: Little more than background information; definitely not a PC race
(unless you are running a Family campaign where all PCs are members of Family
species).

Jaig

Inspired by UFO folklore

The Jaig are a weird amphibian species; some people think they are the
degenerate descendants of the Elder Lords (the hypothetical race which is
believed to have scattered the humans 50000 years ago), though more things
speak against than for this assumption. They are capable of breathing under
water and use a language which is entirely unlike human language: it consists
of rapid clicks which resemble an operating hard disk drive from the late 20th
century.

The Jaig are amphibians with an unusual life cycle. They lay eggs in water;
from these hatch tadpole-like larvae. These larvae first evolve into (still
water-living and non-sentient) males, which mate and then metamorphosize into
the sentient, land-living Jaig. In this stage, the Jaig joins a Jaig community.
The Jaig stays sentient for about 400 years; after that, their sentience dims
and finally fades away as they turn into a female. The female returns into the
water to mate with the males; after the mating and laying her eggs in their own
now non-functional brain (which serves as yolk for the embryos), she dies.

Jaig society is much unlike human society and not understood by humans. Jaig
have no concept of family, as reproduction takes place at non-sentient stages
outside the Jaig society. Instead, the Jaig society features a community and
caste system. The caste a Jaig belongs to is determined when he joins the
community.

Their attitude to humans is peculiar. They show up out of the blue in
disk-shaped craft of excellent manoeuvering capabilities, play tricks on
humans, and then disappear again. To humans, they behave like spectres or imps
rather than something intelligent.

Roleplaying: The Jaig, being seclusive against humans, usually don't mess with
humans and are very incomprehensible. They are little more than a background
feature. Not a PC race.

Those Who Have Become One

Based on an idea by Carl Sagan

This species consists of intelligent machines of different kinds, ranging from
microspocic nano-nodules to huge planet-sized megastructures. The origin of
this species is unknown; they seem to be around for many millions of years now.
Their `brains' are based on superconducting circuits and can process
information at incredible speed. They are connected via wireless networks; all
beings living in one solar system form a hive mind.

Those Who Have Become One do not settle on Earth-like planets. They live in
open space near stars (not necessarily sun-like; they also use brighter main
sequence stars, giants, supergiants and neutron stars), visiting planets only
to get hold of material they cannot find on asteroids.

Roleplaying: Not suitable for PCs. Human adventurers have quite good chances of
encountering them, but they are just very alien (but peaceful -- Those Who Have
Become One show a deep respect for other civilizations, and tend not to pull up
big operations in systems inhabited by other species.

Harvesters

Based on an idea by Anders Sandberg

The Harvesters are both incredibly ancient and incredibly alien. They have been
around for at least 5000 million years, and they have colonized almost every
sun-like (or bigger) star in the Galaxy. Yes, stars. The Harvesters don't live
on planets. Being incredibly advanced nano-nodules, they build Dyson shells of
exotic high-density matter within stars, collecting the highly dense energy
output of the stellar fusion process. This means that the light and heat from a
main sequence star are the Harvesters' waste heat. Only a few peculiarities --
like missing neutrinos -- hint at their existance.

Roleplaying: None. The Harvesters don't care at all about humans and other
planetary beings, as long as they don't mess with the Harvesters (which is far
beyond what we can accomplish, anyway). They are just a bit of background
information, and possibly just a myth.

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Jvrg Rhiemeier
e-mail: rhiemeir@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de

