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Comment by snidane | Hacker News Reader

Us humans like to think that we are the ultimate organisms and everything else is either the material that composes us (cells and tissue) or our products (corporations, cities).

Organisms are scale free systems. It's only our human bias to see humans as importany. If aliens came to visit the Earth, they most likely see this planet covered with massive algae which glow at night (ie. our cities). Cities at night are more noticeable from space than the cells which they are composed of - tissue cells (houses) or blood cells (cars and pedestrians).

For some reason all aliens in movies are pictured as these humanoid and human sized creatures which is most likely due to the same human-centric bias.

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I strongly recommend the book version (the films by Tarkovsky and Soderbergh are okay but the book is better) of Solaris. It explores this idea of an alien life form that is decidedly un-humanoid.

[Lem, the author]... wrote that he deliberately chose the ocean as a sentient alien to avoid any personification and the pitfalls of anthropomorphism in depicting first contact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)

Lem was good at having alien aliens in a way I haven't seen any other author pull off. I also recommend Fiasco [0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)

>Us humans like to think that we are the ultimate organisms and everything else is either the material that composes us (cells and tissue) or our products (corporations, cities).

And yet if we perished from the planet, literally every single other species, animal mineral or vegetable, would benefit from our absence. Everything would grow back at an amazing rate and it would be like we were never here.

Meanwhile, if the bees disappear, we're all screwed.

Even in books, where the limitations of costumes and sets are less relevant, most aliens are at least somewhat humanish. Though there are certainly some more exotic ones like the pattern jugglers, First Person Singular, or the Prime.

Really comes down to a lack of imagination. I imagine there's a good chance life elsewhere is unrecognizable to us as life. No id, no ego, just a vivacious electrochemical reaction bent on survival. Think viruses on a larger scale.

"Good chance" based on what?

The size of the universe, and our relative size within it.

Color me unconvinced

That's a non sequitur.

An aside, but Adrian Tchaikovsky‘s Children of Ruin/Time center on intelligent spiders and mollusks. Earth-centric as they were bio-engineered from Earth native species, but an interesting take on non-human species.

If we're name-dropping, the Vernor Vinge pack-mind dog things are another fun example of non-human races with actually non-human modes of cognition, even if they're not as far removed as Solaris/Revelation Space sentient oceans. In contrast, although I really liked A Deepness in the Sky for other reasons, the spiders ended up feeling way too much like humans in funny bodies rather than any kind of actual non-human intelligent species.

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)

“Individual” and “collective” is a fundamental/metaphysical concept. General purpose AI probably will have a concept of individual influence/veto among its “nodes” so that it is capable of self organizing and reorganizing.

It remains to be seen if corporate-like structure is something it surpasses, but complex systems seem to usually have orders of influence, and multiple hands on any given wheel.

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