Greta van der Rol

Have you ever noticed how often ‘Aliens’ (especially in the movies or the TV) are humanoid? They usually have two arms, two legs and one head, two eyes and they speak with a mouth. Or maybe four arms or legs just for variety. Check out Star Trek sometime. And what’s more, in Star Trek they can actually mate with humans and produce hybrid beings like Spock. Or so we are led to believe. Yes, okay it’s not always like that. But cast a glance at the Cantina scene in Star Wars I, or even the new arrival, the being in the new movie Avatar.

What’s wrong with that, you ask? Well, in a way, nothing. After all, we’re not talking intelligence here, we’re talking technology. Sure, you can have all sorts of aliens inhabiting other worlds. Look in a pond on mother Earth, or in the ocean trenches or in the deepest caves. Life abounds in all sorts of conditions. But not much of it uses technology. Take dolphins; acknowledged to be very, very smart with abilities (like echo location) we can only dream about. But I can’t see your average dolphin building a spaceship. To do that, it seems you need first the desire and secondly the digits to make it happen.

Enter the opposable thumb. Oh, and some brains. And suddenly all those humanoid aliens become a little more understandable. You need things like fingers to build machines. So smart lizards would fit the bill. Very common, your lizard-like alien – especially if it’s a baddy.

Okay, so there might be other ways of building technology that we quite literally cannot imagine. That’s not much use to a writer, is it? So let’s accept that our aliens will have to have some way of getting around (we call them ‘legs’ in our part of the universe) and some means of manipulating material (fingers, hands). But there are other issues. They’ve just found an ‘earth-like’ planet seventy light years away. That means lots of liquid water, a reasonable temperature range. Just one small catch, though; it’s three times the size of Earth. Can you imagine the effect of gravity on a planet that size? I reckon we’d have trouble walking. Unless we can invent some sort of anti-gravity suit.

And what about the air? What if there’s too much oxygen? Or not enough? Earth’s atmosphere hasn’t been the way it is now for most of its existence. Indeed, we need breathing apparatus if we go above a certain altitude on our own planet. So it’s pretty hard to imagine all those aliens in the cantina scene all comfortably breathing Tatooine’s air. Yes, I know some of them wore respirators or some such. But not very many.

Really, when you start looking at the difficulties the solution used by more and more SF writers makes a stack of sense. Bioengineered planets, terra-formed to suit humans. You’ll find them in Elizabeth Moon’s books and Jack McDevitt’s books among others.

I must say also that I find it difficult to imagine why the inhabitants of a planet like (say) Jupiter would ever want to come to Earth and do more than take a passing look. Always assuming, of course, the amorphous blobs living in Jovian storms subject to enormous gravity would bother to build a space ship.  So they get here and then what? Wouldn’t they be more likely to eye off Jupiter? Now this assumption puts paid to a lot of space wars. Why bother, after all?

Which is why the Ptorix (aliens in my book ‘The Iron Admiral’ evolved on a world similar to ours and live on worlds similar to ours. We are cosmic rivals trying to share a galaxy.

And the Ptorix don’t look humanoid. But they do have tentacles.