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Oh

I thought cats were not social animals at the least?

They are actually, most stray cats form packs resembling those of lions. While they might not hunt togheter like lions do, they have a strict hierarchy and at least the female cats help each other with there cubs. Perhaps you thought of house cats who don't get the chance to show there social status.
This was kinda off topic but i posted it anyway...

Samppa wrote:Solitary animals also have forms of communication, for example a cat will meow and a lion roar. Perhaps finding a mate requires some form of letting others know you're there.

Also, one might think how evolved or technically adequate such solitary aliens might be, after all many things humans have come up with have been the result of teamwork. For example copying tool usage would be tricky without a level of communication, or indeed making their presence in the universe known to us in the first place, let alone making a fancy spaceship.


Determining the media of communication might indeed prove problematic. Still, how would the aliens point out the objects they are referring to by their emissions. At the very least it would take something like centuries of close day-to-day observation to make up "the definitive guide to alien sp33k".

Maybe, we will find the aliens analogous to the trees. Well, they may have brains as good as ours but dont use it much. They just sit there; sedentary, have their food and reproduce asexually (budding, fission, regeneration etc). They wont need language if they live this way. Maybe they dont have sexual dimorphism. Just living and nothing else.

ma_am wrote:Maybe, we will find the aliens analogous to the trees. Well, they may have brains as good as ours but dont use it much. They just sit there; sedentary, have their food and reproduce asexually (budding, fission, regeneration etc). They wont need language if they live this way. Maybe they dont have sexual dimorphism. Just living and nothing else.

What would have been the evolutionary incentive to develop a power hungry brain if it were not necessary though?

I am talking about the scenario where the aliens had had enough of technological development and now they dont need any development at all!!!
Then they would go vegetative (this scenario is described in the book "The Time Machine" by H. G. Wells) and would us no brain at all, just sit there and regenerate.

Umm, i sometime think that an alien somewhere must have been reading our posts and laughing on us. hehe

Aliens becoming vegetables because they got sooooo lazy?
Sorry but that sounds really dumb, it's more devolution than evolution. On a literary term H.G.Wells had some great ideas for his time, but those ideas dont really apply anymore today, the vegetable scenario was produced on the basis of our overdependence on tehnology, a similar theme (although more suble) can be seen in War of the worlds.

Aliens as vegetables. Hehe, Sounds crazy, but we cannot rule out anything. Afterall, we are talking about life which is seemingly most complicated thing in itself.

And again, it is not sure at all that the laws of evolution and life formation will be same everywhere. We mainly live on oxygen and carbohydrate(we are carbon life form). What if there are beings around completely different, living on hydrogen and sulfur or so and obeying completely different laws of evolution. Anything could be possible. Thanks to the fiction writers. They bring forth some ideas and situation that they think might happen. The visionary of fiction writers broaden with time so the older views and thoughts are rendered absurd. But anyways, fiction is fiction, old or new.

I find the vegetable scenario fantastic so mentioned it here. But i would never like to meet a tree like alien.

ma_am wrote:And again, it is not sure at all that the laws of evolution and life formation will be same everywhere.

I don't know. I can't see individual organisms such as mice or indeed highly sophisticated aliens emerging from practically nothing at once. It's like first there is no life, then out of some primordial sea comes forth an alien with the ability to think.
I'd think you need to start off with something very basic, like the one-celled organisms that came about and reined for a pretty long time before you got multi-celled organisms, and ~4 billion years later they grew bigger and more complex due to evolution as we know it.
Sure, there may be other kinds of evolution, for example the mixing of genes does not happen if you do not need a mate, or if there is no genes to speak of at all. But it would in my mind still require the progression of simple organisms to highly complex ones.