Aliens, Imagination, and Octopuses

I want to know what real aliens look like. As a kid, I was always disappointed that in cartoons or old Star Trek the aliens were always pretty humanoid. I thought it showed a lack of imagination. I still think it does, but as I’ve gotten older I realized imagination isn’t as easy as you think it is when you’re a kid. 

The ideas that you thought were creative or your own as a child you are eventually able to map precedents to. In the 3rd grade, I wrote a short story for a class that was pretty much the exact plot for the movie Gladiator, which I had never seen. As a college student, I tried my best to write a creative story for a weird fiction class, and ended up with a premise that was identical to the Arcade Fire song “Tunnels”. I eventually learned that even this observation is far from new. Ecclesiastes 1:10 “Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.” Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations has similar notions.

So when we try to imagine aliens we can only draw on what we’ve seen before. Once again, I was disappointed when I found out that scientists looking for life on other planets focused on earthlike conditions, neglecting to imagine that life could exist in other types of places. I even still harbor a dream of silicon-based life, since it is an element which has the same potential for bonds that our carbon base has. The fact is, though, that we simply don’t know what else life can look like until proven otherwise.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote of creatures that are impossible to describe with language, impossible to depict. His writing encourages one to strain their brain to imagine the strangest creatures they can, and this most famously results in the depictions of Cthulhu, the octopus-headed giant. 

When we are asked to imagine the most alien creature possible, we imagine the octopus. I think until we create artificial life or find authentic aliens, this is the best we’re going to be able to do. We want our aliens to be intelligent, so that rules out a lot of life right off the bat. Plants, fungi, and bacteria are all cool but we have a hard time imagining such slow moving life being intelligent in the same ways we are. Then we have other vertebrae, which are intelligent but feel too familiar. Besides the mollusk, I think the only other invertebrae to consider are the arthropods. Bees and ants have probably the best arguments, since they have complex coordinated colonies that we can see as miniatures of our societies. Unfortunately, we must concede that an individual bee or ant is pretty fucking stupid.

So we are left with the octopus, the only invertebrate that we can definitely say is intelligent. If we want a glimpse of the furthest outside path that leads to a nearly human-level intelligence, that’s what we have as our guide. Unless there is a brilliant creative out there who wants to prove me otherwise, we're not getting much more alien than this.

Do you like octopuses?