I'm getting in late to this conversation, but a couple of points...
Ankh-Morpork Guard said:
For all we know, Star Trek was right and the humanoid form was so perfect that the universe if filled with things that look like humans in bad makeup.
Actually, I think this is more likely than most people give credit. Think about it. The bipedal form with lateral symmetry is a very simple and efficient form. It's practical. Evolution is going to select for the simplest and most efficient way to get the job done in whatever ecological niche it's filling, just like rivers flow down hill or electrons in atoms prefer to be in their lowest energy states, and alien worlds are subject to the exact same natural laws our own is. The nature of evolution will produce occasional weirdnesses to be sure, but the weirder it gets the more evolution will select against it. Evolution does not produce weirdness for weirdness' sake, nor does it produce complexity for complexity's sake. An alien planet that has similar conditions to Earth in terms of gravity, temperature, and atmosphere is going to evolve similar lifeforms. There will likely be lots of differences in the details — biochemistry and minor features and such — but I'll bet the overall basic forms will be similar to something we can find on Earth and the really far-out weirdnesses will be quite rare. People who claim that alien life will "not only be stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we
can imagine" usually forget that such alien life is going to be subject to the same universal laws of physics and chemistry that we are and these laws act as effective constraints. Alien life plainly and simply
isn't going to be stranger than we
can imagine, in my considered opinion.
Turanil said:
IMO: Safety obsession is related to efficiency obsession (and our society strives to become always more efficient, without which no space colonization will be ever possible). I mean: there is nothing more inefficient than a dead explorer (or broken probe) as far as exploration goes.
Safety is proportional to efficiency only to a point. If you were to construct a graph of safety vs. efficient, you'd find not a straight line or an ever-increasing curve but a curve with a maxima that then bends downward again. A low level of safety is indeed inefficient because accidents happen that are wasteful of time and resources. As you improve safety, efficiency also improves... to a point. There is a limiting factor in that nothing is ever totally risk-free; there is an inevitable and unavoidable "background level" of risky or unsafe conditions that
cannot be reduced, and the cost of approaching that unavoidable limit is asymptotic. The more safe you become, the higher the unit cost of each additional "unit" of safety.
It will reach a point that eventually you're spending more resources on insuring safety than you are on actually getting the job done, which is the only reasonable definition of efficiency - achieving the most results at the least expense. Once you're past that point, every additional bit spent on safety actually
reduces the end results produced. Safety ends up actually interfering with getting the job done. Our current space program is now deeply into this territory - one accident that kills seven people (the number of people that die in less than 2 hours on America's highways, by the way) shuts down the shuttle program for years in which nothing gets done! The space program is thus
grossly inefficientin terms of getting results
because of its excessive obsession with safety!
What I'm about to say is going to be unpopular with overly sentimental people, but the simple fact is that human life is
not priceless, it
does have a cost, and in many ways our obsession with perfect safety is making us pay more for that life than it is worth. There's little point in living if you're not getting the job done and earning the benefits thereof, whatever your chosen job might be. The "safety obsession" is in my opinion currently being taken to inefficient and mentally unhealthy extremes and we need to get over it. The quest for "perfect safety" and "zero defects" is foolish and nonsensical. We need to accept that risk is an unavoidable part of life, in particular that some things that have a higher degree of risk (like space exploration) are worth doing despite that risk, accept a certain casualty rate as part of the job, and go on to get the job done! The space program is floundering on the edge of pointless irrelevancy and will continue to do so until it gets over this obsession with safety.
You want to have a hard sci-fi game set in space? Forget the extreme safety obsession. We will never get anywhere in space until we do, and any attempt to portray an active and busy presence in space coupled with an excessive obsession with safety will be implausible. People who are risk-averse stay as close to home as possible and aren't going to be found in space at all until space is made as safe as stepping out your front door to get the morning paper — which I doubt will ever happen.
