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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 3093575" data-attributes="member: 1165">One of my favorite sci-fi novels was Permanence by Karl Schroeder.The aliens are so alien they cannot communicate with humans except through AI. And even then, the AI always gives multiple translations and you pick the one that seems right.According to Permance theory, aliens cannot get along because they don't share anything in common.Here are examples of aliens that are rather ... nasty.Humans landed on a planet that bore life but no sentience. Lots of plants, animals, microbes, and everything you'd expect. They found weird radio signals that didn't make sense.The humans started building their colonies while scientists did things like collect samples of life. Looking at the DNA (despite the obvious differences, they shared the same genetic stuff we're made of), the scientists discovered that all living things on that planet had the same DNA! What. The. Heck?Eventually they DNA tested humans and found a number of pregnant women with "alien" babies. The babies, when born, looked and acted just like humans but had the alien DNA. (The women were not sleeping with aliens, by the way!)It turns out the aliens don't like the idea of adapting their environment to suit them. They adapt themselves to suit their environment. And now there were changeling babies causing panic.They figured the radio waves were the way the "different" alien species communicated with each other. They managed to communicate the aliens through the changelings (whose human brains were not connected to the alien communication network and had no loyalty issues). Upon discovering the human philosphy, the aliens declared war on the humans. It's not good when the very plants around you try to kill you! Nor the alien bear-like creatures. Etc. The humans were forced to evacuate and nuke that planet.They knew there were the same aliens on other planets, some also colonized by humans. These planets didn't know what had happened to the nuked planets and were unaware that humans were anything but a resource to be colonized, in effect. The humans are slowly withdrawing from those other planets.Another race were autotrophs. Humans colonized their planet, unaware of the autotrophs, who (though they had AIs) refused to communicate with anything that killed plants or animals for food. Some monks found out about the autotrophs and actually created green-skinned humans that didn't eat anything (instead using photosynthesis, so they're human autotrophs) to communicate with the autotrophs. The experiments went a bit too far... the human autotrophs refused to live with regular humans, although they were (barely) willing to communicate with them. Travellers (namely the heroes) wanted to visit the autotrophs, and eventually got their wish. They found themselves in a cave with lots of green things. They asked the human autotroph which ones were the intelligent autotrophs. The human autotroph responded: "An autotroph is not a thing. An autotroph is a system."In another sci-fi novel, one species of aliens consisted of a colony of less intelligent beings, that together added up to something a bit more intelligent than a human. Can you imagine an alien taking off a piece of itself and giving it to you as a gift, so you'll never miss them?</blockquote>

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