Aliens and posthumans will look the same

[funkervogt]

Intelligent aliens would presumably be gifted with logical thinking just as we are, and they would see all these advantages of having changeable, remotely controlled bodies. While such aliens would probably look very different from us during their natural organic phase of existence, once they achieved a high enough level of technology, they wouldn’t have physical bodies anymore, and so wouldn’t look “alien.” They would look like nothing and everything.

https://www.militantfuturist.com/aliens ... -the-same/

[alibabaghanouj]

Interesting article although I'm not sure I would conjecture the same opinions (re: shapeshifting and the outright dismissal of alien abduction experiences). Still, it raises interesting questions to chew on. Well, questions that are more interesting than wondering when the war in Ukraine will finally end or when corrupt politicians and ex-politicians will get their comeuppance.

[Yuli Ban]

I talked about this before:
viewtopic.php?p=4394#p4394

Here's a random thought that's been nagging me for a while:

Modernity likely looks similar on some fundamental level across any technological civilization. I don't mean that a society of sapient squids will also use rectangular smartphones and walk up stairs. I mean that things like electronics and machinery aren't likely to be too radically different across the universe just due to the way these things work. Electrons don't flow differently a million light years away; they still resist and conduct in the same materials.

I'm thinking of the fact that humans are primates, and thus a lot of our society is reflected in our primatehood. I'm thinking of this line from "My Dinner With Andre," that the 1960s counterculture represented the last dying gasp of the human animal before being snuffed out by modernity. I don't agree, but I do think that humans as animals are meant to live in certain ways. We are scavengers and hunter-gatherers at heart. You can see these behaviors reflected in modern consumerism— when you go to the market, what are you doing but essentially a high-tech version of our ancestors foraging for berries, roots, carcasses, and usable resources?

Humans are primates, which is an order of animal that is notoriously social and violent. We have our unique behaviors. Other orders have their own, even if we share some commonalities here and there. The human spirit is forced into machine-like industrial civilization and we don't like it, but it's inevitable in our evolution.

Imagine that aforementioned sapient cephalopod civilization. They tend to communicate with their skin; a sapient version of, say, an octopus might learn to utilize their chromatophores for a type of visual language. If they develop telephones, it might instead be based on remotely-color changing cells or ceramics or something of that nature.
They may share almost every trait humans have, or they may seem stunted and inhuman to us in terms of raw behavior. Their wild, traditional behaviors could be similar to terrestrial octopodes. If they're purely land-dwelling, they may still do things humans just can't understand.

The more advanced they became, the more alien they might seem at first until you look at the nitty gritty.

For example, electronics are the way they are for a reason. Squishy, wet, biological-looking smartphones aren't going to be how any civilization starts out because of the nature of semiconductors and electrical wiring. However, a cephalopod civilization's smartphone WOULD look extraordinarily different to our own. Our smartphones are ergonomically designed to fit the human hand, specifically to be used by our fingers. A creature with multiple tentacles probably wouldn't need such a thing. Even if they have branching sub-tentacles (which admittedly is kind of what primate hands are), as long as they still have the range of motion that terrestrial cephalopods have, their smartphones wouldn't need to be rectangles. They could be amorphous or circular or even some other shape I'm not immediately thinking of. Because it would make no sense for them to design something for a body plan they don't have, as much as it would be weird if humans designed smartphones to be used solely with beaks and talons.

But underneath that design, you can be assured that the electronics work the same. The machinery is built the same. Their robots will look the same as ours, minus those meant to mimic themselves.
If we traveled to their world and looked at a fully-automated factory, it'd probably look disgustingly familiar. There are probably plenty of jobs and tasks that we'd find familiar on a completely alien world with completely alien experiences if they're still developing towards that final endpoint.

Once you approach the Singularity, more and more of these biological differences begin fading away until you reach the Singularity itself. Heck, the term "Singularity" may even be more apt than we originally thought, as it's possible that any technological civilization no matter its biological origins or functions will ultimately converge into the same thing. Not unlike a black hole: once something enters a black hole, you've lost it forever because information is lost behind the Event Horizon; no matter what a black hole eats, it just becomes part of the black hole, even if it's antimatter, strange matter, another black hole, or a white hole. All black holes are the same, identified only by mass, electrical charge, and spin. Similarly, all Singularities may be the same too, as when you encounter the robotic outgrowths of that civilization, you'll have little to no information as to what the original biological species looked or acted like. Some superintelligences may be aggressive and ultra-logical in their efforts to spread at all costs; others may turn totally inwards and not bother anyone. But when you encounter the probes and the swarms, you're never going to know "Oh, this is a race of sapient apes" or "This was a race of sapient squids" or "This belonged to a species of high-tech dolphins" unless they told you.

Also, you're now thinking of a pre-Lord Cthulhu as an office-squid, hundreds of thousands of years before His apotheosis.

Very likely that there's a cosmic "convergent evolution" after all

[alibabaghanouj]

@YuliBan, you raised some good points. At the very least we as a species need to recognize that we're interpreting what we see from a primate perspective, which will also color how we react to new things and/or sapient squids, dolphins and Dr. Zoidbergs.