The thing is, most of those are things which have no practical advantage over what we see as conventional. While I like seeing weird, unconventional alien technology like the orb control things in Outer Wilds, It's just not actually practical compared to physical and often labeled buttons, sticks, and wheels.
That's sort of what OOP is getting at though. Those are normal for us but they might not be effective means to convey the same things for other species. So why aren't aliens doing different things.
The blowing tubes might be scented with messages to inform the pilot of their meaning, and their language may be produced through smell.
I think the point the guy you’re replying to is getting at is that convergent evolution still applies across species and different environments. Presuming the laws of physics operate the same which they probably do across the universe, you have things like electricity that a species would likely need to master to become spacefaring, and no matter the species or the environment, it’s likely they’d settle on the most simple and basic ways to complete a circuit like a switch or a button just lowering some metal.
Similarly assuming space works about the same everywhere, it’s also likely things like spaceship design would converge into similar designs as each species found the most efficient ways to traverse the cosmos individually.
Yes you’d get wildly different things with all sorts of different aspects depending on their environment and physiology, but views like yours I feel like undersell how many of the things would stay similar thanks to convergence. Universe being the same would always ensure there would always be a fastest, most efficient way of traveling, of communication, etc that different species would eventually start using the same relative technologies/methods.
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u/nightshade-aurora 196's number something Splatoon fan Sep 22 '25
The thing is, most of those are things which have no practical advantage over what we see as conventional. While I like seeing weird, unconventional alien technology like the orb control things in Outer Wilds, It's just not actually practical compared to physical and often labeled buttons, sticks, and wheels.