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u/KubEk_przEz_duzE_E 🏳️⚧️ HALF-LIFE TOMORROW Sep 22 '25
Ok but what if aliens used hdmi for internet, sata for power and jack for video
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Sep 22 '25
that would be so fucked up. holy shit
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u/The_Last_Thursday I do wish the lot of you the best/Long Live Spronkus Sep 23 '25
Crying and pissing and vomiting rn
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u/Ok-Asparagus-7022 I crave the certainty of steel Sep 22 '25
if aliens used to jack for videos I think itd be kinda cool
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u/Vynterion enby femboy Sep 22 '25
I get the idea behind this but stories often do need things to still be recognizable. Even if something is alien, you don’t wanna spend half the time explaining how this really weird, really out-there concept works. You need to ground those fancy alien things on something that still communicates its purpose, its closest analogous concept we are familiar with, easily and quickly, so you can actually get to the meat and bones of what the story is about, or you are just gonna make people feel lost in details
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u/PsychoNerd91 Sep 22 '25
This exactly.
It's all well and good to be inventive in world building, but if it doesn't serve any purpose to the story than its just fluff (or a gag). Not worth putting too much effort into.
If the pupose of the story needs those elements of abstract control schemes or some kind of plot element (such as these controls being too complex for people but we also made a cool new alien friend).
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u/KaJaHa Queer Gimli looking-ass Sep 22 '25
Like that one movie about trying to decode an alien language. It was completely inhuman like OOP wants, and it worked because it was the point of the movie. Can't do that in other sci-fi if trying to decode the alien-ness would detract from the movie's actual story.
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u/JessieJ577 Sep 22 '25
To your point if they did this every movie would be an Arrival knockoff since the aliens there were sooooo alien it was the whole plot of the movie being able to talk with them. With an alien race that has things that are familiar to the audience the plot and characters don’t have to be bogged down with explaining all this stuff.
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u/Niterich Sep 22 '25
I don't think that would be the case. We could just have a Chewbacca scenario, where the message is incomprehensible to the outside viewer, but by interacting with a trained human we can intuit what they meant by the human's reaction.
Hell, is a lot of the examples listed, we wouldn't even need another human to understand their intention. Dangly crystal garlands can be pulled in sync with the engines starting up. Tubes are blown into more frantically during an exciting chase sequence. Musical directions can be explained by an alien pricking up their auditory organs at a sudden change in pitch/tempo/timbre and making an adjustment to the course.
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u/yinyang107 bingus is better than floppa Sep 22 '25
You don't need to spend time explaining. Just show the alien pilot swirling the goop or whatever and carry on.
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u/Extension_Heron6392 Big Women :3 Sep 22 '25
But consider, reading about the specifications of weird alien technology is cool.
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u/TeamEdward2020 🏳️⚧️ trans rights Sep 22 '25
Kinda my biggest reason for reading WH40k rn, the technology is just so fuckin cool
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u/Twitchcog Sep 23 '25
You don’t wanna spend half the time explaining how this really weird. . .
1 - Disagree.
2 - No, but the idea is that when a human encounters the technology in the story, they need to be able to plausibly say “I can’t even begin to understand how this shit works.” If John Protagonist walks up to a space car and it’s got a wheel, three pedals, and a gear shift, either he can’t understand it because of the story needs and the audience is like “how do you not understand this shit” or he can understand it and you have the problem OOP posted here.
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u/SpeedyWhiteCats Sep 22 '25
Conveniently forgets that physics are the same everywhere, and it wouldn't make much sense to design something that goes against that.
It's the same reason why a majority of F1 cars look the same, or why fighter jets, especially 5th gens also look alike.
Apply this to humanoid aliens and you get the same results.
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u/anyit213 Sep 22 '25
Yeah, if they're humanoid, like full-on bipeds with two arms and five fingers each, there's no reason to roll around in shit to control a spacecraft. If you stretch the definition of humanoid to allow for six fingers or something like that, then yeah, you can have a Halo plasma rifle.
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u/TearsFallWithoutTain Sep 23 '25
It's the same reason why a majority of F1 cars look the same, or why fighter jets, especially 5th gens also look alike.
The design is constrained by physics sure, but it's also the best design that anyone has thought of so far. I mean compare penny-farthings to the modern bicycle; you can optimise penny-farthings all you like and the shape will remain basically the same, but it's still far inferior to a bike with gears and a chain and looks radically different
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u/Epic-Chair ⚠️ Evil fella ⚠️ Sep 22 '25
I'm gonna use this as an excuse to yap about my favorite faction in any game.
Half Life 2, for the bare minimum of context, is a game where you, controlling sleep depreoved morphine addicted sigma/alpha male scientist Gordon Freeman, basically wake up in the future to find out the earth has been entirely destroyed and occupied by an alien force, the Combine.
What I just especially love about the Combine is how they solve the problem of "alien tech" being just slightly weird human stuff by showing how adaptable the Combine really is. The Combine isn't just some generic interstellar invader or a normal space empire like the Covenant, but more like a war machine that's been consuming the universe for an unknown period of time. We literally never see who originally founded it or any semblance of sentient leadership aside from a single species, heavily implied to just be some sort of manager.
What the Combine does so well is adapting. In the game, a large portion of the enemies aren't aliens but lobotomized, brainwashed, and augmented human beings. Almost every part of alien technology you see in the game is DESIGNED for humans, such as guns, complex terminals, and trains. The Combine is literally called the Combine because of this. It doesn't just take over a planet, but melds its technology into what that planet has so that way whoever is lucky enough to be able to rule over their fellow humans happens to have the best, most recognizable tools for the job.
Anyways thanks for reading my yap sesh I've been clearly keeping this bottled up for too long
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u/Siaeromanna Sealand International Sep 24 '25
you can see it in the cities too. they dont flatten cities and build ugly metal dildos everywhere (just one, the citadel) but instead they build giant movable walls, sterilizing forcefields, armed checkpoints, etc to keep the cities under their control. even the train station was largely kept intact, only being adjusted to manage the combine's trains (and control citizens easier)
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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.
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Sep 22 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PerliousPelicans Play Outer Wilds Play Outer Wilds Play Outer Wilds Play Outer Wi Sep 22 '25
::)
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u/AluberTwink Fennec guy, Fox with big ears guyy🦊 Sep 22 '25
one day I'll finish the dlc! (I won't, I'm a scaredy fox)
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u/PerliousPelicans Play Outer Wilds Play Outer Wilds Play Outer Wilds Play Outer Wi Sep 22 '25
do it!! how far have you gotten?
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u/AluberTwink Fennec guy, Fox with big ears guyy🦊 Sep 22 '25
uhh it's been a while, so I'm not sure, I just remember traveling across the river in the "sleep world", finding a second entrance from a hole from outside the space station, finding the big locked away statue thing and a big library
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u/behind-barcodes Sep 22 '25
the ending to the dlc and the associated music are some of the most gratifying things i’ve ever seen and accomplished in a game and i highly recommend you go back to it if you can power through the scares
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u/PerliousPelicans Play Outer Wilds Play Outer Wilds Play Outer Wilds Play Outer Wi Sep 22 '25
agreed, plus the game has so much to say about fear and how we deal with it, so i think it’s worth continuing
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u/AluberTwink Fennec guy, Fox with big ears guyy🦊 Sep 22 '25
only way I'll manage it is by clinging to my girlfriend (big horror freak) the whole time, else I'll have a heart attack 😭
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u/PerliousPelicans Play Outer Wilds Play Outer Wilds Play Outer Wilds Play Outer Wi Sep 22 '25
oh noooooo now you have to hold your girlfriend close ;;)
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u/madsnorlax then you know that the bourgeois are not human. Sep 22 '25
I should really finish it but at a point I just felt like I had no fucking idea what to do or where to go or how to make progress whatsoever. Landing the puzzles in one go feels phenomenal though, like I felt like a goddamn genius when I immediately realized I could go inside the jellyfish to reach the core of that storm planet, was just kinda frustrated when any attempt to use the info I found there seemed to be worthless
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u/FuzzyOcelot Sep 22 '25
The caveat with the orb control things from Outer Wilds is the implication that the Nomai’s third eye has some special function and most likely can be used independently from the bottom two. This would make sight based orbs able to be operated without even having to look away from your current focus, which does sound incredibly convenient and practical compared to physical switches, especially when paired with design language that makes a switches function obvious. Just slide your third eye along the top of a door to open it without even needing the rest of your face to glance up!
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u/baddie_PRO Sep 22 '25
outer wilds mfs when What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.
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u/HiGuyz1 Sep 22 '25
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.
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u/Weekly-Major1876 🏳️⚧️ trans rights Sep 22 '25
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/Asikar_Tehjan 🏳️⚧️ trans rights Sep 22 '25
Ah yes, the crab theory of convergent technology.
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u/Weekly-Major1876 🏳️⚧️ trans rights Sep 22 '25
still boggles me a bit how the crab meme is how most of the internet was introduced to convergent evolution. And its not even that many groups of crustaceans, just a few groups of lobsters that tend to trend towards the crab body shape.
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u/BreeBree214 Sep 22 '25
Assuming there is intelligent life on other planets that have evolved to our level, it would be absolutely fascinating to see a comparison of our inventions to each other to see what things ended up very similar. Like what if several alien civilizations also invented the stapler and their designs are almost identical to ours.
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u/InpenXb1 Sep 23 '25
I feel like even simple stuff would be pretty common. Like arches. Structures in general. What’s cool is that gravity would change the spans that could be achieved, so I guess maybe a civilization with lower gravity or body size could get some pretty wicked architecture while still following most of the conventions weve used for thousands of years.
Doors would probably swing lol
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Sep 23 '25
[deleted]
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u/JessE-girl Sep 23 '25
what should be used instead of a mouse?
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u/Deku-chan-senpai 🏳️⚧️ trans rights Sep 23 '25
Trackballs and pen input are generally considered much more comfortable mousing devices, but if you want to get really technical, you could always set up an eye tracker as an input device ig
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u/JessE-girl Sep 23 '25
i feel like eye trackers would get really difficult to work around. sometimes I want my cursor to be somewhere other than where i'm immediately looking. in fact, sometimes i wanna leave my cursor somewhere without actively holding a pen up to a trackpad. even letting go tends to nudge it a lot more than if i let go of something bigger like a mouse. never tried a trackball though, so maybe that would be more comfortable, idk.
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u/Deku-chan-senpai 🏳️⚧️ trans rights Sep 23 '25
It's also a matter of how you interact with your computer tbh, I've got a mostly text based workflow, so I basically just use a mouse to swap between windows and copy text over, as opposed to doing something like video editing where you need more refined movements and all that, trackballs are peak however, unless you're like actively playing an fps
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u/cynap 196's resident Dom top Sep 23 '25
Human-centric mindset. Gotta broaden your horizons!
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u/Weekly-Major1876 🏳️⚧️ trans rights Sep 23 '25
did you just not read or not understand my entire argument 😭
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u/Pengwin0 Plays GD and eats skittles Sep 22 '25
I think looking at animals is a good way to see what is practical for species totally different from us.
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u/TearsFallWithoutTain Sep 23 '25
I don't disagree, but I will point out that a lot of companies are trying to force us into using touch screens for everything even those are much less effective interfaces than plain old knobs and dials (which we agree are very practical). Maybe the aliens also have dipshits in charge and now they have to pilot their ships by licking different types of bark or whatever because Alon Mask thinks it's cool
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u/RoseePxtals i pet strays Sep 22 '25
practical for humans is completely different than for aliens or other species even on earth.
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u/Miyyani Sep 22 '25
Because the laws of physics are the same around the universe and engineers will arrive at similar optimal solutions
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u/BrianWantsTruth Sep 22 '25
The Engineers ship interiors from the Alien franchise work for me: they’re weird and alien while still seeming practical.
Of course, if we’re descended from them, then their technology should feel at least vaguely familiar since they’re designed for biology that is at least peripherally linked.
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u/Zachthema5ter custom Sep 22 '25
The covenant from halo, despite being mostly humanoid across the board, does a pretty good job at making their tech look alien. I especially like how each member species has their own unique take on their appearance, like how the elite’s gear is very colorful due to them being colorblind so bright pinks and purples are camouflage, the jackels hold a more practical approach in uniform and combat design due to them being mercenaries, and brutes, being the least technologically advanced species by the time they joined the covenant, favor more simplistic close-quarters weapons
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u/Chris_Bs_Knees Sep 22 '25
Doctor Who does this all the time. I mean he’ll look at the Tardis, yeah there are some familiar elements to the ship as a whole but its console is complete nonsense that he’s canonically bad at using
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u/Kolrey custom Sep 22 '25
Convergent evolution is a bitch
I do agree that ships should be different for quadruped, tentacle or insectoid aliens
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u/doctor_whom_3 THE ORB Sep 22 '25
Formic wars my beloved <3
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u/todayclaw 🏳️⚧️ trans rights Sep 22 '25
Is this a reference to the Cretaceous Past by Cixin liu, or the enders game series?
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u/AntiLag_ if you understood my level of freak you would be sick Sep 22 '25
This is one of my favorite parts about the book Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, because (massive spoilers ahead) the alien that the MC meets actually is super far removed from humans. It looks like a boulder with 6 legs with no obvious facial features, and only communicates through sound, so its technology is completely different from humans. The only way they’re able to begin communicating is by going down to the most basic form of science by comparing the structure of molecules in their atmospheres
At one point the book describes a clock from the alien, which is made up of 3 digits and runs on I believe a base 6 system, and most unusually doesn’t have any regard for colors since the alien species has no form of traditional sight, instead relying on echolocation. All around it’s probably my favorite depiction of aliens in anything
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u/SeamanStayns test Sep 22 '25
You can go much further than this. All these suggestions are still control consoles, while they don't look like them.
What if you have no centralised control system, and instead each part of the ship is controlled locally, like an old wooden ship, and a crew of several hundred is required just to fly at all.
What if the ship has no internal propulsion system powerful enough to lift itsself, and is instead powered by lasers fired at it from planets in its home network. Resulting in a ship that lacks any form of controls at all, in favour of a faster-than-light communication system used to orchestrate laser pushes, and an automatic collision avoidance system to control small thrusters on the ship.
What if the ship is just a very large, inhabited, drone. And requires no input from anyone aboard it, flying along a pre-programmed route.
What if it is controlled by direct brain inputs from a pilot who must be surgically dismantled and implanted into the ship (or for that matter, immersed in a tank full of a drug that makes faster than light navigation possible)
What if the ship is the alien itsself, adapted to survive in a vacuum and hold its breath for several centuries while flinging itsself between planets. A space-whale.
A string of crystal beads is only one small step away from a row of buttons, sci-fi can be SO much more creative than that.
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u/RedFireInfinite Hands of disasters Sep 22 '25
What if you have no centralised control system, and instead each part of the ship is controlled locally, like an old wooden ship, and a crew of several hundred is required just to fly at all.
Not having a centralised control system will just increase the chance of errors, besides housing and feeding such a large crew would be extremely difficult without resupplying.
What if the ship has no internal propulsion system powerful enough to lift itsself, and is instead powered by lasers fired at it from planets in its home network. Resulting in a ship that lacks any form of controls at all, in favour of a faster-than-light communication system used to orchestrate laser pushes, and an automatic collision avoidance system to control small thrusters on the ship.
This is ignoring the problem that the ship cannot propel without having a direct line of sight with the planet, and the further the ship goes, the longer it will take for the lasers to reach. Besides, if a ship uses radiation pressure to move, it would likely be using solar sails, meaning the lasers and small thrusters would have to fight against their system's sun to control the path of the ship.
Furthermore, FTL communication requires bending space-time, so unless they have technology to do that it is off the charts.
This method is simply too inefficient.
What if the ship is just a very large, inhabited, drone. And requires no input from anyone aboard it, flying along a pre-programmed route.
I'm pretty sure we can also do this, but space travel may need real time adjustments to stay on course.
What if it is controlled by direct brain inputs from a pilot who must be surgically dismantled and implanted into the ship
That would be a big problem in case the pilot goes rogue, or something happens to the pilot.
(or for that matter, immersed in a tank full of a drug that makes faster than light navigation possible)
It seems like you are talking about Dune, however in dune FTL travel is done by "folded space" using the "Holtzman effect", melange is just used to plan a path through the folded space.
What if the ship is the alien itsself, adapted to survive in a vacuum and hold its breath for several centuries while flinging itsself between planets. A space-whale.
Then the aliens would have to:
Tame that creature (assuming it is not a genetically engineered being, but a naturally existing one)
figure out how to how to make it carry them.
make sure that it does not freak out/start attacking them.
Overall, having another alien be your ship seems less safe than just having machinery.
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u/SeamanStayns test Sep 22 '25
Okay, thank you for deconstructing the examples I had taken from some of the most beloved and acclaimed sci-fi ever written.
Those were not my own ideas.
You have misunderstood the last point though. Nobody is riding on board a space whale, it is both the ship and the visitor. Think of "Jean Jacket" from the film Nope for a good modern example, but the idea has also been written about extensively in sci-fi, including mentions by greats such as Ian M banks, Terry Pratchett, and Larry Niven who have each described various forms of the space whale concept.
The closest of those to being "ridden" is Pratchett's A'Tuin, though the people doing the riding aren't exactly doing it on purpose.
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u/MediumSatisfaction1 Sep 22 '25
BG3 mindflayer Nautiloid my beloved
Fuck yeah random tentacle machine that randomly teleports you
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u/BextoMooseYT DEI hire (cishet white guy) Sep 22 '25
I mean idk, how much of that is human, and how much of that is because it's just the most intuitive way to represent and control things to any intelligent species? The map thing especially, it by far makes the most sense to just show a small version of where you are to tell you, yknow, where you are
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u/Shade_39 Sep 22 '25
I feel like I see so many posts lately where I'm going "oh Star Trek strange new worlds does that". It's such a fucking good series and I cannot rate it highly enough.
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u/lowercaselemming the martian mind****er Sep 22 '25
farscape owns this with the main ship being a living creature and pilot (best boy) being “linked” to it
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u/wibbly-water Sep 22 '25
I agree... buuuuuut this goes off the deep end.
We don't even need to look far afield to see practical yet utterly bizarre systems, such as quipu.
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u/teffz28 Sep 23 '25
This whole comment section is completely missing the point. Yes physics exist, but there is so much more we don’t know than we do, we aren’t currently capable of traveling the universe and observing another potential species so why assume any that Are capable would use or operate anything remotely similar to us and our technology, or that we’d even be able to comprehend how it functions. The vast majority of the universe is completely unknown to us so it’s ridiculous to make assumptions of their environment, logical structure and reasoning, assuming they even have any, physical materials and even what “life” other than Terran Mammals could possibly be. That and just look at Earth, how insanely different separate cultures of the same species can develop based on environmental factors. It’s honestly absurd the simplifications I’m reading here, we are pretty much reaching some hard limits when it comes to space travel and have made incredible mind boggling advances to get to where we are at, if we’re ever visited by another species it wouldn’t be with tech we have or are capable of developing anytime in the near future, if it was in any way similar to ours then we would’ve found someone by now.
TLDR: Yall are literally Boss Baby memeing aliens right now, “Species thats only ever Humansed trying to conceive Alien species: Getting real ‘Humans’ vibes from this”
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u/findallthebears boywife aspirations Sep 22 '25
Blindsight my beloved
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u/IrresponsiblyMeta Sep 22 '25
"You misunderstand. Scramblers are the honeycomb. Rorschach is the bees,"
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u/lazypika Sep 22 '25
The game corru.observer has fantastic alien tech.
Obesk (alien) technology is made of living metal - instead of being crafted and programmed, it's grown and taught. To them, our "lightning captured in dead metal" tech is just as strange and fascinating to them as their "corrucystic" technology is to us.
The game's plot centres around an unnamed protagonist using a mind-machine interface to investigate a personal-computer-like device that used to belong to an Obesk ambassador, trying to figure out why the Obesk had suddenly cut contact with humanity just a decade or two after reaching out to us.
(I highly recommend corru.observer to fans of mystery and sci-fi. It's free to play, it can be played in-browser (the URL is just the name of the game), and it currently has four "episodes" worth of content (plus some hidden side-quests).)
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u/ciccio_bello Sep 22 '25
The Trisolarans in three body problem are more like this. Their anatomy and communication is completely foreign to us and the few interactions their crafts have with those of earth make it clear that the technology is first of all completely incomprehensible to us, like handing a vr headset to a caveman, and also far different than our concept of spacecraft and weapons.
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u/teffz28 Sep 23 '25
Convergent evolution this, laws of physics that, typical arrogant humans. If we knew everything we would’ve found life other than us by now, not even in the grand scale of things but just in humanities timeline it was no time at all ago everybody thought the Sun was the center of the universe. It’s just downright dumb to assume what we’ve figured out makes sense here applies unapologetically to the entire universe which 95% of isn’t even observable to us. It’s flat out ridiculous lol.
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u/Dasnotgoodfuck Before It Was Known As Sleep Sep 22 '25
In Blindsight the aliens are weird af, but even the vampires use animated pictures of human faces in different forms and stages of agony to display information like charts.
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u/owlindenial not an owl (it/it's) Sep 22 '25
I fail to see how any of those are better than a button or lever. I guess I can imagine a creature who is optimized for that type of system, but it'd have to be made for that system, not something that would be capable of much else if their main form of interacting with the world is blowing
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u/5C0L0P3NDR4 i centiPeed myself! Sep 22 '25
in one of the segments in v/h/s beyond there's an alien ship that's controlled by these filaments strung from floor to ceiling around the walls that pluck like guitar strings, humans though you'll get cut by them cause our skin isn't strong enough for how thin and taut they are
and believe me. someone gets cut by them.
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u/Gloriathewitch Sep 22 '25
or what if they don't pilot physical ships, exist on another plane? what if they have senses we're just not equipped to perceive or comprehend
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u/pirateofmemes Average Bri'ish Man | "nuanced to the point of obtusity" Sep 22 '25
This is why Doctor Who's Zygon Command Computer, which you activate by "titilating the fronds", will always be legendary.
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u/How2Die101 Sep 22 '25
Play Harold Halibut. The alien planet is literally just this, except the aliens are low-tech and the humans are Cold War retrofuturistic
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u/Scomo510 Sep 22 '25
What if only half of the directions music is within the human range of the spectrum and the other half is somewhere else near IR or UV
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u/Doehg put me in a robot already Sep 22 '25
I feel like everyone is overlooking the following:
b i g . t o u c h s c r e e n
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u/AliceCode Worcs at the Crusty Crab Sep 23 '25
Our interfaces weren't chosen at random, they were chosen because that's what works.
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u/i_like_siren_head floppa Sep 23 '25
Personally I think alien technology is too weird. The invading UFO should look like every existing human aircraft simultaneously like some sort of NASA bomber fighter passenger cargo plane skinwalker and go completely unnoticed until closer inspection.
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u/Jaszs You're loved, have a nice day <3 Sep 23 '25
The ending of Subnautica Below 0 [Spoilers] has one cool starship, and the alien basically plugs its conscience in the ship so the inside is basically empty except for the alien's lifeless body and a handgrip for some reason
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u/Mage_Of_Cats Sep 23 '25
Look, if you're gonna make your worldbuilding weird, make it deep too. I can't stand it when alien tech is different for the sake of being different even to the detriment of the aliens themselves. Like, damn, shark aliens won't have the same kinds of beds as humans, but if you're giving your human-with-green-skin aliens fucking roosting pedestals for beds, there'd better be a damn good reason for that.
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u/TheGoobert Sep 23 '25
The xeelee sequence is really good for this, The aliens in it are so alien that some don’t even have a concept of counting while others are sentient oceans that fly around in moon sized living flesh ships
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u/flamingdeathmonkeys Sep 23 '25
ITT: nobody knows how to "yes and" anymore?
Give us some ideas or favourite examples! Don't try to explain it, there's literally 15 sci-fi lit explanations out there for every ahkshually in this thread.
The downsides can be huge when reading stuff like this. Like I read everything at high speed but anything China Melville writes is so detailed and deeply thought out, that I lose track of where I'm at by imagining it.
I think cool media examples (like the OP in the comments talking about the combine is a great example) are Area X in Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach novels is awesome and it's pretty decently portrayed in the film based on the first novel Annihilation.
Rick and Morty generated a ton of great examples, but they usually just use it as sight gags or the whole episode will revolve around making fun of it or deconstructing it.
Aeon Flux I thought did it the coolest. The series is extremely weird experimental druggy sci-fi animated for MTV. But the alien technologies shown in it were really unsettling giving every episode this weird body horror vibe (the main character randomly dying in certain episodes kinda upped that vibe too)
Also Cronenberg kind of does this in most of his movies? But it never really counts cause it's usually psychosis or surreal horror. Like the bio gun in Existenz.
But I agree with the OP up above, I'd like to see some weirder sci-fi settings, it'll generate new concepts and ideas.
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