I am hoping some one on here is or knows a Physicist or Biolist or is just really good at that kind of stuff. I want to know what kind of aliens could realsticly exist.
And also I was hoping to ask what kind of "powers" like seen in super hero comics and stuff COULD exsist if given the right kind of alien on the right kind of palent.
What is the most phyicaly powerful a living being could ever be with out the aid of tech?
And also I was hoping to ask what kind of "powers" like seen in super hero comics and stuff COULD exsist if given the right kind of alien on the right kind of palent.
What is the most phyicaly powerful a living being could ever be with out the aid of tech?
This is a very complicated subject that mostly revolves around the environment that a creature exist in.
Another thing we should keep in mind is that evolution does not provide perfection, only the best from a given set of individuals over a period of time. Evolution is survival of the fittest, not the best, which means that evolution only needs to be "good enough" which doesn't even particularly mean good.
Another thing to consider is specialization vs adaptability.
An animal specialized for fast swimming and surviving low temperatures isn't likely to be very good in a hot or dry climate. It doesn't matter if you're the most apex creature in the oceans, if you're not in the ocean. In that same regard, even though a gorilla is an impressive specimen of pure strength they're far too dense to ever be able to swim.
Assuming this is only natural evolution the upper limits are rather high. Dinosaurs are a great example of how absurd life forms can spring into existence, of course those animals were only able to propagate due to specific elemental factors like an oxygen rich environment. Even this is limited by the square cube law however, as a creature increase in size, it's volume increases exponentially faster and a materials growth in weight by mass will always increase at a substantially higher rate than its strength. Taking even a femur bone and increasing its size at the same relative scale will cause it to collapse under its own weight surprisingly quickly.
Removing the nature from natural selection and instead having it replaced with intelligent intervention could allow for more variety, as humans have done to dogs. (Although cats are basically genetically the exact same since humans first made contact with them. This is because they're already perfect.) Genes are also super weird. Having the gene (for either deafness or blindness I can't remember which one off the top of my head) twice in the same genetic sequence (Of course this is grossly over simplified) can give you harder skin. And also osteoporosis does weird shit like this too sometimes by increasing bone density significantly. Which also has its downsides, I haven't looked too much into osteoporosis but I do know that both blood is produced in the bones and also the hollow spaces into bones store oxygen which is burned for energy and is directly correlated with a creatures overall stamina.
Fun fact, birds don't have hollow bones just because it makes them less dense and therefor lighter and able to fly but also to store extra oxygen for massively increased stamina giving them the energy to consciously fly for extended periods of time.
Everything has a cost though. An animal that can fly will almost always be much more suspecitble to damage than a creature that can't fly in the same weight category. Armored animals like crabs or turtles although well protected can still be in danger if they get stuck, or encounter something they can't deal with. A crabs armor might be impressive, but it doesn't matter if they stumble into an ant hill because the ants are small enough to ignore the armor the crab relies on. The same applies to ocean worms and leaches.
So there's a lot to consider and it's not really something that can effectively be described in a single conversation with any real depth to it. Like how there's a worm that can be sliced into 180 pieces and grows into 180 worms. But also it's still.... Just a worm and those healing abilities although impressive might not apply to a larger more complicated animal.
Another thing we should keep in mind is that evolution does not provide perfection, only the best from a given set of individuals over a period of time. Evolution is survival of the fittest, not the best, which means that evolution only needs to be "good enough" which doesn't even particularly mean good.
Another thing to consider is specialization vs adaptability.
An animal specialized for fast swimming and surviving low temperatures isn't likely to be very good in a hot or dry climate. It doesn't matter if you're the most apex creature in the oceans, if you're not in the ocean. In that same regard, even though a gorilla is an impressive specimen of pure strength they're far too dense to ever be able to swim.
Assuming this is only natural evolution the upper limits are rather high. Dinosaurs are a great example of how absurd life forms can spring into existence, of course those animals were only able to propagate due to specific elemental factors like an oxygen rich environment. Even this is limited by the square cube law however, as a creature increase in size, it's volume increases exponentially faster and a materials growth in weight by mass will always increase at a substantially higher rate than its strength. Taking even a femur bone and increasing its size at the same relative scale will cause it to collapse under its own weight surprisingly quickly.
Removing the nature from natural selection and instead having it replaced with intelligent intervention could allow for more variety, as humans have done to dogs. (Although cats are basically genetically the exact same since humans first made contact with them. This is because they're already perfect.) Genes are also super weird. Having the gene (for either deafness or blindness I can't remember which one off the top of my head) twice in the same genetic sequence (Of course this is grossly over simplified) can give you harder skin. And also osteoporosis does weird shit like this too sometimes by increasing bone density significantly. Which also has its downsides, I haven't looked too much into osteoporosis but I do know that both blood is produced in the bones and also the hollow spaces into bones store oxygen which is burned for energy and is directly correlated with a creatures overall stamina.
Fun fact, birds don't have hollow bones just because it makes them less dense and therefor lighter and able to fly but also to store extra oxygen for massively increased stamina giving them the energy to consciously fly for extended periods of time.
Everything has a cost though. An animal that can fly will almost always be much more suspecitble to damage than a creature that can't fly in the same weight category. Armored animals like crabs or turtles although well protected can still be in danger if they get stuck, or encounter something they can't deal with. A crabs armor might be impressive, but it doesn't matter if they stumble into an ant hill because the ants are small enough to ignore the armor the crab relies on. The same applies to ocean worms and leaches.
So there's a lot to consider and it's not really something that can effectively be described in a single conversation with any real depth to it. Like how there's a worm that can be sliced into 180 pieces and grows into 180 worms. But also it's still.... Just a worm and those healing abilities although impressive might not apply to a larger more complicated animal.
RoundTableKing wrote:
This is a very complicated subject that mostly revolves around the environment that a creature exist in.
So there's a lot to consider and it's not really something that can effectively be described in a single conversation with any real depth to it. Like how there's a worm that can be sliced into 180 pieces and grows into 180 worms. But also it's still.... Just a worm and those healing abilities although impressive might not apply to a larger more complicated animal.
So there's a lot to consider and it's not really something that can effectively be described in a single conversation with any real depth to it. Like how there's a worm that can be sliced into 180 pieces and grows into 180 worms. But also it's still.... Just a worm and those healing abilities although impressive might not apply to a larger more complicated animal.
I really like what your saying here. I just wanted to think of some cool strong aliens that could exist by the laws of physics even if they where from a world with very diffent gravity to our own.
Less gravity = bigger animals.
Or at least increases their upper limits of size.
Or at least increases their upper limits of size.
Hmm, going off of what you’re saying a lot of this has to do with speculative biology, and for both the types of aliens that could ‘realistically’ exist as well as their powers, that depends a lot on just how realistic you want to be. Is this going to be hard or soft sci-fi? I’d recommend taking a look at the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction to get an idea of where you might want to land with this.
As for strong creatures on a planet with different gravity than our own, realistically speaking the other big piece that has to be addressed is what the atmosphere is made of. This impacts the type of life one would expect to see, I’ll link a few examples of worlds with earth-like atmospheres that result in a variety of different creatures:
Chriirah: A warmer or ‘hot house’ planet that is home to intelligent six-legged aliens known as Birrin. Apart from the atmosphere being at least somewhat similar to Earth’s, I don’t believe details about its composition or gravity have been made clear yet. That said, the Birrin stand at about two meters tall on average, and if you look through some more of the creator’s art, it can be guessed that they’re comparably pretty strong.
Pandora: Yes, this is a pretty well-known one, but one adaptation the native Na’vi have that many people are not aware of is the fact that their muscles have a considerably higher degree of metallic material/elements in them. This helps add to the Na’vi’s strength while keeping their muscles lean. In the movie, a Na’vi is shown throwing a human 10-15 feet away with one arm with relative ease (imo that seems a bit exaggerated, but the individual Na’vi was also a warrior). In addition, many types of animals on this planet have extra forelimbs to help them move around in the slightly thicker atmosphere. Their planet actually has a slightly lower gravity, with thicker atmosphere but a bit less surface pressure (likely due to magnetic effects of the strange material abundant on their world).
Palaven: Another example from a popular series, the Turians have evolved on a world with slightly greater gravity, surface pressure, and radiation from their parent star. They have evolved metallic carapaces to help defend themselves against this, and despite appearing rather lean they are at least as strong as any healthy human, if not probably at least a bit more resistant to physical damage.
Dekuuna: Also from Mass Effect, this is a much higher gravity world home to the Elcor. This species evolved to have four very muscular limbs and will certainly be stronger than any alien life that evolved on considerably lower-gravity planets, however they have also learned to move quite slowly in order to avoid what on their home world would be a lethal thing: falling. Their society is based more on camaraderie as they come from a nomadic, close-knit culture. They generally prefer diplomacy over any sort of violence. This is a great example to kind of see how the environment can impact the society-building aspects of an alien species, too.
Lastly, a bonus alien species that is theorized (not confirmed in the series) to prefer colder planets with ammonia-rich atmospheres:
Thargoids: Their appearance is also unconfirmed, though this image may be what they look like - in general their biological-looking ships are the only known appearance. They are theorized to come from much cooler (below -33 Fahrenheit at least) worlds, with vastly different biology than humans or any forms of life we might know. They’re also quite a bit more technologically advanced, capable at least in their ships of controlling their motion along four vectors - that is to say, they can move fully freely and at will in the 4th dimension (which humans definitely cannot do).
I don’t know how deep you want to go into the biology or if you’re more looking for ideas, but another realistic thing to keep in mind is that silicon-based life should absolutely not be exposed to oxygen. This would most likely cause the life to then literally turn into stone (as we know silicon to be here on Earth). Of course as there isn’t yet any known silicon-based life in reality, this is currently a ‘best guess’.
Also to clarify on a point related to gravity: less gravity = less work a lifeform has to do to move around or grow tall, it doesn’t necessarily correlate directly to being ‘big’ but instead has more to do with the amount of energy that needs to be burnt in order to resist gravity’s pull on their bodies. This is inversely true for higher gravity.
If you want more ideas, I’d start with searching through speculative biology online, or through some fandoms that have multiple alien species. All the better if you find a series whose level of ‘hardness’ is similar to what you want to do! There are also a lot of ways to get a bit creative while keeping things at least semi-realistic, and hopefully the examples I’ve listed along with ones you might find will help!
As for strong creatures on a planet with different gravity than our own, realistically speaking the other big piece that has to be addressed is what the atmosphere is made of. This impacts the type of life one would expect to see, I’ll link a few examples of worlds with earth-like atmospheres that result in a variety of different creatures:
Chriirah: A warmer or ‘hot house’ planet that is home to intelligent six-legged aliens known as Birrin. Apart from the atmosphere being at least somewhat similar to Earth’s, I don’t believe details about its composition or gravity have been made clear yet. That said, the Birrin stand at about two meters tall on average, and if you look through some more of the creator’s art, it can be guessed that they’re comparably pretty strong.
Pandora: Yes, this is a pretty well-known one, but one adaptation the native Na’vi have that many people are not aware of is the fact that their muscles have a considerably higher degree of metallic material/elements in them. This helps add to the Na’vi’s strength while keeping their muscles lean. In the movie, a Na’vi is shown throwing a human 10-15 feet away with one arm with relative ease (imo that seems a bit exaggerated, but the individual Na’vi was also a warrior). In addition, many types of animals on this planet have extra forelimbs to help them move around in the slightly thicker atmosphere. Their planet actually has a slightly lower gravity, with thicker atmosphere but a bit less surface pressure (likely due to magnetic effects of the strange material abundant on their world).
Palaven: Another example from a popular series, the Turians have evolved on a world with slightly greater gravity, surface pressure, and radiation from their parent star. They have evolved metallic carapaces to help defend themselves against this, and despite appearing rather lean they are at least as strong as any healthy human, if not probably at least a bit more resistant to physical damage.
Dekuuna: Also from Mass Effect, this is a much higher gravity world home to the Elcor. This species evolved to have four very muscular limbs and will certainly be stronger than any alien life that evolved on considerably lower-gravity planets, however they have also learned to move quite slowly in order to avoid what on their home world would be a lethal thing: falling. Their society is based more on camaraderie as they come from a nomadic, close-knit culture. They generally prefer diplomacy over any sort of violence. This is a great example to kind of see how the environment can impact the society-building aspects of an alien species, too.
Lastly, a bonus alien species that is theorized (not confirmed in the series) to prefer colder planets with ammonia-rich atmospheres:
Thargoids: Their appearance is also unconfirmed, though this image may be what they look like - in general their biological-looking ships are the only known appearance. They are theorized to come from much cooler (below -33 Fahrenheit at least) worlds, with vastly different biology than humans or any forms of life we might know. They’re also quite a bit more technologically advanced, capable at least in their ships of controlling their motion along four vectors - that is to say, they can move fully freely and at will in the 4th dimension (which humans definitely cannot do).
I don’t know how deep you want to go into the biology or if you’re more looking for ideas, but another realistic thing to keep in mind is that silicon-based life should absolutely not be exposed to oxygen. This would most likely cause the life to then literally turn into stone (as we know silicon to be here on Earth). Of course as there isn’t yet any known silicon-based life in reality, this is currently a ‘best guess’.
Also to clarify on a point related to gravity: less gravity = less work a lifeform has to do to move around or grow tall, it doesn’t necessarily correlate directly to being ‘big’ but instead has more to do with the amount of energy that needs to be burnt in order to resist gravity’s pull on their bodies. This is inversely true for higher gravity.
If you want more ideas, I’d start with searching through speculative biology online, or through some fandoms that have multiple alien species. All the better if you find a series whose level of ‘hardness’ is similar to what you want to do! There are also a lot of ways to get a bit creative while keeping things at least semi-realistic, and hopefully the examples I’ve listed along with ones you might find will help!
Another unrated evolutionary trait is the ability to briskly walk at something for hours on end. Seriously, as a human you can just walk at something and eventually I'll run itself out and have to rest long before you do.
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