I've decided this deserves some spring cleaning what with my having taken the concept through another half a dozen iterations since starting the thread (in about as many months.)
I am deeply dissatisfied with fictional species from almost every medium, artist, and so on. Going out there you're lucky if each world doesn't just have a sentient humanoid and some pet along with a few colorful plants but even if a fictional world has some variety it's all so heavily derived from Earth life.
The reason for this? Progressive thinking. Everyone wants to think that life starts as some bland slime and progresses up to the top of a ladder where it then builds telescopes and cars and things but evolution isn't about that at all. Evolution just has species adapting to their local environment- if something works NOW it sticks around. All of these complicated and delicately balances systems just show up because of so many organisms competing with each other.
Nobody makes their fictional worlds like this. It's always that progressive starting point A and ending point B and THEN they try to fill in the stuff in the middle, or really a lot of the time they don't even bother. I'd like to change that. It seems like a simple way to keep people from just aiming for some end point is to have different people take over the reigns.
So then the thing this is actually about: I'd like to get a few people drawing animals. Really all that's required is a shape that's clear enough to tell where the mouth is at and a reasonable resemblance to the ancestor species but you're more than welcome to talk about any organs and things that are part of the creature. Right now I'm acting in a largely advisory role but I will definitely make numerous artistic contributions if this project doesn't fizzle out.
09/29/10: We've got several varieties of simple bacteria colonies nestled in a shell of two slabs of calcium-y material and one very unrelated balloon sort of creature.
11/15/10: There are a few lineages now. An eight armed jet creature has come from the old bacteria colonies and diversified into several forms and there is also a long... thing rooted to the ground by a hard shell. We have an entirely alternate lineage of what seem like electro-plants so far.
The prompts really need attention to take this project in a direction unlike the trashy alternatives out in the rest of the web, or maybe we need more people.
The Ark Project has me thinking about very foreign types of animals so... this. The idea is a collaborative sketching effort (as in it doesn't need to be pretty, just give a sense of what's going on.)
Well, I should really give it a proper introduction:
Aliens in Scifi have always been horribly lazy. I don't mean the Star Trek method of just adding a few features to human actors- it's understandable that you might not have access to the super special effects you'd need for actors to manage alien-aliens. I'm more irritated by "reptile men" and giant worms and so forth. All of this alien life is something taken from Earth and just changed a little bit.
And then of course there is Spore where they thought playing Mr Potato head with Earth animal bits constituted alien life.
Well, from a biology perspective the complex forms of the animals of our world are heavily reliant on what species they came from. Lizards are shaped like fish and fish are little more than a worm with an internal skeleton and some improved sensory organs resting right in the same general location.
The thing is those mass extinctions. There are any number of ways the environment could have shifted from that sort of thing so a little variation there should have left radically different animals around to end up ancestor to everyone else.
Rarely you'll see someone take something like a jellyfish and grow it to a few extreme variations for their alien life but then they just leave it at some kind of planet with only twelve or so animals on it. Why not keep doing that and make a lot?
Well because they know that their extreme variations aren't really that extreme and with a gradient they would become much less interesting. Just thinking through from jellyfish to some sort of largest land predator in a single step doesn't really take you anywhere. The best you can do is force the jellyfish into the mold of something like a T-Rex.
So instead I thought that adding some evolution into the mix would make it work much better. You wouldn't have to work as hard on each variation because they would just be a stage. You could make a lot of small hops in succession and end up somewhere much more interesting.
The not just ripping of Earth thing is standing in my way though. It's a big hassle to get myself to stop listing what I already know about instead of just thinking of uninfluenced variations. Hence the collaborative aspect.
Anyone interested?
*please ask questions.
**I'll talk your ears off given the chance so also feel free to tell me to cut the fluff and get to the point.
Current prompts:
There are plant globs floating around on the water's surface now. Enough mobility to seek them out would be very advantageous.
Life stages. Not everything starts out a small version of the parent just doing the same thing for it's entire life. Right now we've got a few things that hang around on or in the parent early on but metamorphism is untouched.
Other environments. We've got some wacky stuff out on the continental shelf but in close proximity to that there are tide pools, streams, and murky swamp type areas. All of these can have very different salinity from the continental shelf waters but some may not. Still the depth of water and character of the ground below it have obvious differences and the virtue of living somewhere your predators do not always holds great promise.
Thread Summary:
Up to post 33 - Mainly Star Trek complaints.
Post 34 to 50 - Supermikhail shows up as the first person willing to draw anything and I start talking details about the project.
Post 51 to 60 - I apparently never asked people to make something with muscles skin and nerves. They thought we were just picking up from unicellular bacteria before that. Also I talk about the advantages of sexual reproduction other than orgasms.
Jopax authors a bacteria species with shells.
Infodump about oxygen.
Mikhail gives a bacterial colony jet propulsion and I try to explain organs.
Posts 61 to 70 - First drawings and working out what anyone else is talking about.
71 to 80 - Things actually start to take off with creation and drawing.
-Anyone new can maybe start around there but I will eventually review the rest of the thread as well.
Author
Topic: An Otherworldly Ark (Read 38104 times)