How to evolve a organic ship / Thruster.

[mikegarrison]

1 hour ago, Scotius said:

Actually, that trope is quite old. In 1935 Murray Leinster wrote a short story "Proxima Centauri". It describes first (and hostile) contact between human expedition arriving at Proxima, with the sentient plantoid species inhabitating the system. Those aliens did use plant-like spaceships that were grown instead of being built. After reaching desired size and shape relevant tissues were "turned off" and behaved like dead matter (presumably to reduce need for the nutrients) until the process was reversed - for example to create a connection with incompatible airlock of human ship.

Thanks, I didn't know that one. But nevertheless, I'll quote myself: "I think you probably could have counted all the stories with living spaceships on one hand before the late 80s". So that's 1, but you can certainly count "1" on one hand (unless you've had a really traumatic accident with a bandsaw).

My point was that it seemed to me that there was a sudden explosion of "organic spaceships" right around the time B5 and Farscape hit the airwaves.

Edited December 11, 2017 by mikegarrison

[Scotius]

Widespread use of CGI is probably the answer. Building convincing models of alien starships probably took more time and money than to run a digital model through rendering program. And then those digital models could be further processed to add animations - and the effect would be crab-like, moving Shadow warships. Looking and behaving in a stranger and more "alien" way than any conventional scaled model ever could. And what is a better way to hammer down the point of meeting aliens than to have them use tech completely foreign to us and our machine-oriented civilisation?

[mikegarrison]

Just now, Scotius said:

Widespread use of CGI is probably the answer. Building convincing models of alien starships probably took more time and money than to run a digital model through rendering program. And then those digital models could be further processed to add animations - and the effect would be crab-like, moving Shadow warships. Looking and behaving in a stranger and more "alien" way than any conventional scaled model ever could. And what is a better way to hammer down the point of meeting aliens than to have them use tech completely foreign to us and our machine-oriented civilisation?

Yeah, could be. But I think maybe it's also related to what was considered "high tech" at the time. In most of the 20th century, that was machines. But in the last few decades, people started thinking that bioengineering was the new "high tech". (And after that it became "nanobots".)

[DDE]

4 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

Yeah, could be. But I think maybe it's also related to what was considered "high tech" at the time. In most of the 20th century, that was machines. But in the last few decades, people started thinking that bioengineering was the new "high tech". (And after that it became "nanobots".)

That’s a really broad brush. The kind of machines kept changing, from clockwork to electricity to atomic.

[PB666]

1 hour ago, Scotius said:

Anyone remembers flying graboids from "Tremors"?

I remember going "What the... They just didn't... OMG they did...!" Followed by an epic facepalm and helpless laughter.

Do-do birds as I recall could not fly, what are the flight dynamics on this?

[Green Baron]

2 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Yeah, could be. But I think maybe it's also related to what was considered "high tech" at the time. In most of the 20th century, that was machines. But in the last few decades, people started thinking that bioengineering was the new "high tech". (And after that it became "nanobots".)

And in the nineteenth century it was all steam and rivets (Jules Verne), before that transmission lines and all kind of mills.

These stories are all mirrors of the broad masses' imagination of the future, based on slightly flexed, bent and extended current possibilities.

Edited December 11, 2017 by Green Baron

[CastleKSide]

There is a video game I play where there exists the concept of a "Dyson forest."  Essentially it is a not-sentient plant-like organism which VERY slowly forms around a star. Not much detail is given about the biology obviously,  however, it does propagate from star to star using what are termed "floaters." These are large gas-filled bags on the scale of hundreds of kilometers.

I have always thought this is one of the more realistic space life forms theorized. (using "realistic" very very loosely here) The only problem I see for this organism would be acquiring enough mass to truly form a Dyson sphere which is what is implied. Obviously, you would coat every surface with something sticky to catch every mote of dust which collides with it, plus you would want to capture all the solar wind you could. A few asteroids caught in the growing net would be very helpful and very old forests could probably siphon matter directly off of planets atmospheres.

 

Or of course, you could go full trek and invent another dimension entirely filled with matter and have all your organic ships live there.

[Scotius]

And of course there is a classic Brian Aldiss's "Greenhouse". In which highly evolved plants looking like gargantuan spiders travel from Earth to the Moon and back on strands of webs hundreds of thousands of kilometers long. Now that's an incredible mental image