Pretty sure the word you’re looking for there is “descendant”.

Given the overall quality of the comments, I’m surprised this slipped through.

Phil Farrand, in The Nitpicker’s Guide for Next Generation Trekkers, debunks the panspermia idea. His argument pretty much boils down to “How do you plant genetic seeds that naturally evolve toward a target without including the target that they’re aiming for, thereby making the evolution unnecessary?”

SG-1 was a Star Trek that didn’t need spaceships or a biological panspermia theory, but it did need a linguistic panspermia theory. In one episode they simply asked a guy if he could understand them and waited thirty seconds for the audience to forget that he shouldn’t be able to. His people had been taken from Mongolia at least a thousand years earlier.

Have you heard of Raelianism?

Boy, that Voyager episode with the dinosaurs is so Earth-centric (typical for Star Trek). Why didn’t they find descendents of Vulcan’s or Qo’noS’s or Betazed’s analog of dinosaurs? Always with the Earth, these people.

Well, here’s the thing: in the fictional universe we’re looking at, which in several noticeable ways (‘warp’ drives included) bears little resemblance to what we think we know of our own, there *are* hominids everywhere. They vastly outnumber anything else. That being the data we’re stuck with, we’d have to consider theories that fit our data. The Ancient Continent of Panspermia would be worth considering I’d imagine. Perhaps the IDers have even found a universe where their theory, forced, agenda-driven and unsupported by evidence in ours, might make some sense. That said, I’d go with Occam’s razor and eliminate it anyway, especially if in that universe it were shown that these hominids were genetically close relatives. There are simpler possible explanations than a God or gods, such as Panspermia.

Incidentally, we’ve had artificial selection at least since the dawn of agriculture, haven’t we? How is Panspermia anything but a high-tech version of artificial selection?

My personal favorite hypothesis is slightly different from Panspermia, in that no seeding of primordial soups was necessary, just colonists. These hominids really *are* hominids in my version, some mutated naturally as their populations became isolated (adapting to their environment and to cumulative local quirks in sexual selection). The colonizing of space was relatively recent (in geological time) and the various human colonies have had enough time to diverge quite a bit but in many cases the divergence is fairly superficial.

I don’t think we can really rule out some innate advantage to our body plan, at least until we have a fuller understanding of *why* we have big brains. If the body plan is innately superior and big brains are advantageous enough to evolve relatively often, that would be a hypothesis, but all this being speculative it seems a bit of an… ugly universe (and ultimately our data is indeed very contrived, and the universe in question is the product of imaginations not evolution, but let’s not spoil the illusion).

The advantage of my favorite hypothesis, the “new-Earth Panspermia” (see what I did there) is that it can fit the data (a rampant body plan in our fictional universe) to just about any hypothesis for our evolving a big brain that I can think of. If big brains are primarily the product of sexual selection–absurd, costly, ungainly and expensive (but beautiful) like peacock feathers–then we’d still only need to evolve the body plan once, so the odds wouldn’t matter much.

Shipwreck some of these hominids in different environments as “Robinson Crusoe” species, relatively bereft of technology but with big brains intact, I’d expect to see significant variation from world to world, given time. Especially if the environment were quite different from the one that evolved the original hominids, and if there were niches in the ecosystem we could evolve into (such as in a new-ish world or after a big depopulation of indigenous species).

so to answer the “where are they?” question: we’re already here, at least in this hypothetical universe where we have a lot of hominids to explain…

During what I call my “active meditations” one of the beings I communicate with is a member of my soul group or “cluster” as my Guardian Angel calls it who’s having a life on a water planet in the Sirius B Star System. Here’s what I asked and his reply about hominids or humanoids:

Antura, can you tell me what percentage of the universe is made up of humanoids?

“Yes, certainly a good percentage Tom.”

Is it above 35%?

“Yes, a little higher. Forty percent would be fairly accurate Tom.”

Were humanoids created by one society?

“This is a little like the chicken and the egg theory Tom. When Creator created this Universe, calls went out and several humanoid societies you might say responded. Naturally from them grew the large percentage of the universe you have now you see. So to answer your question, it was not just one society but a few.”

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Beyond that, it should be noted that cephalization (focusing of nerves into one region, leading to development of the brain) is extremely common among animals. And it’s not out of the question to suggest that alien life may also evolve cephalization because it gives an animal an information processing advantage over its counterparts, something I imagine can be important in any environment. From there evolution points to radial or bilateral symmetry; it is uncommon for a cephalized animal to have no noticeable symmetry.

With bilateral symmetry, the basic animal layout is a tube with feeding on one side and excretion on the other. This still leaves nature a lot of options and by no means points to alien hominins; however, I expect that if intelligent aliens are found, they are more likely to be bilateral than radially symmetric because this allows the animal to further focus sensory organs that may develop, rather than have them dispersed around the animal. For example, imagine trying to read a book with 6 eyes all pointing in different directions. It would be rather hard. Furthermore, depth perception is much greater in animals such as humans where the eyes are close together and can conjointly focus on an object.

Whatever life we find, I suggest it will be… somewhat… morphologically similar to species we have here on earth because of similar advantages evolution will seek out.

Evolution is an undirected biological process, dependent on genetic mutation and natural selection. It is impossible to predict what evolution will produce, because every tiny change in the environment and every random mutation of the genome can enormously effect the subsequent adaptations. As Kurt Wise puts it, “if … the evolutionary tape were played again, human life would not be expected. In fact, even if it were replayed a million times or more, man would not be expected again.”

Outside of Star Trek, the only place I’ve seen this idea of forward-planned evolution is in the pseudo-scientific writings of “Intelligent Design” creationists. They suggest that God put all the genetic machinery necessary for the evolution of man into the first primordial genome, because they cannot accept that evolution can explain all the diversity of life (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary). This is one of the the “gaps” in which ID Creationists choose to place their God. The only difference, then, between Creationism and the Hominid Panspermia Theory is that God is replaced with an ancient alien.

Unfortunately, Kyle, the episode titled “Distant Origin” in Season Three of Star Trek Voyager completely destroyed this logic.

In this episode a scientist from a race of reptilian saurians in the Delta Quadrant discovers that the DNA of saurians (who have a hominid shape) matches the DNA of humans at 46 separate markers. He is amazed, and realizes that humans and saurians must have a shared distant ancestor.

Upon further investigation with the scientists aboard Voyager, it is learned that the saurians were a race of intelligently evolved dinosaurs on Earth that foresaw the meteor collision that would destroy other dinosaurs and escaped into space. The shared ancestor of humans and saurians could be traced to the evolutionary split between mammals and reptiles on Earth.

In the same episode, the saurians trade and interact with many other humanoid races across the delta quadrant – but only the humans share the DNA markers that point to common origins – which begs the question: what sort of “DNA” do all these other humanoid species have? Obviously, nothing remotely close to humans or saurians.

Presumably, the Voyager writers on this episode were unaware that they had just made the character B’Elanna Torres an impossible hybrid (she is supposed to be the daughter of a klingon and a human).

The list goes on and on.

C.J. Cherryh wrote a novel that contained an insectoid race, complete with queen, group dynamics, castes, the whole recognizable package (except intelligent, and much larger than Earth bound insects).

One of the sci-fi greats (Clarke? Heinlein?) wrote a book that contained a closing chapter. In it he speculated about a race of aliens the size of planets. They existed on the edges of planetary systems and lived lives slowly and of great length. We would call their home the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud now. Communication was by radio but radio was inherent to the species’ biology and morphology, not a tool.

I’d estimate that the body plan of a squid or octopus would permit both advanced intelligence and advanced technology. The chromatophores in their skin also would permit advanced language skills not based, as namonaihito says, on vocalization.

Where things turn plaid, for me, is when you give up on DNA as a body encoding tool. DNA/RNA is the foundation of life as we know it. When you move away from that altogether, I suspect that more species diversity than we can imagine is possible. Physical laws must still be obeyed of course but the universe of life is potentially vast.

Jen: regarding Babylon 5, no, it's two non-hominid species out of six major species that were the focus of the show (Humans, Minbari, Narns, Centauri, Vorlons, and Shadows). If you expand out to consider the other races shown throughout the series, you’d add a couple more non-hominids, but I wasn’t talking about every alien-race-of-the-week; only the six major races that comprised the main focus of the series; the “star” races, if you will.

I should have made it clear that I was referring to Haldane’s dictum — to wit: “The universe is not only queerer than we imagine; it is queerer than we can imagine.”

But as regards finding “beetleoids” on other worlds, I wouldn’t rule it out. They have six legs, so could evolve manipulators without losing sure-footedness. Of course, the exoskeleton would be a handicap to developing the sort of high-energy metabolism they’d need. They probably would require a world like Earth in its Pennsylvanian period, when oxygen reached 35 percent and dragonflies had two-foot wingspans.

“Imagine spacefaring elephants typing stuff in their keyboards with their noses…” Jerry Pournelle did exactly that – It’s called “Footfall”. Elephantine aliens invade Earth. Interesting riffs on the pros and cons of various types of locomotion and physiology.

Also want to throw out a second or third mention of David Brin’s Uplift books for having a really convincing, well thought-out collection of ALIEN aliens – not just variations on things we see here on earth.

When I read that the TNG explanation “lead [the author] to develop the Hominid Panspermia Theory of Science Fiction Aliens” I had hoped he would actually take it a step further. Is it just me, or does it seems like this was merely just a well crafted summary of the episode and its implication? I fail to see how this can be accepted as the author’s theory. That’s like tasting a big mac and saying that it inspired you to create the world’s best burger, and then putting out a product that is essentially a perfect copy of the big mac, but calling it the “Biginid Macspermia of Generic McDonalds-esque Restaurants.”

If anything good came from this, it’s the subsequent conversation that followed. I had not read the Lensman books for example. I found Sargon’s post to be very interesting. OK that’s all for me.

Save Stargate!

No bonus points for me, I can only name 15-16 (I think I know one, but can’t tell from the picture) of the aliens pictured.

I’d just simple run with the idea that the hominid form could just be the best form to be at the top of the food chain. Animal might run faster than humans, be stronger, but when you look at most animal forms they are only good at specific tasks. The human form is much more versatile, and this form has become good at killing things. It stands to reason the hominid form is superior.

An anime series explored this idea, Geneisis Climber Mospeda an alien race the Inbits came to earth to study evolution, the humans kept shooting at them. The Inbit start out looking like slugs, no one really gets to see them much in their natural form, but by the end the Inbits were taking on human form after experimenting with various forms. Most people will know of this as it was re-written as Robotech’s 3rd Generation. The Invid were still doing pretty much the same thing as the original Mospeda Inbits were, looking for the ultimate form. They believed the human or hominid form may have been it.

First row: Emperor Sea Strider from “Expedition” (see http://www.waynebarlowe.com/expedition_pages/index_expedition.htm ), 4th Doctor from Doctor Who, Gorn from Star Trek, Drac (named Jeriba Shigan) from Enemy Mine, Predator

Second row: Alien from the Alien movies, ALF from the sitcom “ALF”, Vogon (Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz) from the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, creature from “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull”, don’t know what that last one is

Third row: Cthulhu from story “Call of Cthulhu”, Daleks from Doctor Who, Nakai from Stargate Universe, Thanator from Avatar, Spock from Star Trek

Fourth row: Martians from “War of the Worlds” (see http://images.wikia.com/waroftheworlds/images/8/8e/War_of_the_Worlds_original_cover_bw.jpg ), Morn from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Marvin the Martian from looney tunes, “prawn” from District 9, sand worm from Dune

Also the one between the Gorn and the Predator on the top line is a Drac from the 1985 film “Enemy Mine”.

The Panspermia idea was also used by the Stargate series in a very similar way that you’re using it here.

Best,

Wes