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[Shoku]

Well yeah, cnidaria is basically all of those roundish soft things that sting you if you simply touch their skin, so sea anemonies and jellyfish as well as corals and sea wasps (otherwise known as box jellyfish but I thought I'd draw some distinction.) Stuff like that comb jelly from a video I linked some pages back are not part of cnidaria but are rather ctenophores.

[Supermikhail]

 : Hey, Shoku, how do you explain flying saucers?

[Shoku]

Spoiler: oofohs (click to show/hide)

Based on everything I know about physics and energy it would be a giant/massive/cosmic waste of resources if they were aliens doing basically any of the things people think they are doing.

Now, one thing that seems vaguely plausible to me is the replicator idea. We ourselves could probably make machines that could fly off to some distant star system and then set up a bit of a factory for making more of themselves to send to other star systems and so forth. Wouldn't take a whole lot of input effort from us once we were capable and they could map the galaxy for us a lot better than we can by just by looking through telescopes. Maybe after they had assessed certain worlds we might even start up colonies there.

We generally value the concept of alien life so it would be reasonable that we'd try to stop them from trampling the critters on any life filled world.

Now there are still problems here. We'd want to have left them open to later communication, for like software updates and the whole sending information back to us thing. If our sector of the galaxy had robots like that from some other civilization we should be able to pick up at least some of the buzz as they send signals back and forth, except maybe if they sent data with neutrinos- but how would you even... well, advanced aliens might be able to I guess.

Even so there shouldn't be nearly so many of them screwing around with people. There isn't anything particularly confusing about the chemical reactions our bodies perform so anything capable of analyzing us ought to get 99% of the information they ever would from the first person they checked out. And why would you have so many on a planet you weren't disturbing?

Worse though is how they only get reported in certain cultures, particularly America. You would think they would have at least some interest in Chinese people and that SOME farmer would have a strange story about some encounter he had one night. No, instead the accounts of alien abduction all show extreme signs of the idea just being passed around amongst us. The way we described the aliens changed so strongly as movies portrayed them differently.
And the way we've dealt with people is just horrible. The hypnosis recollections and all of those things that people do and digging for memories at all! They are more like digging a hole and planting memories. Every time you recall something you rewrite the memory in your head and the people that deal with these things have not taken any measure to stop themselves from leading people into alien abduction ideas.

So overall maybe 1:10 odds of it being the replicator thing and otherwise pretty much just lights and things that people don't understand and easy convince themselves they fit with this popular culture concept.

Edit: I expressed that poorly at the end there. Even if they're alien machines people still see lights and things they don't understand and call them aliens even when they are not.

[Supermikhail]

 : Wow, that's neat. Especially the idea that shouldn't need so many kidnappings and horrific torture, unless they are a race feeding on emotions. However, say, they are a race feeding on emotions... who are GIANT JELLYFISH EVOLVED FOR aerial flight, and, what's even more cool, CAPABLE OF INTERDIMENSIONAL travel!

And while this idea settles in, I'd like to inform you that I've read past the introduction to Cnidaria, and I have to say... that I'm having a hard time imagining anything more complex or more perfect evolving from the Medusa part of them. I'm growing in opinion that to juggle things like them I first need to evolve something myself to the same complexity. They seem perfectly balanced and to shift the balance you'd have to take something away, make them worse, like remove cnidocytes. But in the same mutation you'd have to add some alternative, because otherwise the mutation won't survive.

Which proves once again the usefulness of education on the subject in this endeavour. I couldn't imagine the beauty and complexity of life before I met Cnidaria.

[Shoku]

The energy it takes to warp space-time for things like wormholes and faster than light travel (for something space ship sized) is on the scale of all of the energy in the visible universe. I would hate to think that they were somehow unable to consume any of that energy themselves and had to waste it just to get some kind of contact high off of our electro-chemical energy. Though if they could use energy on scales like that you would think they could just grow some brains in jars and fiddle around with those matrix style.

-

You're having a hard time thinking of anything more perfect/complex/balanced than them because you've forgotten how evolution works. Yes they are very good at what they do, just like most of the life on Earth, but evolution changes body plans the most when they have reason to do something else. Surely you can find some situation that jellyfish are not well suited for.

But that isn't quite so much the point of the exercise. The idea here is to push half of the thought process off to the side and just rip off other animals to get more experience with changing a body. "What if jellyfish had evolved into millipedes?" except it would be a medusa based body instead of a worm one. It seems like a good way to clarify the tools we're working with and maybe get at a better method for iterations of species.

Seems strange though. I expected anyone interested in this project would already appreciate how amazing life is.

-

You wouldn't have to take away the cnidocytes really so much as condense them into a smaller area. Worms have got muscle running up and down the length of their body and muscle in rings perpendicular to that just all over the place. The things with bones or shells still obviously have muscle but it is shifted around and usually just runs between two or three points. If you had muscle like worms do instead of bones you'd probably be as puffy and that tire-man mascot to get the same range of strength.

No, lots of animals can certainly poison things that get too close to them but it is instead concentrated in fangs or claws simply because it isn't all that tough for them to move those bodyparts where they need to be. But jellyfish? Well the ones with longer tentacles can kind of pull them at their mouth and they've got whichever swimming motion but that is about it. Think of what they could do with joints or if they needed to periodically seek out shelter.

[Supermikhail]

Heh. My fascination with zoology before this project was mostly concerned with what things I could get my hands on, that is, furry cute things that run around the street and are sold in pet shops. But this is an entirely different level.

The task is still a little intimidating. But I'll think about it.

[Shoku]

It is really more about just forcing them to bend over backward. Jellyfish are pretty dissimilar so if it goes how I'm picturing we'd get above average alien life, though not the sort the actual project is about. It is more about possibilities than practical adaptations.

[Supermikhail]

Yeah, so this is kind of dead. I've been sick the past week, didn't go out, and I read books mostly on a bus, because when I'm at home I can't tear myself away from the screen. And when I'm at my computer, my creative lobe apparently don't work at all, and without them coming up with new creatures is kind of hard. Plus, even with my creative lobe, frankly, the jellyfish challenge adds even more to my feeling of pointlessness about this project.

But in case this somehow continues, but it would be, actually, much better if it restarted, I've realised how a wiki could be useful for it.

First, every creature could get its own page, with whatever description and illustration the author has provided, and then the page easily edited for any new info, and linked philogenetically to other creature pages.

Second, any topical ramblings, which would be detrimental to participation on the forums, could go to their own page. And then also easily edited by anyone willing to improve their readability and other properties.

I feel like soon it would be a great time to finally learn to work with Google sites, and I could take that as a test project. Although "soon" here is a variable of some kind.

[alfie275]

You could always try wikia, it offers free wikis, and you can use the talk pages for discussions.

[Shoku]

Drawing things by hand is almost universally easier for people attempting to do something creative. Chris Georgenes even recommends you start with pencil and paper for flash animations (sort of the last art lessons thing I took up- though that was awhile back.)

My exchanges with Mikhail have definitely grown to into some real show stoppers for the progress of the actual project and just having a totally removed area for questions about biology would greatly ease those troubles.

The big downside I see to moving this into something like a wiki format is that I'm simply very good at checking forum threads but practically absent if I need to look in more than one place to see what's new. Now, I don't know anything about the tools available to wiki managers so somebody is going to have to show me how to get a conglomerate list of things I'd want to respond to that is still reasonably easy for me to navigate.

-

The jellyfish project is only meant to address your uncertainty about body forms. Right now the toolset I seem to have made you comfortable with is hanging right on the edge of nothing and before that you had shells, jets, wings, and backwards jets. I miss anything?
Really I see it as somewhere that I can forcefully say "use a structure like this" and then have it done quickly, give a passing remark, and move on to something else. No matter how I set it up and exercise will still take the work of doing and exercise but you've got to stop letting the negative emotions tied to how small a distance we've traveled stop you from traveling at all and just do it. Even if it sucks at what I want it to do we'll get more ideas for how to handle these projects and maybe even fix it up as a good way to bring other people into this.

Maybe I could even have a pyramid scheme style system of people who did it walking new people through it before they try to touch the actual project n_n

[Shoku]

This topic has been fairly dead for awhile now but I found a video with a lot of relevance and it is probably easier to understand than I usually am :b

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RbPQG9WTZM&NR=1