User blog comment:Mr.Robbo/Human Chauvinism 5/@comment-4364108-20140106235932/@comment-4844180-20140107022916

Orangutan, I said they could think at a slower rate. This would conserve energy so they wouldn't need as much per second as we do because they think over a longer time. Also, as said in the definition of a plant, they don't have mobility organs and so would roughly stay in the same place.Either that or use the environment to move (water currents, strong winds).

For the evolutionary pressure I would just like to point out it's not agreed upon for what gave humans the pressure. Or at least to my knowledge it isn't agreed upon. There are many theories to it. For plants we could have that competition from other plants made them need a mind to actually think about where to go so they wouldn't end up in the same area as competitors. Or perhaps it was influence of another race. Or perhaps the pressure could have been that the environment is hostile and they needed a mind to work out resource allocation between individual plants so the race could survive.

Yuy, I know you said it wasn't /impossible/ but I jusst wanted to note the ways it could happen as you are making it sound as close to impossible as you can get. Or at least it came across that way to me. Sorry if I misread.

Electricity would be hindered, but plugging things in one at a time wouldn't cause a disaster. You can turn plug sockets off, plug everything in and then turn it on. Or have a lot of resistance that can be switched off so you have the time to plug things in. The first option is much easier.

Also in saying aquatic and floral organisms would never develop space travel I disagree. Some might have thought the same if they viewed our planet at the time of tribes or earlier. Space travel and colonisation for humans is currently illogical, expensive and time-consuming. A few centuries ago there wasn't that much thought of a "need" to go to the stars with an evolutionary pressure.

By the way if you mean the planet, the one on Atavin actually just sends seeds into orbit to drop somewhere else on the planet. They don't go across to another planet as, as you'e said, the environments would be far too different in most cases.

Also, I think this wasn't just aimed at writers. Of course human-like creatures are easier to write for, but some people (actually a fair few) do think that to have sapience it requires human-like features that may as well limit sapience to low-budget sci-fi rubber head aliens.

Also, some authors do strive to convey alien thought processes and many have written papers and novellas on the concepts, so it is not unheard of in writing. I know you meant generally, but the point still stands that writers overall don't all go to human-aliens.