r/DaystromInstitute • u/ThewizardBlundermore • 19d ago
Are non Humanoid Alien races living in hiding from Humanoid ones
I've recently been watching voyager and I've noticed, apart from the fact that miraculously the vast majority of the delta quadrant are also conveniently made up of Humanoid life with different foreheads that any time Voyager does ever encounter a non Humanoid lifeform or race it's always seemingly hiding or is incredibly insular to the point of xenophobia.
Like the race that attacked Tuvok aboard the delta flier that had invisible ships and stealth fields to the point people in the local area thought they were a myth.
Or the alien parasite creature that latched onto Belana and the Doctor had to employ a Cardassian war criminal hologram to help him. Or the swarm. The aliens from Fluidic space etc.
Do non Humanoids actively avoid Humanoid life out of fear? It seems to be a common trait amongst them that there is this entire subsect of the Galactic community that actively avoids humanoids which can't just be a coincidence.
Like the changelings, who are another (technically) non Humanoid life form are non humanoids feared by Humanoid life? Treated with suspicions and potentially on some primal level seen as a threat and hunted down? Causing these life forms to live in isolation?
Is it some sort of underlying running theme across the galactic that Humanoid life on some base level actively drive anything that isn't Humanoid into isolation? Even the Borg would prefer destroying races like the Fluidic space aliens despite those aliens clearly having reached a level of perfection that passes their own.
Could it have something to do with Picard finding a common ancestor amongst various alpha quadrant races? The precursors to modern space fairing society?
Perhaps when they seeded various worlds with their genetics they left behind a marker that made them intolerant to non Humanoid life? But why would they do that? What reason would there be?
I know the out of universe explanation is that non Humanoid aliens are budget intensive and difficult for the time so the best they could do was Human with funny forehead or ears but in universe it does make me wonder about some underlying universal principle. Similar to how artificial life was actively hunted down by ancient Romulans in picard because of an unknown entity outside of the universe that was seemingly some sort of super AI that murders all organics. Is there something that binds non Humanoid life forms together that makes them an existential threat?
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u/Amathril 19d ago
I just wanted to add that the Borg absolutely wanted to assimilate the Species 8472 from Fluidic space - but they couldn't. But I don't think it was because of incompatibility caused by 8472 being non-humanoid, because it is stated on screen that they are biologically superior pretty much to everyone self and simply immune to the nano-probes.
Then again, we never see any non-humanoid drones in the show. It could be because they are assimilated by cybernetics to common template (which would be rather harsh and inefficient) or possibly have some different role, that is not seen on screen. Maybe they are some sort of drones sent to specialized missions or maybe have some function in cores of the vessels where their unique physiology is utilized. Keep in mind we have probably seen only the Borg assault and assimilation units, we know very little about the structure of their non-military functions.
Then again, it is quite possible, that they are assimilated and then discarded, after their knowledge is extracted, precisely because they do not conform to the common template and it is inefficient to change the surrounding technology to fit these "special" drones.
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u/DrohtinCynewulf 19d ago
Not to mention the fact that all Borg ships we’ve ever seen, as well as Unimatrix One, were clearly designed for humanoid drones.
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u/Marvin_Megavolt 16d ago
Admittedly we have seen ONE known case of the Borg capturing and assimilating (briefly, after a fashion) not only a nonhumanoid being, but a noncorporeal one - Zero the Medusan from Prodigy.
…possibly why even the godlike Q are a little wary of the Borg, if they can brainwash and assimilate into their network even inorganic, non-corporeal energy based lifeforms.
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u/merrycrow Ensign 19d ago
I think the implication is that non-humanoids are also more likely to be psychologically different, and part of that might involve being less sociable or able to relate to humanoid lifeforms.
But as others have said there are a number of friendly non-humanoid species out there.
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u/Wrath_77 19d ago
That bit about a common ancestor Picard found. It's not a "common ancestor". They were the first intelligent race in the galaxy, and used their humanoid genome to seed life throughout the entire galaxy. Humanoid life is the most common form of intelligent life because they engineered it that way. Almost no humanoid species are the result of natural evolution.
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u/JustaTinyDude 19d ago
The Progenitors were not the first intelligence race in the galaxy. They were the only intelligent race during their existence but the technology the Progenitors used to seed the universe came from an intelligent species that existed before them.
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u/Wrath_77 19d ago
Where is that shown in primary canon? (A source not relegated to Memory Beta).
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u/HawkShark 19d ago
Last season of Discovery revealed this. I'm not the biggest fan of it, but they said they didn't develop the technology it was left over by some race even prior to them.
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u/Mobius1701A 17d ago
Gross; could you explain more? Are they that seasons super special species? Or was it an off hand history tidbit (btw, even they used ancient alien tech)?
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u/HawkShark 17d ago
Last season of Disco was all about unravelling how the progenitors did the seeding of life all over the galaxy. The why was established in 'The Chase'. It's not a bad story arc, but as usual the execution wasn't great. It boils down to the Progenitors using a tech that predated them that could create and modify but not restore life.
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u/Khanahar 19d ago
It is a particularly weird piece of Star Trek lore that "intelligent design" is canon.
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u/ChronoLegion2 19d ago
There’s an old game with a similar premise where precursors seeded the galaxy with life and programmed it to hate all non-seeded life forms on a genetic level. It’s why Centaurians attacked Earth as soon as they learned it was populated
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u/Witty-Ad5743 19d ago
That's an interesting premise. Do you know the name of this game, by chance?
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u/SomethingAboutUsers 19d ago
It's a variation on the Fermi paradox, and popularized somewhat recently as the dark forest theory from the second book of the same name in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Liu Cixin, the first book of which is The Three Body Problem.
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u/ChronoLegion2 19d ago
It’s a very pessimistic view, and there’s lots of weirdness about the books. Like I don’t see scientists committing mass suicide just because particle accelerators are providing finicky results. That must be a Chinese thing
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u/SomethingAboutUsers 19d ago
I always saw the suicides as being somewhat related to them seeing the sophons' countdown the same way that Wang Miao (novel)/Auggie Salazar (tv series) does. It's not just funky results: it's that their entire psyches have been destabilized by seeing some stuff that they truly cannot explain in any rational way.
That said, the edition of the first novel I read was translated to English by the author's son Ken, and there's a note in the extra matter somewhere where he mentions that he believes the best translations are as transparent as possible, meaning that there will always be a bit of an odd feeling to such translations merely because they retain certain cultural and linguistic norms that wouldn't be present in a novel written by an English author. So it could be that, but it's also open for interpretation as all novels usually are.
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u/ChronoLegion2 19d ago
I’ve done some amateur translations to English from another language and have tried to walk a fine line between not stepping away from the author’s language too far and also making the story more relatable to the reader
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u/LunchyPete 19d ago
Maybe the real life finicky results are not yet sufficiently finicky to make scientists freak out in such a manner.
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u/electrical-stomach-z 19d ago
It is definately possible. Raises the question if alot of species out there have a sort of "Sheliak mentality" towards pseudo-homonids.
We see this pattern of reclusive behavior from many non humanoid aliens, including the Tholians.
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u/LunchyPete 19d ago
Consider the possibility if the changelings are the evolved progenitors like some fans have suggested, that they maybe had a similar mindset to the Dominion before they evolved and were a threat to non-humanoid life. So any non-humanoid species that knew of the progenitors avoid their progeny out of fear.
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u/Dangerous_Knowledge9 18d ago
It’s unlikely they are all hiding, they just generally aren’t there…
In TOS Bones remarks ‘in this Galaxy there’s a mathematical probability of three million Earth type planets’. So plausibly the best form on those planets is something humanoid, at least as far as we know (which is a sample size IRL of one…). To add to this, even the Voth, who evolved from Earth dinosaurs, eventually evolved humanoid forms while in Space/the Delta Quadrant, so the evolutionary advantages of humanoid forms seem apparent in Star Trek, even if we rule out the Voth because of their Terran origin.
We also know the Progenitors seeded significant amounts of life in their form, so those three million Earth type planets have a significant humanoid edge - we don’t know where they colonised though there are apocryphal references to the Gamma Quadrant but it’s reasonable to assume they were able to freely colonise much of the Galaxy which helped give humanoids such an edge.
Additionally there are plenty of life forms which aren’t humanoid in Star Trek, we have everything from the Tholians, Xindi Aquatics, and Changelings, to the Medusians, (generic) Energy life forms and Q. The universe is teeming with diverse non-humanoid life who aren’t hiding, sure there must be many species cowering with their own forms of the Fermi Paradox believing any Alien life would mean to destroy them, but it’s apparently a drop in the Galactic ocean.
(For a show focused on the Federation) If they are out there and don’t want to be found, the Federation has no business trying to find them - the Prime Directive applies.
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u/tjernobyl 19d ago
Consider that they might just find humanoid life overwhelming. Given that most humanoid species seem to be reasonably capable of interbreeding, even if the Progenitor origin was not widely known, a non-humanoid species might see all humanoids as a single group ruling the galaxy by sheer incredible numbers.
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u/EvanIsMyName- 19d ago
The Q are non corporeal and don't seem to have much problem interacting with humanoids. It's brought up a few times that they, along with other energy life forms, used to be humanoid and evolved beyond their physical bodies somehow. It's quite plausible to me (in Trek "evolution" terms anyway) that the giant gap in evolutionary sophistication makes interaction with humanoids uninteresting to them.
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u/MissingLink314 19d ago
The aliens are predominantly humanoid/bipedal because that’s easiest for casting, lol.
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19d ago
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u/uequalsw Captain 19d ago
/u/Thin_Piccolo_395, you've commented in our community several times in the last months; almost none of them clear the bar of being diplomatic. Several comments, including this one, complain about things you see as "woke" or "marxist", in ways that are pretty obviously incendiary. I hope you will adjust your behavior in Daystrom going forward; I've enjoyed reading your commentary about Star Trek from the perspective of (I assume) a service member. You've rightly pointed out that many of Star Trek's creators came from military backgrounds, and I myself wish there was more recognition and discussion of that in the Star Trek community -- I'm sure we would find unexpected things drawn from military experience, as well as things that surely were in response or reaction to it, and which ought to be understood in that context.
Please bear in mind the rules of our community if you wish to continue participating in it. Thank you.
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u/Holothuroid Chief Petty Officer 19d ago
If anything it's probably more the other way round. The Ancestor configuration instills some form of kinship and distrust would be the default state of the universe.
However Ariolo are Federation members and Medusans at least close allies.