Deflation stories

BTW, have you seen my recent journal entry on dA addressed to pneumaticchick about inflatable people who function like the way they're described in the Balloon Girls stories? I'm playing with that a bit.

If i put my SF fan hat on for a second, i have to agree - humanoids are definitely improbable in my opinion and there are other organisms found on this planet which probably have many representatives elsewhere in the Universe, but they're more likely to be tree-like, sea urchin-like, worm-like and so on, although there are probably organisms with much more complex shapes which are unimaginably different from anything on Earth.

However, and this goes very much against the grain of my general thoughts about this kind of thing, on a planet with a substantially accessible solid surface, it's not entirely impossible that convergent evolution would lead to humanoids because there are known precedents of similar-looking organisms here suited to particular niches. Well-known examples include Tasmanian wolves and placental wolves, loads of flower-like animals, brachiopods and bivalves (and goose barnacles come to think of it) and so on. In this case, we are at least talking about an animal with totally different internal anatomy than a human. One of the most improbable things about humans, i think, is that we're vertebrates. Vertebrates are so far as i know the only living things on this planet with hard internal skeletons which aid movement - everything else with a hard endoskeleton has it to anchor it in place and prevent movement.

Just to pursue this digression for slightly longer, and i will get back to the point, one of my "worlds" has a Galaxy rich in intelligent life, and simply because there are so many hundreds of millions of such planets (in the scenario i imagined), by sheer chance there exists one single other humanoid species which is used by a sort of "Galactic Federation" to form delegations to visit Earth so that we can deal psychologically with the existence of ETs.

Now (sorry about this - i know it was a bit off-topic), if i then transfer that idea to a Galaxy rich in intelligent life whereof there is one other humanoid species which happens to be inflatable, there seem to be possible stories there, e.g. the Federation sends them for first contact or uses them to infiltrate human society and spy on us. So yes, it's really implausible but it can be made to work, and in particular the idea of alien inflated spies could easily be made to work, i think - there's a secret service which tracks them down and tries to puncture them or something, or they test everyone by pricking them with a pin and seeing if they pop.

Some characteristics are arbitrary and problems are solved in various ways.  Whereas there's a reason why something living in the atmosphere of a gas giant might be inflatable, there may not be a reason why we are largely solid inside rather than hollow and thin-skinned.  There has already been a period when life here was dominated by thin-skinned organisms supported hydraulically.  It didn't work out, but if you look a little later there are all sorts of body plans which have disappeared, succeeded or have only left a few species, partly due to luck.  For instance, there are now eight known species of priapulid but that seems to have been the dominant phylum in the early Cambrian, and there is only one possible example of a chordate along with other unique examples.  There's often no particular reason more than chance why one body plan succeeds, although there sometimes is.  I'm guessing what happened was that something evolved teeth and went round puncturing everything and eating it, and in fact i think that's an accepted hypothesis among palaeontologists about why they disappeared.

Ah, i see where you're coming from and in fact in what i was imagining over on dA, it does have a function. Just as adipose tissue in real animals is an energy store, i imagined the gas inside inflated people was there for a couple of reasons: as raw material for food as with photosynthesis (i.e. carbon dioxide and water vapour to be made into carbohydrate), as oxygen for respiration or as water separated through an electrolysis-like process into hydrogen for lift and oxygen for respiration. Propulsion and defence (flaming jets of hydrogen for instance!) would be other possible functions. However, biology is not completely deterministic and you can't get anywhere at all from a starting position just because it would be an advantage to do so. For instance, snakes have hard transparent covers over their eyes which protect them from dust and desiccation but mammals and birds have to blink constantly and have very vulnerable eyes because we have no apparent way to reach that situation without a problem emerging (e.g. permanently closed opaque eyelids and therefore blindness), and there are practically no green mammals even though that would seem to be good camouflage. So it doesn't always happen.

Also, and this kind of brings us full circle, one situation where apparently expensive but functionless features do develop is for mating displays. Antlers and peacock tails, for example, are sort of "conspicuous consumption": they're saying "I am so incredibly healthy and energetic that i can afford to waste resources on this ostentatious and pointless display", which is then far from pointless because it leads the animal to pass on its genes. So maybe inflation could serve the same purpose: "I am so incredibly fit that i can spend all my time inflated and still function". It would also make the animal bigger, which would get them noticed and be a good defence, as with the self-inflating toads which really exist, and of course pufferfish (although that's to make them difficult to swallow).

So maybe there are aliens out there for whom inflation fetishism is perfectly normal!

This is true.  However, suppose they come to Earth and want to give us pleasure by inflating us?  There's a cheesy sci-fi B movie script right there!

Limbs make sense, and they might even need to bend in the same places so they can handle things.  There's always the get-out clause of deciding they're not aliens after all but made in a factory.  Maybe it's cheaper to use them instead of human labour because they're easier to transport, can be stowed away after deflation and wouldn't need to eat much.