/fur/ - Furry★

>>50382 (OP)

It's hard to tell. Presumably they might evolve some kind of fur if their planet gets cold.

>>50382 (OP)

Evolution works the same everywhere. So the environment will select which adaptations survive and which do not.

The ultimate challenge is leaving the planet you're on, which requires the mental capacity, physical dexterity, and natural resources needed to escape the pull of gravity.

>Do you guys think, if there is extraterrestrial life, they might be akin to walking, talking beasts?

I hate to break this to you anon but if there were aliens that learned to walk and talk they'd most likely not have fur for very long or look particularly bestial.

Humans used to be much hairier but we lost this overtime because as we got more intelligent we started to see there were superior ways warm ourselves and fur was too inconvenient by comparison. More hair would also invite worse smells and diseases via parasites. It's not surprising to put it into that context that overtime humans became largely hairless.

Animals also largely communicate almost entirely via body language. When they make sounds it's not a language like humans it's more so designed to illicit a reaction like fear. Faces would also not look stiff and uniform like dogs for instance but would also eventually gain a wider range of facial expressions. Stuff like that.

Then there's the question of how intelligent they are specifically. Like there were other species of human that were less intelligent and were eventually either killed off or died off due to small numbers.

If there were sentient aliens their planet would have to be very different than the one we live on for them to not suffer from the same factors that guided our own evolution. (Fluctuating temperatures leading to hairless bodies. Etc). The most you'd probably get are a race of anthropomorphic aliens that kind of look like dogs if you squint that are dumb as a sack of rocks.

>>50383

>if their planet gets cold

colder climates stunt evolution and bio diversity. You get far less species in general.

>>50382 (OP)

Alien life will most likely not resemble anything we see on earth.

>>50394

Time, fucking time. The sheer scale of time compounds that unlikeliness. Our planet has existed for 4 billion years, and yet we've only been capable of radio communication for a century. Considering we reached the milestone of mutually assured destruction 50 years ago and many believe we don't have much time left, it's unbelievably unlikely that we'll ever find an alien civilization that hasn't destroyed itself and is sufficiently developed to make contact. Time is just another dimension, and we are equally as far away from extraterrestrial life in time as we are in space.

>>50394

>The bit with "fur being inconvenient" by comparison to clothing is Intelligent Design; that's not how evolution works

I'm talking about it practically. I'm not saying that humans just decided to get rid of fur one day.

Fur sheds and gets wet. It gets tangled. And parasites live in it. And with humans eventually wearing clothes there was less of a need for it. It can be observed that less and less hair became more of a desirable trait as evidenced by how much hair earlier humans had compared to modern ones. And earlier humans still had less hair than great apes do.

It's the same with how tails would be useful for a creature that predominantly lives in tree branches and needs to balance itself but less so if it mostly stands upright on land.

>If humans had evolved in a cold climate instead of one of the hottest parts of the planet, they would likely still have fur.

This is a lot of ifs. It's unknown if a very cold climate would promote the kind of biodiversity required for such a thing to happen.

>>50401

The most consensus I've seen (a Google search) is that we would overheat if we had fur, because brains and also Africa.

>>50401

Fur isn't an inconvenience for thousands of other species. Assuming it has something to do with sapience because it's associated with a sapient species is nothing more than anthropomorphic bias; naked mole rats aren't particularly smart. Wearing clothing has nothing to do with it, either. It CAN'T because that's not how evolution works. Just because something happens doesn't mean it's a desirable trait: "natural selection" as the solitary driving force behind evolution has been debunked as simplistic and often plain wrong. Sometimes a species will evolve something monumentally useless, for no particular reason, that neither improves nor harms its chances to survive to reproductive age a significant amount.

>>50382 (OP)

they'll look exactly like us but with different skintone and slightly altered facial features, nothing more

>>50406

We sweat. Fur would inhibite our ability to cool off.

>>50418

Horses sweat too

>>50419

Horses have hair, not fur.

I'd say we're much more likely to see furry 'aliens' through some kind of human diaspora through space, either furries created through genetic experimentation (most likely for cheap/free labor or sex) or humans who choose to become furries through gene therapy and pass it on to their children (most likely some furfags like us).

>>50418

Sweating is particular to humans' hunting style. It's not required for sapience, either.

>>50444

>It's an inconvenience to a lot of species, they are just used to it and have no concept of anything else

This is stupid. If it didn't work for them, they would have evolved to have no fur like humans did. You can't claim it was evolved out of humans because it was inconvenient but didn't have out of any other animals just because that would destroy your argument. You're still assuming hairlessness is correlated with developing intelligence, when it is not. Failing to rebut the point about anthropomorphic bias means you're clearly aware that this is something you cannot disprove.

>it can easily be assumed because of that if another animal grew to be intelligent and use tools it would go down the same path

No it can't! That's my point. You can't make any assumptions about how intelligent creatures evolve based on a statistical sample of ONE goddamn species.

>>50418

Sweating isn't necessarily required for sapience, anon.

Just for living in the environment we did, doing what we did.

>>50382 (OP)

I suggest go read the indian Vedas. That's a kind of answer.

>>51745

>Unlike humans, the Avali, rely on liquid ammonia as the primary solvent in their biology

I suppose this could work if they use nitrogen for their metabolic processes instead of oxygen. I'm not a good enough chemist to come up with a glucose-alternative that can be formed by their native planet's plant life, with which they would form a stable food chain.

>>50405

this is gold anon

Yes, there around Five trillion light years away.

>>50405

need sauce

>>51745

i want an avali fursuit

this is just anthropomorphism

Why must we project our fantasies onto the universe at large?

>>50390

>>50401

Climates do not remain stagnant. The Sahara Desert is now barren with extreme temperature swings, ten thousand years ago it was green and temperate. Twenty thousand years ago a vast ice sheet covered most of Northern Europe. 250 million years ago Earth was a toxic swampland barely capable of sustaining life. A lot can change given time.

>>50444

This is all nonsense because humans lost their fur covering before significant hunting ability (homo did not start out as a good hunter!!!) or tool use beyond stone flakes one would use for butchering small game. Human pubic lice diverges from hair/body lice about 3MYA (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2687769). Before that, we only had one type of lice like all other primates. Guess when we started to lose our body hair?

Homo erectus doesn't happen for another million years. When we lost body hair, we were scavengers struggling to eek out a bare existence. Habilis remains in the skeletons of large predators remained common. We were a tiny manlet herbivore who learned how to eat meat (and by meat I mean half-rotted carrion) in australopithecus time. We didn't have claws. We never had claws dating back to the chimpanzee divergence save perhaps the grooming claw that became our big toe. We didn't have controlled fire. We were neither master tool users nor were we particularly vicious in body mass even compared to our ancestors. We were shitty little scavengers who survived by running the fuck away, and if you didn't run fast enough, well, you made a good fossil for future generations.

Read: there is no reason to assume losing body hair over say, learning how to gain greater and more nutritious caloric sources, is responsible for man's current predominance of the Earth. So your opening statement that "(fur's) really useful to R-type creatures that near constantly fend for themselves but humans have tools and can hunt" is incorrect, and notably based on a fallacious misconception of r/K theory repeated often in pop-science shitblogs. Harsh environments evolve K-strategists, not r-strategists, based on the carrying capacity of the ecotype. Plentiful environments generate r-strategies.

>if another animal grew to be intelligent and use tools it would go down the same path

great filter hypothesis repackaged to justify excessive blandness in alien design. If you say so, but in my opinion, we only have a sample size of one to go off of. To claim that all species that therefore developed civilization will go down the same path by virtue of association is anthropocentrism at its most ivory. You're just claiming phenotype follows intelligence and one creates the other. This is the exact type of thinking that stifled earlier generations of anthropologists. There's no reason to assume the direction we went in is any special at all and higher cognitive capacity did not arise for other, more practical matters like eating a richer diet.

I'd figure the furry board would fall for the two biggest fallacies in human-oriented thought.

>>59446

The artist is custapple, tho someone else wrote in the dialogue.

>>50382 (OP)

When discussing extraterrestrial life, it's good to keep in mind that evolving to human-like intelligence is not inevitable, or even worthwhile for most animals. Even relatively smart animals like ravens might be on a plateau because their ways of surviving don't select for higher intelligence past a certain point.

If you expect civilizations of beast-men on other planets, they will probably have to be uplifted by future humans, rather than the trite "convergent evolution" handwave.

>>60237

>Alien furries show up and take away all the humans as mates, each of them being exactly what the human wanted in every way

>You are the only one that gets left behind on an empty planet

Every single time.

>>51745

>they really like cold!

>but Earth for them would be super hot!

And how do they perform physical actions (like running, lifting, or fighting) without producing heat that they themselves would find unbearable?

>>60249

Maybe they're just "cold-blooded".

>>60202

Based space Elmer

>>50382 (OP)

There's probably mechanisms of life out in the cosmos that don't even coincide with our understanding of life.

Ever heard the whole "room full of chimpanzees will eventually make Shakespeare?" Same situation here. With infinite possibilities, it becomes likely there will be a race of extraterrestrial life that would resemble animal life from our current planet.

Just to spite all you fuckers I would hope it's some sort of arthropod or mollusc.

>>60275

>With infinite possibilities, it becomes likely there will be a race of extraterrestrial life that would resemble animal life from our current planet

Yes, this is true. However, infinite possibilities is only rational if you allow for infinite space and infinite time (which, really, are the same thing). So, yes, there might be a race of anthro catgirls somewhere in the Universe. However, they won't be in our galaxy, and not right now. They might evolve in some other galaxy, a hundred billion light years away, a couple trillion years from now. Since there is zero chance that humanity will ever meet them, in practical terms they do not exist.

Just to spite everyone, it would be pretty funny if they're absolutely beautiful but think humans are disgusting, loathe interpersonal contact, reproduce asexually, and have laws against fraternizing with other species the same way we have bestiality laws.

>>60276

I find it pretty heinous that you think human even have minor-intelligence...