Why our first aliens were just humans in different clothes
In short: Before the era of CGI monsters and tentacled horrors, our first literary encounters with extraterrestrials were remarkably mundane. Because humanity lacked a scientific framework for non-human origins, early writers simply imagined aliens as people with different cultures, habits, or slightly different physical proportions.
The evolution of extraterrestrial depiction is inextricably linked to the history of science. Early astronomy shifted the view of celestial bodies from divine lights to physical objects, leading to the assumption that these objects could be inhabited. However, without a theory for human origins, authors defaulted to anthropomorphism. In works like Voltaire's Micromégas (1752), people from Saturn were depicted as humans of higher proportions, while others, such as those in Johannes Kepler's Somnium (1634) and Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), imagined 'selenites' that differed from humanity only in their social habits.
A massive shift occurred in 1859 with Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. By introducing the theory of evolution, Darwin provided a rationale for non-humanoid life. Authors began imagining creatures shaped by different environmental pressures, leading to the first 'genuinely alien' lifeforms. Camille Flammarion's works in the late 19th century introduced sentient trees and silicon-based life, while H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) famously utilized Darwinian evolution to create octopean Martians that served as apex predators.
The 20th century saw a diversification of tropes, from the 'little grey man' archetype popularized by the 1961 Barney and Betty Hill incident to the diverse ecosystems of Stanley G. Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey (1934). While pulp magazines often relied on binary morality—where reptilian aliens were villains and birdlike ones were heroes—modern cinema and CGI have liberated designers from the constraints of practical costumes, allowing for the exploration of intelligence levels that are completely incomparable to our own.
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