wtf Cambrian

A brain covered in knives does kinda seem like a sleeper S tier build
- That guy with the mouth 30cm away from the face doesn't care.
- Add a giant eye and you have the zerg overmind.
- A brain covered in knives does kinda seem like a sleeper S tier build

.... and it was all by chance and luck
I'm sure that there are planets all over the galaxy where the same or similar creatures evolved and didn't get wiped out but instead evolved into higher animals.
Our lineage was lucky to go on to create humans because all the other ones got wiped out in the Cambrian for some reason.
If those same creatures had survived, they would have evolved into more unique forms of life and we would have called them aliens.
Funny part is, those same creatures I suggested that might exist in alien worlds might one day run into us and look at us like some kind of weird animal that might have evolved out their own planet's Cambrian extinction event.
- "Bipedal???? WTF?"
  Or simply "They're made of MEAT?"
  
  "They reproduce by doing what? Why? How? Wait almost a whole solar cycle? Give birth? Then they can't take care of themselves? ... How did these beings even survive this long to evolve?"
  
  Made of Meat, a classic.
  
  Oh man, you brought up a good YouTube memory:
  https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg?si=OxzXyIeZ6CicPIM7
  
  “They’re made of MEAT?”
  Now, that was a different story. "Talking meat? You must be joking!"
- The biggest fiction (constrained by budget obviously) of shows like Star Trek is that most of the intelligent creatures we might possibly meet will look almost exactly like us. I don't think even the people coming up with Star Wars aliens have the imagination to get it right. They still base it on what we are limited to thinking up as humans and our own likely narrow understanding of what is life and what is intelligence.
  The second-biggest fiction is that it would be possible for us to coexist on one planet's surface considering our needs when it came to gravity, atmospheric pressure and basic atmospheric composition would be very unlikely to be the same.
  But that would narrow the scope of a lot of sci-fi, so I let it go.
  
  I always felt that humanoid aliens were also a way to get the audience to more easily emotionally connect and treat them as characters. Its hard to portray a truly alien lifeforms with alien behavior like you would find in a speculative evolution fiction art book while also giving them a human understandable emotionally driven narrative and space age tech for the plot of a story. Its easier to relate to blue cat person than to the Blob I guess is my point.
  I really like the comic Humanity Lost for its better representation of alien life in its story. The author really cares about that kind of world building ad im here for it really great stuff.
  
  I always liked the Hooloovoo, from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
  "The Hooloovoo resemble a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue."
  
  i mean it seems to me that aliens are likely to either be completely different from us or remarkably similar, depending on their environment.
  Like look at how things on earth look: stuff in the ocean is either a fish or something completely unique and fucked up, and on land we have a series of ecological niches that reappear across time and location to the point that it's kinda hard to tell the different incarnations apart.
  I don't think it's that unreasonable to expect the odd humanoid alien, we should just also expect a bunch of them to be crabs and slime molds and fish.
- There is a hypothesis that an alien might actually look like a crab. Because life somehow managed to create crab-like creatures from a number of different evolutionary lines. Which shows a certain advantage that seems to be there with this specific form.

Ok but now we have taxes and seasonal depression, so, like, who really won that game?

Everyone was doing weird shit in peaceful mode, just vibing and experimenting, and then that FUCKER on the bottom right turned on PvP. Being festooned with knives is how they said "I'm tryna get these nutrients, don't @ me."

PRE-Cambrian my dude. The Cambrian explosion of life is associated with conventional body plans.

tbf there are some pretty weird looking creatures in the ocean even now. Like, would the giant deep sea Isopods really look that out of place next to stuff like Anomalocaris? We still have plenty of spiky worm shaped things living on the bottom of the ocean. And for the softer side of animals, would things like siphonophores really look that out of place in a lineup of Cambrian fauna, if placed there and shown to someone who wouldnt have the knowledge to recognize what they actually were?

Cambrian seems like heavens design team didnt have an established meta and were just having fun with it. Once the horse design got approved the engineering team got lazy and used it as the base for everything.
- I think the technical term for animals with that horse design is Chordates
  
  Chordata is the third-largest phylum of the animal kingdom (behind only the protostomal phyla Arthropoda and Mollusca) and is also one of the most ancient taxons.
  Seems legit.
  
  Horse design?
  Woah, alien worlds.

Basically what my creations in Spore looked like.

God was overwhelmed with the editor and just kept hitting "randomize".
- "Why did I make the undo button a flood? They're underwater!"

wtf Cambrian
Bunch of blood type: blue-looking mfs.

These are all immensely powerful evolutions. We got the Knifey Tortoiseshell, Cheval De Frisetipede, Sucky Long Mouth Humpback Trilobite and Sabertooth Flatworm. All the greats!

To be fair bottom right ended up an apex predator for a while

Fuck yeah anomalocaris
- I didn't see anyone make puns about it sounding like Kamala Harris. 😤

Look at human mechanical inventions from, say, 1900-1930. Same deal.
- Early flying failures

All of us had ancestors hunted by one or more of those
- I wouldn't as much as want to be in the same sea as one of these.
  
  That kind of attitude is what got us into this mess in the first place!

Leave them be, everyone goes through an experimental phase. They're just working themselves out. Give them time.

hallucigenia my belved

reminder of this YouTube gem: Tribute to anomalocaris

Don't mean to make this all serious but sure you could talk about how god or a designer was just playing around or you could think about how the environment and the selective pressures were different during this period of the planet's history.
- This befote the META became all about efficientely killing everything while wearing armor. This the ptelapsarian world before the spinal catastrophe.
  After that point, you can't just "be yourself", you'll just get ganked. So everyone started putting all their point in attack and defense, variety massively got reduced and everyone became a servitor of Moloch while existing only so that the mindless universe could suffer the pain of its own entropy.
  Guess what I'm saying is we're in the bad place!!
  
  So what you're saying is that power creep and meta chasing ruined the build creativity in the Earth server?

Us much more sensible cephalopods came about at the end of that era and you can see why we kicked those weirdos out of the biosphere.
- The first image are still around tho.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crinoid
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QNbNnbfu4ls
  
  Sure, if you want to call that a crinoid. I call it a genetic mistake.

look like my last creatures from the spore

They look like organs

A time where the ways werent as set as now, biologically speaking.