Scientific names for alien species

As far as I know, Halo is the only franchise to seriously explore this. Aliens wouldn’t have any relation to any terrestrial life, so how exactly would that work?

Well the binominal nomenclature thing would still be doable, albeit with heavy research needed into what relevant traits should be emphasized (location for starters)

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Feb 25th 2023 at 12:00:54 PM

I imagine you'd need to add a level above Kingdom to represent the different origins of their various native ecosystems.

And if you're dealing with a Panspermia class situation an additional one so you have a level representing the specific event of abiogenesis (assuming there are multiple instances) and another to represent the local system. Possibly multiples if their a nested hierarchies.

The Kingdom/Phylum/Class/etc hierarchy is largely outdated, but otherwise you're right - extraterrestrial organisms would need their own entirely unique phylogenetic tree, and panspermia would only make them slightly closer together.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Feb 26th 2023 at 8:06:19 PM

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

One would extend the Real Life biological taxonomy system to these alien species, just like it was lately extended to viruses.

If your lifeforms arose differently from Earth's, then you'd probably insert a new taxonomic level above "realm" and "domain" to cover it. In panspermia cases where your alien species has affinity to Earth based life (or the other way around) it would be classified under Earth-based life.

The exact words used are mostly up to the researcher's preferences. I don't think there is much of a convention, here.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Once in a discussion with Isaac Arthur, I proposed the term "Genesis" as a hypothetical taxon. Basically, it would be a taxon for all biological life that shares a common ancestor.

For example, let's say we discover alien life on Europa. After some research, we discover that that panspermia occurred and Earth life and Europan life share a common ancestor. Then we'd share a Genesis.

Conversely, let's say we later discover life on an exoplanet and determine that there's no way panspermia occurred. In this case, we can then determine that the alien lifeforms are a different Genesis than Earth life.

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Ruling out panspermia, an alien world's life would essentially be a new tree of life. For example, alien animals on this world would technically not be part of Kingdom Animalia. Instead, there'd be something like a "Kingdom Alien Animalia", creatures that, through convergent evolution, are the alien world's equivalent of animals, but that evolved completely separately from Earth's animal life.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

The panspermia hypothesis is interesting for that idea. Like many of the sapient races in Star Trek being called humanoids (originally since they look similar to humans, later because they in fact share a common ancestor.

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If we assume that all laws of nature work the same in all places in our universe, that would also apply on the evolution of living species. So we could maybe really just take the Earth taxonomic system and apply it there. This assumes nevertheless that nothing really crosses categories...

And for the planet of origin: that could maybe become something like a third part of the name. A short, indicative syllable or designation number of the planet.

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