>>5747582>aliens in sci-fi etcThank you so much for these recommendations!
hehe, I should clarify, I am not utterly hostile to the Star Trek HUMAN BUT I HAVE BROWN FOREHEAD KNOBS LOOK AT MY FACE KNOB I am open to anything, I like Mass Effect 2 very much and all the alien races like the frogspawn Krogan or Turian metal avian bird soldier people, I have not played Endless Space 2 but I did find the Cravers and the Horatio clone race interesting, also the Space Trees I only watched some youtube gameplay of it but I really adore the Endless Space 2 music soundtrack I listen to it so much even in other games sometimes.
I think my preference for all human settings comes from my first encounter with the genre; as a child, I read Asimov Foundation's Edge (this was probably the first sci-fi book I ever read) this setting was affixed in my consciousness so from then onwards I had this notion that all science fiction had to be about space university people hunting for Gaia earth in a thinly veiled geopolitical Soviet Union vs US type setting lol except also psychic robots. And what I liked about that book was the sci fi felt very understated, there are barely any laser guns or face head knobs visible etc which made the fantastical elements far more believable (in fact, at the time I found the notion of a spaceship computer controlled through a PSYCHIC HAND INTERFACE impossible, utterly ridiculous, Asimov did not use the word haptics but everyone knows that computers will only ever be interacted with through keyboards, never tactile psychic hand surfaces?? It is surely impossible??)
A lot of the old sci-fi had an emphasis on psionics, eg Stars Without Number "The Scream" cataclysm is a very good narrative contrivance, and of course 40k psykers, I think this has somewhat receded nowadays. So there is something called synthetic telepathy, which is based upon subvocalisation
https://news.mit.edu/2018/computer-system-transcribes-words-users-speak-silently-0404https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubvocalizationThe basic idea is when you "think" a word, it undetectably moves the muscles of your mouth and jaw - the electric signals are sent, even if the word is not spoken aloud. So with some electromyography setup you can detect these signals and retrieve unspoken words. It made me think a bit of how in St Augustine's Confessions if you could read books without speaking the words aloud, you were some sort of remarkable genius savant sorceror hehe.
https://qz.com/quartzy/1118580/the-beginning-of-silent-reading-was-also-the-beginning-of-an-interior-lifeAnyway that AlterEgo subvocalisation project has gone a bit quiet since 2018 either the accuracy was not high enough or they have become entombed in some militaristic secret application argh
