Aliens

Humanoid is more likely than anything else because as far as we can tell, only earth like planets can support life and the humanoid body plans seems to be the ideal for intelligent life.

>humanoid body plans seems to be the ideal for intelligent life
We are humanoid because all large landborne animals are quadrupedal, and tool making requires a pair of limbs not used for walking. On a world where land animals evolved 3 or more pairs of legs, being humanoid wouldn't be necessary for development of sentience.

However alien the writer and designers feel like, kinda depends on story tone too, "Rubber Forehead" and "Green Human, Blue Human, Outright Human with a different name" is fine for shit where interaction is supposed to be positive and shit is just supposed to be cool and fun and it is important the audience can actually connect even with the "Alien" characters, For eldritch and gritty stuff it is generally better to go for the more eldritch/strange and off-putting designs.

A sapient alien capable of interacting with life on other planets would, at bare minimum, need appendages that can reliably manipulate tools in order to build spaceships and work levers or buttons. Tentacles are a maybe but paws and hooves are right the fuck out.

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Anything is good, as long as humans can fuck it.

Like the worms in Worm? Good taste.

I've never seen a good alien design that wasn't just an insect, reptile, or marine life. It turns out the human brain can't comprehend the incomprehensible. That one glitched-out gif of the frog is the best representation of an eldritch entity I've ever seen, though.

Going to say my favorites are Zorak, the Irkens, and the cherubs from that one webcomic.

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this is implying that a third set of legs on a land animal isn't so taxing on the metabolism that it is out competed by just two sets thereby bringing the evolution in sync with what we see on Earth. If 6 legs worked on an Earth-like planet even just enough to form a niche we would have seen it.

Explain arthropods.

Depends on local conditions.
Picture here is for something that lives under 2 or 3 gee. Mesklinites from "Mission of Gravity" evolved under 400 to 600 gee and were built like centipedes. Their pincers worked fine as manipulators.

Or consider the Horse Show we can't mention here. All 3 varieties are supposed to be closely related, can marry and have viable offspring. But 2 types are quadrupeds and the 3rd has 6 limbs. Think of how vast the genetic differences must be and how many millions of years previously the evolutionary branches must have split.

Octopuses are supposed to be smart and certainly do not lack in ability to manipulate their environment. They're not likely to build a civilization but our own ancestors were just animals for the longest time and our nearest relatives are still animals. We were a fluke, driven to intelligence by ecological changes, a population bottleneck, and some dumb luck.

In SF, if humans go extinct, something else eventually evolves to fill the empty niches. But would intelligence evolve a 2nd time on Earth? I'm aware of no concensus.

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Here's a Mesklinite, courtesy of Wayne Barlowe, an artist noted for painting "plausible" aliens.
See "Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestials" or "Dougal Dixon's "After Man" before jumping to conclusions.

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