Why are aliens always nekkid

Who says they don't? Just because you haven't seen them? I've never seen Brad Pitt poop on screen either, but I'm fairly sure he poops once in a while.

 

The first film to show a toilet was Psycho in 1960, ~70 years after film was invented. The first film to have fart jokes was Blazing Saddles in 1974. If aliens were using pop culture to learn about us, they'd probably think that the GI tract was a relatively recent invention.

 

As I said in another thread, this place always ends up at booze, food, sex, and shit poop.

Edited to add the word "as" which somehow I missed typing. Also edited for the more genteel "poop" as that's what it's called in most of posts about it. But it's still the same old...

 

Did aliens (if they exist) have their own Marquis de Sade?

 

If they did, they don't appear to have brought an copies of his books with them. Still, if the tin foil hat crowd can be relied on, aliens appear to be huge fans of Sade.

 

They might misinterpret it and start covering everything in grass.

 

I'm curious what if anything this guy's workers wear when landscaping. Now we're back to the whole sunscreen conversation.

 

"All in the Family" (Archie Bunker) was, in 1971, the first time a TV show aired the sound of a toilet flushing.

 

The Rape of the A.P.E., by Allan Sherman, defines the six pleasures in life (I may have them out of order, but I know #6 is where it belongs) as

Eat
Drink
Sleep
Shit
Piss
Fuck

Which is strangely close to George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words.

 

Well, writers do sometimes like to deck them in ornate jewellery and nothing else (especially humanoidish female ones, which makes this female grumble about equal time)

I sometimes suspect that it's partly because, if you have a really alien alien, thinking that up was hard enough, thinking up clothing that isn't just human-clothes-in-odd-fabrics is even harder. You have a sentient twenty-legged arachnoid, or worse still something that looks like a prehistoric Hallucigenia (look it up) and the first reaction is "umm... how would you even start???" But if they live in the right climate, they would want some sort of cover...

I also suspect that there's a similar imagination-boggled reaction when one is trying to create plausible alien foods.

 

I thought all aliens were either vegetarian (because any civilization advanced enough to travel the cosmos would be enlightened enough to eschew their boorish taste for animal flesh) or exclusively ate Terran humanoids.

 

Well then, as a group we're right on target!

 

That's an L.A. area code, so they'd better be wearing something...The sun in the 818 is pretty intense!

 

I always thought the original point of clothing was to aid in survival. Maybe an alien wouldn't have a use for clothing if their body was covered in some sort of plating that made them able to withstand natural extremes or certain wounds, unlike humans who are fleshy meat bags that sunburn, get frostbite, and are subjected to a myriad of horrible things like... stubbed toes and hangnails.

 

Still have the apparently-endlessly-fascinating-to-humans matters of how to cook said humanoids (I wonder what the Alpha centauran equivalent of in My Kitchen Rules is?) or what the alien vegetables might think about it...

 

Survival or decorative vanity, which came first?

 

I think nudity may be an enivitability if any adnvanced civilization. Clothing is technology, and as technological beings were always striving to make our technology better and at the same time less intrusive.

I think over time the technology would become indistinguishable from their being. I think they may look naked to us because their “clothing” is too advanced for us to comprehend.

 

Spoken by a man!

No, clothing is all about making us look stylish, whatever style you're following: pretty, smart, sexy, whatever. Woman, especially, have made an art of wearing very uncomfortable items of clothing like corsets as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It's not. Nothing to with natural and everything to do with cultural. (And I'm only thinking of western society. In other societies changing your body for "beauty" purposes is practised since childhood. Like keeping feet small or stretching your neck to the weirdest proportions.)

So, replying to the thread in general, this has nothing to do with survival or technology and everything to do with aesthetics. If naked aliens walked up to me, not even wearing a hat, I'd think they had no sense of fashion at all.
Not joking. I'd think they lacked the ability to pursue beauty for the sake of beauty if they'd go without clothes simply because they didn't need them. Difficult to wrap my mind around that.
From here, I'd quickly extrapolate: lack of aesthetics, what else is lacking? Ethics? Empathy? It would certainly deepen my fear of their otherness.

 

I agree. Even for a guy, show up to a bar in a well tailored suit, or a nothing at all and see which one gets you laid first.

 

Depends on the bar

 

As usual, it was Mark Twain who put it most succinctly: "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."

On a more serious note, I wonder why nobody has pointed out so far that, of all the species of animals on this planet, we're the only one wearing clothes. Every other species seems to have found some way of staying reasonably comfortable without having to resort to clothing. So it's not unreasonable to assume that alien species can also do what 99.9999999% of the species on this planet has been able to do.

 

Yeah, but other than the cockroaches and tardigrades, we're the only ones who have colonized pretty much the whole planet. Alaskan crocodiles weren't hunted into extinction, if you know what I mean.

 

Well, other than dolphins and white mice, anyway.

 

Good point on the watery bits of the world.