As “mostly harmless” (Adams 1992).
Though I fear that present-day alien observers might decide it is necessary to revise that classification (or at least revise it with respect to one particularly pernicious Earth lifeform).
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(I think this is an interesting topic to ponder, though I admit I find the thread as is hard to read, so respectfully, I would ask @moderators to review it and consider moving off-topic posts to perhaps another thread.)
I grew up reading Ray Bradbury. I think him brilliantly prophetic, given that so many of the technologies he described, particularly in his short stories, have now been produced in some way some seventy years later. With that in mind, I cannot help but be shaped by his short stories that include aliens and other planets and humans’ effects and interactions to/with them.
From that perspective, the aliens would categorize life forms on earth by rain withstanding and not rain withstanding. It is an interesting way to look at it. I remember being haunted by one of his short stories, “The Long Rain” wherein plants grew over the body of a man quickly. Maybe they would categorize plants by growth rate.
They also assuredly would categorize humans as invasive and extremely dangerous because of the pathogens we carry. (As I recall, the Martian Chronicles deals with this, which is so forward thinking considering Bradbury penned it in maybe 1950?)
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i look forward to adopting whatever the alien system is because honestly humans are terrible at this,
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Unless the alien system is worse.
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oh jeez true. i am imagining a Vogon classification system for instance.
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how would humans classify alien lifeforms?
- interesting / not interesting
- useful / not useful
- dangerous / not dangerous
- valuable / not valuable
- edible / not edible
- etc.
Isn’t that what iNaturalist is striving for? 
Given that they allegedly speak aUI, they would presumably classify according to semantic primes. If that lexicon has been added to iNaturalist, we could get some clues from the existing names.
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In order for aliens to reach earth, they’d have to be intelligent. So they’d classify things based on evolutionary relationships just like we do.
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Wildly, I approached this (because of the Bradbury influence) as if the humans traveled to the aliens’ planets, because of course that is how Bradbury wrote it, that humans were forced to leave Earth and colonize other planets due to the consequences of their own actions.
This is why I think aliens would consider humans an invasive species. In The Martian Chronicles, which is a collection of short stories tied together by a narrative, the chicken pox the humans carry nearly wipes out the Martians, which of course reminded me of uncontacted peoples and the perils they face.
Perhaps you don’t quite take the point.
In this scenario, humans are an invasive species, much as they are when they attempt to approach uncontacted peoples (who are themselves other humans). There are very real dangers in these scenarios in that we carry pathogens to which uncontacted peoples (and conceivably aliens) do not have immunities.
These immunological differences are one very good reason why uncontacted peoples like the Sentinelese and Huaorani are well within their rights to not want outsiders to approach.
So too aliens would be within their rights to not want humans, even those wishing to be colonizers, to approach.
A bomb, regardless of who makes it, is not at all a solution and not at all what this thread is about.
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Thank you, I’ll watch that later.
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humans aren;t inherently invasive. Colonialism, and certain other similar social entities, act invasive.
I actually think an alien species that has traveled to earth probably has seen multiple separate life genesises in different places, or else panspermia from very base level microorganisms. So i think form and function, and evolutionary convergence into important forms and traits, might matter to them more than trying to create phylogenetic trees. But i;ve also got my own bias around that, and after all they are aliens so who knows.
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No, sorry, I meant in my Bradbury-inspired scenario wherein the humans travel to other planets and encounter the aliens on their own planets, the humans arriving with the goal of colonizing said planets. In that scenario, the humans are invasive, and Bradbury wrote out the perils of invasive species brilliantly in The Martian Chronicles.
I guess if the aliens arrived here, the situation would be reversed.
They could bring additional viruses or bacteria that could impact in untold ways. For better perhaps?
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If they can travel here they have the tech to do genetic sequencing, and they probably group species into clades with a common ancestor, not too differently form how we do it, but without the polyphyletic groups
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Ok, I’ve noticed a lot of the responses have been centered around how aliens would classify Earth organisms if they had superior technology and could travel to Earth. I thought most of them were spot on.
Now I’ve got an interesting question. Supposed the aliens were less advanced than us. Like about 200 years or so less advanced. How do you all think they would classify Earth life then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linnaean_taxonomy is the only real life example of an intelligent civilization a bit more than 200 years less advanced than us classifying life, so I think this is a good starting point, but I do not believe a civilization less advanced than us would become aware of earth life
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Well even if they didn’t actually come into contact with earthblife, how would they classify it? Let’s maybe assume that the aliens have a very different physiology than us.
yes i could imagine humans being invasive in that setting but i am guessing that would also be an extension of colonialism… unless we are very different by then but equally problematic.
but clearly any species that advanced would be lumpers not splitters and wise pragmatists not taxonomic purists 
I think they might do as we have done, and start with what is similar and dissimilar to them.
We classify things by skin covering (fur, scales, feathers, etc), color, presence or absence and location of skeletal structure, etc.
Now imagine an alien that comes from a planet where some species float in the atmosphere and at different heights and others are pushed to the planet’s surface by the weight of their planet’s gravity, some merely so they trod on the surface as we do but others so they are prostrated and perhaps even flattened by gravity.
Might those aliens think worms and caterpillars are held to our earths’s surface the same way otherwise they would be upright? (They might even observe inchworms struggling to reach upward.) Might they then be surprised by butterflies and moths?
There are vast untolds, either to imagine or discover, in the universe.
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It’s a thought experiment, not meant to be taken as real-world hypotheses about aliens, which might or might not exist. It allows one to think through our assumptions and other possible perspectives on what we know or think we know and might help sharpen one’s critical thinking skills. A lot of science fiction uses “what if” scenarios.
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