Body plan of a 4D human-analog?

Question

I am attempting to design aliens that live in a universe with a 4+1 space-time--i.e., a universe with four orthogonal spatial dimensions, rather than three, in addition to a fifth time dimension. In this universe, gravity follows an inverse cube law rather than an inverse square law, but it still results in large blobs of solid matter being pulled into (hyper)spheroidal planet shapes. 4D planets, however, have 3D hyperplanar surfaces, not 2D planar surfaces like planets in our universe. While 4D space comes with an array of other interesting features as well (like having an extra Platonic solid, knots made out of sheets instead of strings, and two independent components of angular momentum), it is the 3D nature of planetary surfaces that is most relevant here, as that dictates the geometry of limbs designed to contact and move over them.

Now, to state the obvious as background: humans have two legs, and two arms, derived from creatures that have 4 legs. In 3D space, standing on two legs is unstable, but it is (obviously) feasible to maintain balance on the free axis with active neurological control. There are, however, no creatures which get around on only one leg (modulo the occasional bird that can lock its joints to stand on one leg, nothing actually locomotes with one).

4 legs is a good number for an ancestral creature in 3-space, because in 3-space you need 3 points of contact to maintain stability, and having 4 legs allows you to move one at a time while keeping three points of contact on the ground. Also, having an even number of legs permits bilateral symmetry. Also due to symmetry considerations, we don't see any 3-legged, one-armed animals; having three legs would result in greater stability than two, but Earthling tetrapods that re-purpose some of their limbs as not-legs invariably do so in pairs.

Moving up into 4-space, you need four points of contact on a hyperplanar ground for stability; standing on three legs is as unstable as standing on two legs in 3-space, and standing on two legs in 4-space is as unstable as balancing on one leg in 3-space. Thus, it would seem unlikely for a 4D sophont to have only two legs (and definitely not just one!).

However, while we can reasonably exclude one-legged and two-legged/two-armed body plans for the aforementioned stability reasons, it is not so obvious what limb arrangements would be reasonable, particularly since adding an extra dimension gives you more directions for limbs to stick out from a single body section (e.g., a shoulder girdle or hip girdle analog).

So: Does it make the most sense to attach only two bilaterally symmetric limbs to each body segment/shoulder girdle/hip girdle? Or, are there higher-order symmetries possible for limb arrangements?

Answer 1

To me, one body plan is by far the most likely: 6 limbs in a triangular prism.

To see why, think of the earliest land-dwelling, limbed animals to evolve on Earth. I'm imagining something like a wide-legged lizard. It's low to the ground; effectively its entire body is in a 2D plane. And this makes sense, since opposing gravity takes work, and evolutionary pressure hadn't yet forced creatures to do that work. It has a head, and it wouldn't be advantageous for its limbs to be moving around its head all the time, so it keeps its limbs along the orthogonal axis, 2 on each side (one on each side would be below the minimum number required for stability, as you mentioned in the question). Thus, 4 legs total.

This, fundamentally, is why bilateral symmetry developed on Earth, and not trilateral symmetry. Imagine that lizard having 3 legs: how would it place them around its body without being off-balance when its head is in the plane of the Earth? This logic is important, because, as we'll see, it generalizes simply to 4+1-dimensional space.

Imagine an early land-dwelling animal on our hyper-Earth. Its body crawls along the hyperplane because supporting itself against gravity is hard. For stability, it splays its limbs to the sides of the axis containing its head. The minimum number of limbs it could have is 3, because that spans the plane perpendicular to its head along the ground. But, in analogy with how 2 was the technical, unstable minimum for our proto-lizard, we'd really expect 2 sets of limbs along the spine. Thus, in our case, 6 limbs total: 3 hind limbs and 3 front limbs. I want to stress that trilateral symmetry perpendicular to the spine isn't a problem, because the issues with trilateral symmetry on Earth don't apply on hyper-Earth.

So let's fast-forward the evolutionary clock and ask about hyper-people. I think it stands to reason that they would manipulate objects with their 3 forelegs and walk on their 3 hind-legs. To visualize them walking, it might help to form an analogy with the way people walk on Earth. Our 2 legs are always in the positions of 2 vertices of a triangle, and when we step forward, we change which vertex is missing. This is always unstable due to the missing vertex, but we use momentum to keep our balance. Similarly, the 3 legs of the hyper-humans always form 3 of the vertices of a tetrahedron. Don't actually try to picture it; in 3D, the legs will seem to pass through each other, and it's very confusing to think about.

But suffice it to say, this 3-and-3-limb body plan seems the most logical. Of course, extra legs are always doable, like a 4-and-4 version. This is in analogy to animals with more than 4 legs on Earth, like insects. However, I think I've shown that 6 limbs is, in many ways, the default in 4 spacial dimensions.

Answer 2

Having seen it, I am fairly convinced by Gilad M's answer. However, I think the reasoning can be clarified and expanded on.

So, we start out imagining the simplest creature that could crawl out of the sea onto land and stand up. It will "want" to keep its center of mass low, and span the (hyper)plane for stability. If you zoom in on one limb attachment section of a 3D tetrapod (i.e., the shoulder girdle or hip girdle), you have the major axis of the animal (the spine) defining one dimension of the plane, and then two limbs, providing two points of contact with the ground, defining a second axis; the third point of contact with the ground is provided by something located elsewhere along the spinal axis. That third contact point can be expected to be provided by another pair of limbs, rather than a single limb, since having 4 total permits one to move while maintaining 3-point stability--thus, you end up with matched pairs of limbs. Additionally, since the pairs of limbs do not span the plane by themselves, they also serve as a rotational axis about which the spine can pivot, so 3D tetrapods can stand up. In 3D, if you add additional limbs on the same body segment, you loose the ability for the body to pivot around those limbs--see, e.g., radially symmetric creatures like seastars (flat) or sea cucumbers (elongated), or cephalopods. There is thus no way for such a creature to transition from laying with its primary body axis parallel to the ground to standing with its primary axis perpendicular to the ground.

Moving up to 4D, a primitive creature will still "want" to remain low to the ground, and span the hyperplane for stability. In order to get that static stability, we need at least four points of contact with the ground--plus one to permit movement. However, there are far more different options for how limbs might be arranged. For an axially extended creature (something with a linear spine that can lay down or stand up), it is clear that one will need at least two different limb attachment points, at opposite ends of the spine, to support the entire length of the spine; otherwise, a single limb group would have to exert a lot of torque to support a cantilevered body; one could perhaps imagine something like a 5-legged theropod with its single hip girdle in the middle and the body balanced across it, but that is both not a primitive-looking condition (nothing on our 3D world came out of the ocean balanced on a single limb girdle, despite bipedalism later evolving multiple times), and doesn't lend itself to evolving into something with distinct sets of arms and legs--i.e., it's not very good for a "human-analog". In addition, we should expect each limb girdle to have at least two limbs attached to it, just as in 3D--if there were only one, then when it was that limb's turn to move, the cantilevered body would bee unsupported, and you would end up with a 3-legged-dog situation.

If each limb girdle still has only two limbs attached, then three such girdles would be required, resulting in a six-limbed basal animal, which could raise its front limbs in a direct analog of the 3D mantoid / centauroid body plan, resulting a 4-legged, 2-armed creature. Such a creature would be less stable than a 3D centauroid, as it would not be able to span the surface with the three remaining legs while moving one, but more stable than a 3D biped.

However, it is possible for a primitive 4D tetrapod-analog to have an arbitrarily large number of limbs attached to a single limb girdle, much like radially symmetric 3D creatures, without losing the ability to hinge the spine. The reason for this hinges (pun intended) on the fact that rotations (in space of any dimensionality) do not fundamentally occur around axes, but rather in planes. The utility of linear axes to describe 3D rotations is a 3D-specific artifact of the fact that selecting a rotation plane leaves a single unique perpendicular vector left over to span the space. Radially-arranged limbs on a 4D creature, however, can span a single 2D plane with their attachment points, leaving a second plane containing the spine free to permit rotation of the spine around that set of limbs (hence the (geometric, if not evo-devo) plausibility of the aforementioned 5-legged theropod).

Thus, since we can attach three or more limbs to a single girdle, it is not in fact necessary to adopt the centaur-analog body plan with three limb girdles--which is convenient, as a 4D human-analog with only two sets of limbs is certainly more human-ish than a centauroid! In fact, we can achieve the minimum limb set for statically stable locomotion of an axially-extended creature (5 limbs grouped at least in pairs) with one three-limb set and one two-limb set. Such a creature could stand up, hinging its spin from horizontal to vertical around the 3-limb girdle, to free up 2 arms while remaining as dynamically stable on 3 legs as a 3D human is on 2. This is, geometrically at least, a perfectly plausible body plan, and results in an unusually high degree of freedom for the joint between the spine and the arm girdle. If a consistent symmetry type is to be maintained along the full length of the body, however, that would dictate a 3-leg, 3-arm arrangement, with full trilateral symmetry. This gets us to the basic body plan proposed by Gilad M.

So, to directly answer the question: No, it does not make the most sense to remain restricted to pairs of limbs, thus dictating 3 limb sets total; and yes, arbitrary numbers of limbs with high radial symmetry can in principle be supported on each limb girdle of a 4D creature.

Moving into the realm of greater speculation based on non-purely-geometric arguments, however, the 3+3 hexapod arrangement may or may not actually be optimal. After all, there are no trilaterally symmetric organisms in our world, and very few quadrilaterally symmetric ones. The larger degree of attachment available between radial segments that meet along 3D cell boundaries rather than 2D cross-sectional surfaces may significantly change whatever considerations lead Earthly evolution to favor 5+ symmetries, thus making trilaterally symmetric 4D "humans" perfectly plausible, but as this is well outside the realm of simple arguments to be made about hinging structures, how exactly that would impact 4D creature development is not nearly as obvious. Perhaps the optimal 4D human-analog is actually a ten-limbed, pentalaterally symmetric creature!

Answer 3

In geometry, a tetrahedron is made by extending a single point from the center of a triangle into the new dimension. A cube is made by stretching a surface into the new dimension. That's why those two shapes can be continued into all of the higher dimensions. More complex animals follow the cube-generation algorithm, not the tetrahedron algorithm.

Thus, I'm going to suggest that such an animal would have clusters of 4-limb segments, in sequence, the same way we have clusters of 2-limb segments.

The primary characteristic of animals is that we move. Anything that moves faster than a starfish has two axis of organization: that which resists gravity (Z) and that which is in line with our direction of travel (Y). The direction of travel winds up being a convenient path for spines, neurology, and digestive systems -- things we only need one of. Chordata then spread limbs in the third direction (X) for stability.

Note that, in humans, we have managed to use advanced neurology (reaction speed, allowing better balance) to line up much of our biology with the gravitational axis, but that is a very recent development.

A 4-space animal will still have Z and Y, but then will have two un-aligned dimensions to stabilize against, X and W. I propose that they would extend pairs in both directions.

Looking at the animal in 3-space, you wouldn't see the limbs, any more than you see the limbs of a horse if you split it along the Z/Y plane.

As a further complication, chordata have specialized the limbs along the Y axis. 4-space animals may very well specialize along the X axis, creating more spindly limbs (for instance) along the W axis. Alternately, they might have X-limbs that branch in the W direction, the same way our feet are duplicated X-ward, but extend Y-ward.

As a side note, you probably should know that there are no stable orbits in 4-space. Planets wouldn't form around stars. Greg Egan got around this in Diaspora by saying that the Strong and Weak nuclear force also works differently, so the creatures populate the surface of matter clumps that we would think of as stars.

Answer 4

You can still walk on 2 feet as long a gravity exists.

Locomotion, no matter how many dimensions you have, requires only one appendage to anchor you to the ground and another appendage that you can lift and freely swing. The "shape" of your 1 planted foot becomes more complex as you add dimensions, but will always remain doable. The big difference is how many directions we can "walk" in. Because gravity pulls all matter inward, it means that your planet will have a "flat" surface at a more or less fixed distance from the center of mass. That means there will still be a single "up" and "down" to lift your feet away from and come down to make contact with the ground, but instead of being able to turn in 2-dimentions to walk along the planet's surface you can turn and walk in 3 dimensions by taking a 4 dimensional footstep.

From our perspective, it would be kind of like being able to walk around with the bottoms of your feet contacting a solid volume of a 3d ground surface with thier body extending "up" into the 4th unseen direction where the solid ground does not exist, and the ground extending "down" towards the center of gravity. They would lift one foot out of the volume where it contacts the surface and then place it back down in another volume of the solid to create friction and forward locomotion.