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Guodzilla
>>216597 (sigh) Well, I guess the thing I'm griping about is when people think of "extraterrestrials," they almost automatically fall into the "Star Trek" trap: eg, green skin, pointy ears, horns or extra (fingers, eyes, etc.) but all essentially humanoid. One really good book I've read is the book "extraterrestrial life," (Or some title like that), illustrated by Adolf Schaller. He proposes the idea that life can possibly exist in MYRIAD different biological setups, from hypergravitational earthlike planets, to gas giants, to even interstellar nebulae. He does it without the pointy ears, green skin, etc. An earthtype planet need not have a sapient race which is humanoid. . .A race could evolve with tentacles that have a cartilage core, or some kind of exoskeleton, or whatever. I just had an idea. If you want to see something about REAL extraterrestrial-type organisms, research the Precambrian Age on earth. There was liquid water, and some very strange lifeforms, with an atmosphere similar to (but MUCH cooler than) that of Venus. The earliest lifeforms were reefbuilding microbes called "stromatolites," which came into being when the earth was "only" 1 1/2 billion years old (There may very likely have been earlier lifeforms, but they left no fossils as we know them). Then came the Vendian and Ediacaran ages, with some WEIRDASS critters, some of which blow sci-fi out of the water.
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