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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cleon" data-source="post: 6654782" data-attributes="member: 57383">I don't remember anyone specifying it had to be a land dwelling terrestrial organism, it'd be a lot easier if it was floating in water or freefall.Anyhow, I fear we're talking at cross-purposes here. We need to agree on what we mean by 30-foot insect.If it's literally an insect in a taxonomic sense (i.e. a member of the class Hexapoda, or rather Insecta), its evolutionary ancestors would have to originate on Earth and then somehow get transplanted to an extraterrestrial environment were they become the aforementioned ten yard arthropod. Maybe a bunch of ants hitch-hiked a ride on a UFO.You seem to be talking about a class of alien lifeform that just happened to evolve identical biology to earth insects - chitinous exoskeletons, six legs, division into head-thorax-abdomen, tracheal respiration, and so on and so forth.In both the former cases, I hope we can all agree that growing one to 30 feet is, ah, problematic. Insect anatomy is just not compatible with sizes longer than a few inches. I suppose it's theoretically possible if it's an entirely aquatic insect with very, very elongated body. If it's 30 feet long and half an inch wide, at least its trachea would still be able to diffuse oxygen through its tissues. It'd probably be unable to intake enough food through its comparatively tiny mouth, so it'd likely have to feed through its skin - some kind of symbiotic photosynthetic or chemosynthetic bacteria would be a likely solution. It'd be extremely fragile and unsuited for life anywhere with violent weather, let alone predators.However, while such a hypothetical creature may be a "30 foot insect" in a technical sense, it'd look more like a giant Polychaete worm. I'm visualizing a Lamellibrachia luymesi with a half-dozen legs at one end.Then, to make the poor thing's physiology even more implausible, we're talking about making it intelligent. Some kind of communal mind, perhaps, with a lot of these insect-worms networked together. Or maybe they have information-processing symbiotes under their chitin as well as food-producing ones, which allow them to reach sapiency.If we want a 30 foot intelligent alien that, say, looks like a praying mantis as big as a house, I don't see any way it can be an actual "insect" in any real sense. It just looks like one, but its physiology would have to work in very un-insect like ways for it to be viable.</blockquote>

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