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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DMScott" data-source="post: 1938520" data-attributes="member: 11734">Sure, but what I'm saying is the conditions that make those combinations better are largely dependent on what other organisms are capable of. And that part of the conditions will be unique for every world.On a relatively small scale that's true, but on a geologic scale it isn't really. You can easily find billions of years of life during which none of them applied.Aliens certainly need to fill some plot purpose in a fictional setting. I'm just saying that in a hard sci-fi setting - where consistency and plausibility are presumably important goals, else why play hard sci-fi? - the humans-in-makeup approach to intelligent aliens is something you have to account for. Transhuman Space does that by making all the "aliens" descended from humans; that's a perfectly plausible hard sci-fi way to do things so long as you propose a reasonable rationale for the modifications and spend some time exploring the ramifications, and TS certainly isn't the first or only setting to do so. Star Trek does not aspire to be hard sci-fi, so they've got a different set of priorities when creating aliens, and rely on a big handwave to explain the similarities (IIRC, that some ancient starfaring species modified the genetic code of primitive life on a bunch of planets so that relatively similar intelligent species would ultimately arise billions of years later), which then is never examined again.At heart, what I'm saying is that using a giant handwave on some basic scientific issue and then never exploring the ramifications is contrary to the hard sci-fi genre. It can work just fine in other forms of sci-fi, there's no law that says all sci-fi must be hard.</blockquote>

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