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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
Neat... but not necessarily impossible for speculative science to accomplish. An alteration to Venus' orbit... early impact by asteroids carrying the right elements to alter the atmosphere and stabilize it into a waterworld... terraforming... I'm just saying that within the bounds of SF, it is possible.
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Sure. But in the stated case, why bother going through the effort? If you
are going to go through the effort, there are probably better uses for the labor than retconning domed underwater Venusian cities.
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I think alternate realities would be included among the SF concepts that are considered part of SF tropes only because of their long-term acceptance by the genre. Since I think we need a law to include the tropes:
Science Fiction includes various "special concepts" that have been accepted as SF elements, regardless of their actual likelihood or possibility of being proven, such as: Warp drives; psi powers; humanoid aliens; inter-species communications; alternate realities; parallel/alternative universes.
Please to point out any I've missed.
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Time travel, for one. And "alternate realities; parallel/alternative universes". overlap enough to be considered one overall category.
We
can talk about the likelihood of various things. Humanoid aliens aren't all that unlikely, for example, if we assume similar settings will produce similar evolutionary results. There's a branch of theory that
does make that assumption, and postulates that Earth-like worlds with life based on long-chain carbon molecules and DNA might very well produce something human-like. There's a reason humanity evolved and rose to the top of teh food chain here on Earth, and no reason why something similar
shouldn't evolve under similar conditions elsewhere. The alien doesn't
have to be something unlike anything we've seen to exist.
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Dennis