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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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'll buy that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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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Most of the theories I've come across point out that an enormous set of coincidences, lucky breaks and random choices have led to humans developing as they have, and rising to the top of the food chain... it could easily have become any one of a half-dozen other species, or if it was Man, could have looked very different today. But I'll buy the possibility of aliens being humanoid, however slight IMO.
So, if we make some amendments:
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; inter-species communications; alternate realities; time travel.
(Actually, the wording allows for some leeway in the chosen concepts, not specifically stating that they cannot be proven at all, and leaving space for other concepts to be added.)