GarbageShoot [he/him]

I think that’s a counterproductive response.

Maybe there’s a rock out there made, by complete chance, in such huge proportion of silicon that it becomes more viable, I don’t give a shit. It was just an aside anyway, pick another based on the same principle if you like. Why an obligate biped? Why this size? Why not a flying creature? Why not a rotationally-symetrical monstrosity? Why not an intelligent species that physically couldn’t really be engineers but happen to live on the same planet as creatures who can? Or who just get contacted by outside life that can? I’m a dipshit who mostly prefers pulp and cosmic horror (read: fantasy) science fiction, so I’m sure someone who knows more could come up with more and better prompts.

I can’t help but notice that you didn’t list a whole lot of traits that would be considered vital to having a fairly human sillhouette. There’s nothing here about obligate bipedalism, for example, or having just two legs in the lower part of the body at all. There’s nothing here about how the forelimbs are articulated, and whether it would look meaningfully like hands or an array of dexterous tendrils or something. And all this gritty realist speculative biology seems out of place when most sci-fi is basically a particular sub-genre of fantasy anyway. Even being generous to the sci-fi writers, supposing the universe works in a fundamentally different way from how ours does (breaking laws of relativity and entropy, commonly), why can’t some ecosystems work out to stretch your imagination of what could be an advanced species? It all seems very narrowly prescriptivist, even beyond the fact that this is fiction to the point of taking negative liberties with the bounds of what is truly realistic.

Edit: idk, it just seems obtuse. Like, “Advanced life can only be carbon-based because being that way affords these benefits” without considering that other models could provide other benefits (I’m sure you know better than I about the use of silicon-based life in speculative biology). And that’s if the subject is addressed at all.

Bernie had a lot of support back in 2020, but he got ratfucked by the entire field moving to ensure that Joe had a clear path to beat him.

You can’t tell in the movie but in the script, all his lines and stage directions are written in greentext.

These are literally reports, what the fuck are you on about?

I think ultimately your problem is that ideas that were normalized to you on just don’t hold up to scrutiny, and even the academic neoliberal consensus on most of these issues is different from what predditors treat as self-evident. Enculturation is like that, and I wish you a speedy recovery.