This Is What Aliens Might Actually Look Like
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What do real aliens look like? We know that life on Earth is incredibly diverse and exists in the strangest and most extreme places, from blue dragon sea slugs to aye-ayes or chrysomalon snails with shells of iron, or whatever this is supposed to be. Let's use our imagination and real science to travel to three possible worlds, each more alien than the next.

Put on your future science suit and enter the portal to witness wonders never seen before. The Eye of Oculus. This is the red dwarf star, Oculus. Five times smaller than our Sun and a lot less bright. A bit larger than Earth, but orbiting its star 20 times closer, you see the ice hell of the planet Iper. It's tidally locked, so one side experiences a never-ending night and the other an eternal day lit by the star's dim glow.

In the region facing the dim star directly, temperatures are warm and pleasant. The hell of ice has melted into a shallow, black ocean, the eye of Iper. About the size of Europe, barely 200 meters at its deepest point, churned by a never-ending storm where hot air meets the frigid winds from the icy outskirts. But below this inhospitable chaos, we find calm stability, an ecosystem in almost perfect balance. Let's dive in.

Instead of meeting open water, we splash into a floating underwater jungle. We know places like this at home. Kelp forests made from seaweeds up to 65 meters long sheltering countless smaller creatures. On Earth, we get abundant white sunlight, so our plants evolved to be green, absorbing the most useful red wavelengths for photosynthesis and reflecting away the rest. But Oculus shines not nearly as bright, and its dim rays are even further dulled by the storm.

So here, plants are a deep black to make use of the weak infrared leftovers. Which also gives the eye of Iper its striking black color. Over billions of years, the jungle has occupied all possible space in the eye. Its roots extend deep into the seabed mud, anchoring them and providing access to nutrients. They drop their seeds in the few free spaces in the mud. Only death makes room for new life.

Big and streamlined teardrop-shaped creatures push through the dark water. They kind of look like fish.

Just like many sea creatures on Earth, their shape is optimized for the lowest drag when traveling through water. Like underwater cattle, they lazily swim through the forest, grazing on leaves in peace. Suddenly, a patch of strange-looking leaves begins to move and wraps around a distracted grazer, dragging it down into hungry jaws. A predator that's had eons to adapt its camouflage to fool its prey.

But not only by imitating leaves. Both hunter and prey never evolved eyes in this dark underwater murk. Instead, they do battle with sounds and textures. Listen, there's a whole cacophony down here. Countless species are singing to each other, sending warnings or invitations, forming a collective song.

Like the noisy jungles of Earth, except howler monkeys and screaming piers are replaced by chattering seed eaters poking at the mud with snapping pincers, squeaking spike bulbs loaded with poison, and the flailing fins of starfish-shaped grabbers hunting small prey.

Beautiful and unsettling. In this stable and never-changing ecosystem, their music will never end for billions of years. You seem to have been noticed and blind creepers are crawling towards you. You want to explore this while not become part of it, so it's time to leave. The Clouds of Nimbus.

You're immersed in the blinding light of the B-type star, Cairolius, shining hot and blue, orbited by a dozen lava planets burned to a crisp.

But we'll visit the last planet, Nimbus, a gas giant very much like Neptune in size and composition, except there's a lot more water, and seething hot Cairolius showers it with 900 times more light than Neptune. So its atmosphere is warm enough for gigantic white clouds the size of countries to be lofted upwards by titanic warm updrafts rising from the hazy depths.

Millions of years ago and astonishingly quickly, life emerged and evolved inside tiny water droplets deeper down in the planet. Like extremophile microbes on Earth, they found ways of breathing methane and using exotic enzymes to harvest sulfur and nitrogen compounds from the air. As Cairolius grew hotter and brighter, the higher altitudes of Nimbus became habitable and life-spread. Let's dive into the gigantic white clouds to meet it.

Up here live quadrillions of tiny beings, a kind of cloud plankton so small they're carried on the gentlest air currents. The most common type resembles flat, four-legged spiders barely a millimeter wide, tinted yellow by the sulfur they consume.

They gain lift with wispy electrostatic threads thinner than spider silk, pulling on the charge differences between the top and bottom of the cloud oceans. A technique Zistica's crab spiders use to travel great distances on Earth. You're just in time for mating season. Billions of cloud plankton gather to join their threads into huge parachutes that ride updrafts for hundreds of kilometers. Here in the hot heights, they hatch their eggs before their life comes to an end.

Other tiny creatures latch on, most of them predators, looking to feast on fresh younglings. But not all life on Nimbus is tiny. The other way to stay up in the sky forever is to become a living balloon, like the enormous sky whales, taller than a skyscraper, almost completely made of a wafer-thin membrane.

They heat up trapped gases, making them less dense than the air around them, giving them buoyancy. The bigger their gas envelope, the more lift it produces, so sky whales evolved to be as large as possible. Only a lumpy, car-sized spherical bag of organs hangs at its bottom. Heating up all this gas requires a lot of energy, so it's time to feed.

The spherical body opens up, unfolding and lowering a huge sticky net into the white clouds. On Earth, the largest animals to ever exist, blue whales, feed by filtering millions of tiny krill each day. Similarly, the sky whales of Nimbus filter skyplankton out of the clouds. Most is consumed right away and burned in specialized glands to generate heat. The rest is converted into an orange and energy-dense nectar for later.

This nectar is the most valuable resource on Nimbus. Numerous predators are looking for it, but none so hungrily as the frog-sized jet squids, evolutionary cousins of the whales. Several of them trail each sky whale, waiting for it to be distracted or sleepy after a succulent meal.

Jet squids are far less efficient floaters, but they're able to superheat and expel gases in short bursts like a rocket. Like vampiric hummingbirds, their long and pointy beaks try to pierce their prey and lap up some of the nectar inside.

Unlike in the stable I, Iper, life on Nimbus is doomed. B-type stars like Cairolius live for a few hundred million years at most and this time is coming to its end. Soon it will be burning through its fuel at an astounding rate and violently burn our gas giant. Life on Nimbus is only 600 million years old and has barely 10 million years left.

Is this tragic, or is this unique ecosystem lucky to have existed in the first place? Something to ponder as you move on before your jetpack runs out of fuel. A fatal attraction. Ørsted is a Y-class brown dwarf, 13 times more massive than Jupiter and with a magnetic field 60 times stronger. It belongs to the yellow star Sturgeon, which is about to disappear behind Ørsted's shadow.

But you're interested in Monier, one of Ørsted's many moons. It should get as much sunlight as our Earth, but its three-hour orbit around the brown dwarf means its days are extremely short. Gravity here is a mere 5% of Earth's, so the moon can only hold on to a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere that doesn't retain much heat. So its average temperature is far below freezing. As its cold night begins, a chill descends on Monier and dry ice snow falls from the sky.

A green, blue and red aurora illuminates the landscape, made from star plasma caught in Ørsted's magnetic field and striking Mornay's atmosphere. The Sturgeon system was born from a nebula saturated with metals, so iron and lead are abundant.

In this frigid cold, chock full of toxic minerals, life found unique ways to make the best of a bad situation by using ammonia instead of water, which would freeze in the short nights. And by incorporating magnetized minerals and Austerd's magnetic field into its biology. On Earth, species like lobsters or bees have learned to sense magnetic fields, but life on Moneghe takes it to a whole other level.

As Sturgeon rises and its red rays filter through Ørsted's crescent, a yellow glow rushes over the horizon. The snowfall stops and temperatures quickly rise. The ground creaks and multicolored liquids trickle out from fissures all around you. Cryo-volcanism just like on Jupiter's moon Europa. Brittle seeming bundles start to unspool and climb off the ground towards the bright star.

Like arctic flowers on earth sprouting in the short summer, these plants don't have a minute of daytime to waste. Their blossoms are saturated with magnetic minerals, making use of the extreme magnetism and low gravity to levitate, reaching up to a kilometer into the sky, extending the sunset for as long as possible. Don't touch them!

With a loud crack, the skyflower detaches itself from the ground and drifts out of reach. Suddenly, you're surrounded. Hundreds of shiny critters zoom by. They look like ice-skating snails and can circle Moneye faster than the sunset. From their head, they extend two long stalks that are electrically conductive and merge up top. A magnetic kite that drags them along the surface at breathtaking speeds.

The skaters formed a symbiotic relationship with photosynthetic purple microorganisms that live in their shells. These biological solar panels produce sugars that they share with the skaters in exchange for continuous starlight. If the skaters ever stop, they risk their partners freezing and death by starvation.

The harmonic scenery is violently interrupted as the ground splinters open and a spiked metal claw grabs a skater and crushes it. It belongs to an animal that looks like a cross between a sea lion and a beetle. As it devours its prey, it gets covered in pink and sparkly fluids. These ambushers hide in the crystalline ground, spreading an array of electrically sensitive whiskers that they use to detect their prey and strike just as they zoom by. Like living landmines that could be buried everywhere.

Maybe you should end your stroll. The darkness will return soon. It's time to return home. Back home.

Earth. Warm and pleasant. It's good to be home, in the environment you and all other life that's not made up evolved in. But who knows, if you look up at the countless flickering lights, there may be countless strange worlds, home to life stranger than anything you've seen. Scientific speculation is fun, but also useful, giving us ideas about what we should look out for, and

Who knows, maybe in a few thousand years our descendants may actually visit exotic oceans, fly over white clouds the size of continents or pet metallic animals. And maybe, just maybe, even talk to others like us who are also marveling at all the strange life in our universe.

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Welcome to the Kurzgesagt Lab. Let's conduct a few stellar experiments. We'll first add some more mass to this protostar. More, a bit more. Wow, we've just created a blue giant, a star with 10 times the mass of our Sun. Let's now add a couple of million years and see what happens. A supernova, breathtaking. And look, it leaves behind a black hole. Fascinating stuff. Now we record our findings.

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