Our World and Its Aliens

Whenever we try to imagine science-fictional aliens, many times we find ourselves looking at life forms on our own planet. They’re so numerous and so varied and so very different from us, especially as we get away from mammals and the general run of large or largeish land critters and into the kinds of life that exist in environments we can’t ourselves survive in: depths of the ocean, volcanic calderas, drops of water or tiny cracks in rocks or…

But many times we circle back to the more compre...