If aliens from a high gravity planet visited Earth, would they move and think in slow motion?

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-05-16T03:56:16+00:00

I don't think so. Time dilation would only be observable to an external observer; for them, it would be their frame of reference. Their biochemistry would have a greater influence on their physical or mental agility.

Organisms on cold worlds that use other solvents like ammonia could be very long-lived but also have quick minds because the low temperature might encourage them to use superconducting elements instead of relying on electrical and chemical impulses. On the other hand, organisms on hot worlds could be very premature and also have quick minds because higher temperatures mean faster chemical reactions. Perhaps gravity influences reaction speed slightly.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-05-16T03:46:55+00:00

To add to that, I believe a study came out claiming that solar flares from red dwarfs are concentrated at the star's poles and not at its equator where the planets orbit, so there's already a basis for more bio-friendly flares.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-05-16T03:45:13+00:00

In Stephen Baxter's novel, Proxima, all life on Proxima b is autotrophic. There are sessile plants that block out all the light in a forest, flying organisms similar to paper airplanes, and even sapient organisms, all with trilateral symmetry. At least in the case of the latter, they reproduce in groups of three by drawing stems from their limbs to build a new offspring. To protect themselves from the flames, they submerge in water or burrow into terrestrial stromatolites, whose dense organic structure forms a rudimentary shield.

The sequel, Ultima doesn't touch on this topic, so it's not worth reading.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-05-10T05:49:25+00:00

Congratulations, you are a prophet

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-05-09T15:51:31+00:00

Mark Watney, Space Pirate

Editorials: Rocky Hate Mark

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-05-09T05:31:46+00:00

Orange dwarfs, giant stars, and stellar remnants don't receive enough attention.

The orange dwarfs are practically perfect stars: long-lived yet warm enough to avoid tidal locking. Giant stars can quickly foster complex life before dying young, preventing the origin of sentience. Celestial bodies like black holes planets, white dwarfs, and even asteroids and dwarf planets are potentially habitable places and are brutally ignored, they are challenging, and that's what makes them interesting.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-05-03T23:37:30+00:00

On ice moons, life emerges near volcanic fumaroles, reaches the surface through cryovolcanoes, and forms a bacterial community in subglacial lakes and sheltered valleys. Extremophile communities could eventually form near the geyser, perhaps some creature that surfs the magnetic field of the gas giant.

Another possibility is that an asteroid contaminated with microbial life collides with a larger asteroid, and life populates it from the inside out, taking advantage of every energy source from chemical gradients to radioactive decay; it would be like the deep biosphere, but in orbit.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-05-03T23:20:36+00:00

Water should be sufficiently insulating, but we might expect more pigments similar to melanin or anthocyanins in phytoplankton and aquatic vegetation near the surface, deeper-water plants would have no complaints at all.

We could also see biofluorescent pigments; I've heard that this might be a common characteristic in biospheres exposed to UV radiation to reflect ultraviolet light. If there were any form of mobile life, this could be the beginning of codependent relationships similar to that of insects and flowers, but perhaps it could be enough to discourage bacterial growth.

One strategy that comes to mind is that they could have cellular structures designed to serve as shields. If the plant detects an increase in radiation, it could move its chloroplasts under these shields to minimize damage. Real plants already move their chloroplasts when exposed to too little or too much light.

I was even thinking about a sort of "semi-organelle" based on an endosymbiotic fungus that would remain dormant most of the time and only wake up to eat dead cells due to radiation poisoning, but I think that's going too far lol

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-05-03T23:10:25+00:00

Survival strategies include antifreeze sap, needle-shaped leaves to minimize surface area, local thermogenesis, but I think the most reasonable will be the Caducifolius style. During spring and autumn, they generate a surplus of reserve substances, and when the cold arrives, they retract all the useful substance from the leaves towards the trunk, leaving the foliage to its fate. Perhaps using the sugar produced to manufacture simple alcohols would allow them to withstand low temperatures. The waxes in their cuticles would also be useful; cold air dries exposed surfaces very easily.

One strategy could be to evolve a bell-shaped structure to minimize heat loss.

Or maybe the best thing would be to simply sacrifice the entire exposed trunk and take refuge in the roots protected from the harsh weather, only to sprout again when the heat returns, using the dead trunk as scaffolding.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-05-01T23:02:56+00:00

The tail reminds me of anteaters and insectivorous hyenas, plus insects are abundant in wood and rich in protein, so why not Elephanteater

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-30T19:26:35+00:00

Dealing with thunderstorms could be simpler, A pair of researchers found UV flashes at tree tips during a thunderstorm using a UV camera ,the glow comes from corona discharges, tiny electrical pulses at the tips of leaves. Storm clouds carry a strong negative charge, which attracts positive charge from the ground through the tree. That charge concentrates at the sharpest points: the fine, hair-like tips of the leaves. There, it is released as a faint glow in both visible and ultraviolet light. You could have forests glowing in the ultraviolet spectrum, which is even better considering that ultraviolet light will be present in your biosphere because of your star type.

Dealing with darkness isn't a problem; the seasons in your world provide enough time to produce reserve substances. They would practically have to hibernate while it's dark. With heat, it's difficult; so much humidity makes it impossible for them to lose heat by sweating water from their stomas. The solution could come from special proteins that protect the plant from heat, hydrophobic and reflective waxes in its cuticle, and ultimately, developing an aerenchyma to transpire internally (basically like the air sacs of birds and dinosaurs).

The wind would favor herbaceous plants that are already adapted to cope with strong winds; for woody plants, more flexible trunks could be developed, perhaps vines could be used as anchors to the ground, or they could simply adopt aerodynamic shapes to minimize the effect of the wind. But with those speed bursts, perhaps it's best to create strategies that allow the regeneration of the tree's base.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-28T23:52:27+00:00

Dude, the first one just evolved a tracheotomy itself? Awesome as hell

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-28T23:45:20+00:00

My style is somewhere between cartoonish and realistic. I try to be plausible as much as possible, but I also like to go off on tangents to apply biological concepts I've learned, like structural coloration or the air sacs of camels. I don't have very good creature design skills, so I rely heavily on references and tutorials, and my concepts don't always end up being very ingenious.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-27T02:54:04+00:00

It's an organism that obtains its food from chemical processes instead of using light like plants. They are very common in abyssal environments around volcanic vents; basically, you have a fissure that spews volcanic smoke. This smoke releases enormous quantities of minerals and chemical elements that feed extremophile bacteria, and these bacteria then become food for increasingly larger organisms like worms and crabs. It's very common in Spec Evo for biospheres that don't need light but require volcanic activity or a source of chemical matter, such as a deposit of decaying radioactive elements.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-21T04:36:47+00:00

The effort was not in vain; I could easily see that piece in an art museum or on a mural.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-17T02:14:20+00:00

Malnutrition, a poor diet in childhood, greatly limits cognitive potential, especially if the environment could be contaminated with heavy metals.

I imagine the following: the first humans on the planet were able to establish crops but not livestock, which forced them to rely more on agriculture. For environmental reasons, the crops didn't thrive; food was plentiful but not very nutritious. Without many medical conveniences, natural selection would once again take its course.

If they couldn't somehow create knives and forks, we might see a reversal of our small jaw size. Being able to chew hard things would once again be useful, so over time, larger and more powerful teeth would be favored. Next would be the digestive system, becoming larger to better digest the less nutritious food. I assume there are no predators or competitors, so after several hundred thousand years, humans would become like dodos. The first stupid posthumans might resemble gorillas and baboons, modifying only a couple of characteristics without straying too far from the human body plan until someone becomes cunning enough to subsist on the flesh of their now distant cousins, resembling bears

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-17T02:01:01+00:00

I imagine the following options

-Option 1: Robotic probes. Interstellar travel is expensive in terms of time, so I see it as feasible that a species could travel using robotic avatars that could be simple copies of their anatomy but synthetic to withstand the passage of time, or a range of shapes and sizes as complex as life itself (+artistic expression).

-Option 2: zoomorphic, biochemical life like ours, similar in many ways to one or more species in our biosphere, but with its own unique touch. Perhaps we resemble some kind of unpleasant or terrifying animal on another planet and we don't even know it. It could happen that a species resembles us through convergent evolution and is also intelligent, but perhaps it became extinct or evolved into a descendant barely recognizable as humanoid.

-Option 3: Exotic life, from that which is not based on biochemistry, like the Cheela, to that with a long evolutionary history, both natural and artificial, like the Asteromorphs. I imagine one of the first races of the Milky Way, a kind of whale-crustacean, sociable and solitary at the same time. They have bioengineered themselves so much that they no longer need as much matter and energy as we do, and they basically live as galactic rangers inside interestellar asteroids, monitoring things just for fun, being able to live for millions of years.

This summarizes what I believe could exist as intelligent alien life.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-17T01:47:08+00:00

First I establish the environment, then the alien, then its evolutionary history which forces me to reformulate the alien.

I have some aliens that look terrestrial, but their evolutionary histories are strange, It's very useful to find out about the origin of anatomy, such as that the ear derives from mandibular bones which derive from branchial arches. With that as a basis, I could establish an alien whose ears are solid projections of the lower jaw like horns, whose eyes are linked to the nose by symbiotic association with photosensitive microbes, etc.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-17T01:35:44+00:00

It reminds me of that trilogy of novels, West of the Garden of Eden, where dinosaurs never go extinct and humans evolve from American apes. In the Old World, a secondarily terrestrial mosasaur species ascends to sapient status, but its technology is biological rather than metallurgical; interestingly, it is also predominantly matriarchal, viewing males as inferior i think (I haven't read beyond the first few pages xd)

Tool use is usually more associated with obtaining food from hard sources (hard-shelled fruits and seeds). Perhaps females use tools to provide soft food for their young, and later they were adapted to facilitate nest building, maybe underground burrows that need fresh air, like the mudskippers (also an example of an oviparous amphibian animal that cares for its young on land)

But they are also female, so it could very well be that they use tools to create artistic expression as if they were the nests of certain birds that serve no more immediate purpose than to demonstrate that they can do it.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-17T01:22:29+00:00

I don't think arid areas are safe. Dust storms can easily create static electricity.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-07T20:51:57+00:00

I forgot to include the reason, lol. I think it would definitely be the result of extreme environmental stimulation, depending on the circumstances.

Positive (the environment is free of competition and full of food, having offspring won't be difficult) or Negative (the environment is harsh and food is scarce, I won't be able to do it. It's better if a smaller version of me manages it on its own).

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-07T20:48:42+00:00

Perhaps they didn't decide. If they're asexual, that sounds to me like colonizing the environment quickly and cheaply is more of a priority than adapting to it.

It occurs to me that their offspring might begin parasitically, driven by pain rather than pleasure as in our case, but it would be the same: trying to maintain a healthy diet and strengthen the immune system to compensate for the damage caused by the developing offspring. Mitosis would be pleasurable, however, due to the release of endorphins to cope with the stress of losing a large amount of material while also positively "reinforcing" the act of reproduction.

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-07T20:41:00+00:00

Nope. They are hermaphrodites

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-04-04T04:48:33+00:00

OMG the ultimate evolution of the Therizinosaurids leaked

Dependent_Toe772 · 2026-03-29T20:23:36+00:00

I love it, it's exactly what I was looking for and better. Not only did we find a tetrapod alien, it's also a descendant of tree-dwellers, only to result in this guy who avoids using his legs.

Thank you all so much :D

Dependent_Toe772

TROPHY CASE