"On that note there might just be something as relatively amazing as the Internet is that we don't know we're missing."

"We know perfectly well we're missing FTL."

"—well. Yeah. I'm not sure I'd put it in the same category but, yeah."

"Yeah, it's different. Hmm, aliens might be a multiplier to ways to occupy oneself the same way the Internet is?"

"Ooh, yeah, meeting aliens would be so cool."

"They'd have invented all their own ways to fill time! Art forms under different constraints, scaled to different statistics of interest - whole planets full of people with tastes that'd make a tiny fandom on Amenta."

"I wonder what if any castes they'd have. It's not natural at all to divide ours the way we do, it'd make a lot of sense for stuff to be completely different—I mean, not that we haven't already talked about fiction about that, but thinking about meeting aliens in real life—"

"Yeah, fiction's aiming at - interesting characters and plots, not for solving life problems? And authors vary in how much they nod to life problems."

"Right, and fiction's also not aiming for realistic forecast of what the world might look like. Or most fiction isn't, anyway."

"So they don't have realistic alien traits and histories and they don't extrapolate from what they've got realistically either, yeah."

"And thinking of it there's no real reason they'll even have approximately the same emotional makeup or social structures or anything like that. Even using animals would be wrong, they share our evolutionary history and pressures."

"They occupy different niches; if well-done animal-based aliens are probably closer than 'change one thing about Amentans and think about how that could propagate for twenty minutes'."

"Yeah. I'd be curious to read anything about hivelike structures that didn't make the aliens seem like they're telepathic or anything like that. Real hiveminds occur because of hive behaviour compounding, not because everyone shares a brain!"

"Yes, oh my word, bees are not psychic."

"If my green date were the writer type of green I might recommend him that idea. Goodness knows he's nerdy enough that he'd research everything there is to know about the most obscure ant species ever just to get every detail right. His girlfriend is a physicist and works at the university, too, she'd probably find him a biologist to talk to."

"That must be nice, being - plugged in like that -"

"It must be! Even if we don't work out I'm totally mooching him for nerdy green contacts."

"How many links in the chain out can you go before the introduction's worthless? I guess it depends how strongly they vouch."

"And like, every link I befriend shortens the chain, right, I won't always need to be a friend of a friend of a friend, I'll be a friend of a friend and then just a friend."

"You're very friendly."

"I do try."

"You're all, hey, a blogger I read at the pool, let's be friends!"

"To be fair, you're not just a blogger, your blog is one of the coolest I know and I was having a mild case of meeting-a-celebrity when I saw you there. And if it weren't for your very reasonable policy of not dating greys I'd totally also be up for, you know, dating."

"I mean, I would be too, but - grey children -"

"—I'm okay with nonmonogamy? And also, like, I'm pretty sure I could convince a green to provide genetic material. Maybe even Ohan—my date—I bet he wouldn't object, and his disability isn't genetic."