Otherness

Alien… Weird… Foreign… Alterity… Strange… Xeno… Other.

Scientists and philosophers have had a field day with the issues raised by communicating with aliens. Consider the Problems of Interplanetary and Interstellar Trade. When we finally do meet the aliens, at least we can rest assured that they’ll speak geek.

Nothing compares to the otherness found in science fiction. Even when artists take existing structures found on Earth, and simply add another layer of complexity to them, the result is remarkable, as we can see in these two videos by 1stAveMachine, where insects and jungle plants are made alien by simply adding additional organs to them:

And another:

Wayne Barlowe creates some of the most alien creatures of all, and makes them all the more real with hard SF details. There is some concept art that was used in making the CGI speculative documentary Alien Planet, about robot probes visiting a distant planet called Darwin IV, where life is detected in the future. Barlowe also has several great books collecting aliens from SF literature, which could make for interesting coffee-table books.