Why Are the Aliens So Strange??

Like the unforgiving plains of the Serengeti or the volatile jungle of the Amazon, natural selection prevails in this hydrogen-rich wilderness. Floaters are the staple food of the fast and agile killers simply called ‘Hunters’.

Image of flying Hunters by Adolf Schaller

The four-winged Hunters are very capable of taking down the slower and sluggish Floaters, consuming their organic flesh to survive and absorbing their hydrogen resource to keep themselves from plummeting to death.

An alien world indeed.

Too strange

Told above is a ‘well-seasoned’ picture of Jupiter. A planet so huge that it could fit 1,300 Earths inside it.

Jupiter is as far as 588 million kilometers away from where we live. It is one of 100 billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy that houses our home - the pale blue dot.

Image of Planet Jupiter by NASA Jet Propulsion Lab

Galileo orbiter shot its probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere in 1995. The probe survived only 58 minutes into its descent and recorded temperature of 153°C and winds as strong as 610 kilometers per hour before it disintegrated.

However real planet Jupiter is, the indigenous inhabitants vividly mentioned, the Floaters and Hunters, are creatures of human fantasy.

Nonetheless, Floaters and Hunters are not mere fantasy per se. They are sophisticated speculation that is brought to life by imagination and art.

Astronomer Carl Sagan and Astrophysicist E.E. Salpeter dreamt these creatures through calculations adhering to the laws of physics and chemistry; the same set of rules that apply throughout the universe.

“Some people – science fiction writers and artists, for instance – have speculated on what other beings might be like. I am skeptical about most of those extraterrestrial visions. They seem to me to rely too much on forms of life we already know,” says Sagan as quoted from his seminal work Cosmos.