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Xenobiology is, in my opinion, the most challenging category. It can be very difficult to make alien life in a way that is convincing.

Although Kaimere is most notable for basically functioning as an alternate history project using a seed world setting, xenobiology is the ‘how’: Kaimere is a distant planet inhabited by hives of microbes that in the distant past sent a swarm to Earth and started harvesting them to be replicated on Earth. Developing the entire evolution of indigenous Kaimeran life took a lot more time and speculation than even the most basal and ancient Earth life on Kaimere since I at least had a foundation to develop from in the form of Devonian life onwards. For another planet to independently develop life with cell-like structures struck me as close to Earth life as I wanted to go.

Multicellular life is not indigenous to Kaimere, although hive-like swarms of unicellular organisms do bind with larger single celled organisms, and replicated multicellular organisms from Earth were host to these interconnected hives.

The closest Kaimere got to indigenous multicellular organisms are floating or stationary colonies of several hundred to several thousand different individual cells of many different species. These may resemble multicellular organisms, but technically they’re more analogous to coral reefs, where a bunch of different organisms from different species work together to make a structure.

So often, especially in popular media, xenobiological organisms take convergent evolution to an extreme, presenting six limbed animals that somehow in all other respects look like wolves, or cephalopods that are humanoid, even though there’s no biological reason for the aliens to be cephalopods, much less look like us. This can simply be artistic shorthand to convey to viewers that this creature is alien. I want to be clear that in that context it’s not bad, even great in showing something inhuman but in a way that will cultivate empathy. If the point is to show something different in ancestry but easy to empathize with, such designs can be good at serving their narrative. Good literary devices, but it’s not good speculative biology. More often than not, it just comes off as lazy creature design.

To make convincing and interesting aliens, it can be helpful to build from the ground up, considering ways other than we have on Earth to make multicellular organisms. One way you might approach this is a composite organism of many different sorts of cells. After you do this, convergent features like limbs to move through space make a lot of sense, but don’t give them eyes and noses just because we have them. Consider other ways they might experience their environment, like a light sensing disk on the back paired with a photosynthesizing organ, or a different analogy to taste in their feet for determining soil health as they gather nutrient supplements. Maybe their entire body is a sequence of tubes and they move with hydraulic pressure, filling and emptying fluid sacs to shift the limbs and orientation of the disk as they move.

There are some really exceptional xenobiology projects out there with multicellular organisms. Phtanom B by Paul has some truly unique and impressive designs for multicellular organisms that I highly suggest you all check out if you’re looking to create a truly unique xenobiology project. His organisms have a structure based on Silicon instead of Carbon, and he has come up with some really interesting and original analogues to locomotive and sensory anatomy.

Description
Xenobiology is, in my opinion, the most challenging category. It can be very difficult to make alien life in a way that is convincing.

Although Kaimere is most notable for basically functioning as an alternate history project using a seed world setting, xenobiology is the ‘how’: Kaimere is a distant planet inhabited by hives of microbes that in the distant past sent a swarm to Earth and started harvesting them to be replicated on Earth. Developing the entire evolution of indigenous Kaimeran life took a lot more time and speculation than even the most basal and ancient Earth life on Kaimere since I at least had a foundation to develop from in the form of Devonian life onwards. For another planet to independently develop life with cell-like structures struck me as close to Earth life as I wanted to go.

Multicellular life is not indigenous to Kaimere, although hive-like swarms of unicellular organisms do bind with larger single celled organisms, and replicated multicellular organisms from Earth were host to these interconnected hives.

The closest Kaimere got to indigenous multicellular organisms are floating or stationary colonies of several hundred to several thousand different individual cells of many different species. These may resemble multicellular organisms, but technically they’re more analogous to coral reefs, where a bunch of different organisms from different species work together to make a structure.

So often, especially in popular media, xenobiological organisms take convergent evolution to an extreme, presenting six limbed animals that somehow in all other respects look like wolves, or cephalopods that are humanoid, even though there’s no biological reason for the aliens to be cephalopods, much less look like us. This can simply be artistic shorthand to convey to viewers that this creature is alien. I want to be clear that in that context it’s not bad, even great in showing something inhuman but in a way that will cultivate empathy. If the point is to show something different in ancestry but easy to empathize with, such designs can be good at serving their narrative. Good literary devices, but it’s not good speculative biology. More often than not, it just comes off as lazy creature design.

To make convincing and interesting aliens, it can be helpful to build from the ground up, considering ways other than we have on Earth to make multicellular organisms. One way you might approach this is a composite organism of many different sorts of cells. After you do this, convergent features like limbs to move through space make a lot of sense, but don’t give them eyes and noses just because we have them. Consider other ways they might experience their environment, like a light sensing disk on the back paired with a photosynthesizing organ, or a different analogy to taste in their feet for determining soil health as they gather nutrient supplements. Maybe their entire body is a sequence of tubes and they move with hydraulic pressure, filling and emptying fluid sacs to shift the limbs and orientation of the disk as they move.

There are some really exceptional xenobiology projects out there with multicellular organisms. Phtanom B by Paul has some truly unique and impressive designs for multicellular organisms that I highly suggest you all check out if you’re looking to create a truly unique xenobiology project. His organisms have a structure based on Silicon instead of Carbon, and he has come up with some really interesting and original analogues to locomotive and sensory anatomy.