Space Whale: Not naturally, at least – so far, no-one’s found naturally evolved space-native life – but, y’know, once they’d got around to uplifting cetaceans it was close to inevitable that some of them would take an interest in that other endless three-dimensional environment (not to mention being better instinctually equipped than most hominids to serve as a starship’s sailing master), and between them and hydrogen-breathing gas giant life and ambitious genetic engineers, it was equally inevitable that people would engineer actual Space Whales, equipped to swim-sail the vacuum (with biosolar sails, mostly) and harvest volatiles where they can find them. Just how it goes.
And then there are their cousins that prefer to dwell in the solar corona…
I find it odd that there are no cosmozoans in this `verse. They are a staple of SF, even hard SF. And in this `verse, it would not have been surprising to me that there would be silverlife-like ones or some other substrate that started out as engineered lifeforms by Precursors stretching back from Ancient History to the Far Past and back into Deep Time.
I did intentionally hedge my bets a bit there by saying “naturally evolved”, heh.
But my main hedge here is that I’m trying to bear in mind – and reserving some tropes and concepts in the light of – that the Associated Worlds, even with the Republic added on the side, represent a tiny, tiny chunk of the galaxy as a whole. (Same reason as I limit myself to the one known black hole, no more’n a couple of blue-white giant stars, etc., etc.) So while space is big and the universe is old and all manner of things have probably happened, not all of them have happened in the chunk of space defined by canon, and this is one of those.
So while “no-one’s found any naturally space-evolved life so far” in known space, author reserves the right for the Exploratory Service to run into some Real Soon Now out on the Periphery should I think of anything particularly interesting that involves cosmozoa.
(Probably down close to the galactic core, actually, where the energy is rich and the nebulae are thick.)
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