JimCambias
Since: Jan, 2011
Sep 1st 2013 at 10:50:02 AM
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I've always wondered why silicon-based life is depicted as looking like rocks or crystals. Sure, nonliving silicon looks like that, but there's no reason for living silicon beings to resemble the nonliving forms. We're made of carbon, but we don't look like animated piles of coal or walking diamonds.
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Larkmarn
Since: Nov, 2010
Sep 1st 2013 at 11:18:24 AM
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Visual shorthand. Not much point in going through the trouble of creating wildly different creatures and then making them look like Rubber-Forehead Aliens.
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Camacan
MOD
Since: Jan, 2001
May 18th 2011 at 10:08:18 PM
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This appears to be a non-example: a stronger skeleton based on replacing one element with another doesn't seem radical enough for the trope.
- The dragons in Dragonriders Of Pern are boron-based. Yay for Lewis acids.
- The dragons, and other native Pernese lifeforms aren't boron based, they just have a higher amount of it in their bodies then Terran life. They do tend to have skeletal systems based on boron, but that's only replacing calcium, not the carbon.
The following was deleted from the Live-Action TV examples for Star Trek: The Original Series.
Not only is there nothing in the episode "The Savage Curtain" to indicate that the Excalbians are based on silicon (in fact, the word silicon isn't used at any time in the episode), but a comment by Mr. Spock at the beginning of the episode says that the life forms on the planet are carbon based.
Note also that the example is a Zero-Context Example because it doesn't say anywhere that the Excalbians are silicon based.
- The Excalbians from "The Savage Curtain" are also heat-lovers, but they can survive at lower temperatures because they are much smarter and more powerful than the Tholians, or humans for that matter.
Edited by Arivne