[dogscoff]

We already live with aliens: As well as being physically very different to us- animal have utterly alien thoughts comaprted to ours. Obviously you're talking about intelligent aliens and I'm talking about sub-sentient animals, but I think many animals are much smarter than we give them credit for and I do believe that some animals on this earth *are* clever enough actually to look at their lives and think abstractly. Whales & dolphins, almost certainly- chimps, too. Some dogs and cats as well, i think.

The point is that they have a completely different way of looking at life than we do.
We often try to fit animal behaviour into human patterns, and sometimes they are experiencing things that humans also experience(hunger, fear) but I think we could expect aliens to understand these basic emotions as well, simply because they make such good sense from an evolutionary point of view.

Anyway, on the whole- shared DNA heritage aside- I think animals are almost as different from us as we could expect any alien to be.

And there have been some excellent "utterly alien" writings on this forum! Some of the races in the "xenology" thread were really far from humanity in thought as well as form, (although my KanesS turned out very 'human', despite my best efforts.) and someone- Unknown enemy, i think- wrote a fantastic story just before that about the Cryslonite that opened up whole new understandings of consciousness for me.