Life as we know it here on Earth... Water, carbon, etc. I heard eons ago that Spock's green blood was inspired by the blue-green blood of horseshoe crabs whic

Life as we know it here on Earth... Water, carbon, etc. I heard eons ago that Spock's green blood was inspired by the blue-green blood of horseshoe crabs which has a copper-based system instead of iron, among other oddities: A horseshoe crab's blood has a blue to blue-green color when exposed to the air. The blood is blue because it contains a copper-based respiratory pigment called hemocyanin. https://dnr.maryland.gov/ccs/Pages/horseshoecrab-medical.aspx https://dnr.maryland.gov/ccs/Pages/horseshoecrab-medical.asp... Though this piece contradicts that origin story: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/578911/why-star-treks-mr-spock-has-green-blood https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/578911/why-star-treks-mr... I'm failing to come up with the right search terms to find what I recall about zooplankton and the oceanic food web. It differs from other food webs and this shows up starkly in certain kinds of charts/models. Zooplankton are tiny creatures found in relatively small amounts on the surface but breed like crazy and feed huge animals, including some types of whales. So where other food webs are kind of pyramidal and you have a huge amount of plants at the base of the web and a smaller amount of animals that eat those plants and a smaller mass of animals that eat those animals, the ocean's food web doesn't follow a similar pattern. It's not pyramidal. There is much more mass found in other layers of the food web than of zooplankton at any given time. (Included because of the claim that "One elephant per year of this substance can't sustain life..." How do we know that?) Furthermore, on Earth we have life sustained by undersea volcanoes which defies our usual patterns of life. I'm out of my depth on exactly how these lifeforms differ from the norm on Earth, so I won't try to give a nutshell version of how they differ, but here are some links: https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/underwatervolcanoes/ https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/underwatervolcanoes/ https://www.mpg.de/19982028/0309-mbio-life-in-the-smoke-of-underwater-volcanoes-154772-x https://www.mpg.de/19982028/0309-mbio-life-in-the-smoke-of-u... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfurimonas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfurimonas That's what I know as a former homeschooling mom and Earthbound human who reads. Surely we can do a little better than "It doesn't readily match the patterns of the dominant lifeforms of this planet, so we cannot imagine that some other planet with dramatically different chemical makeup and other details has lifeforms that are fundamentally different from that, and never mind that Earth has some oddities living on it." Cue the plot from the Star Trek episode where humans were being attacked by the guardian of the eggs that they were destroying willy-nilly without realizing they were eggs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_Dark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_Dark