We're Still Waiting for Hollywood to Depict a Plausible Alien Ecosystem - Facts So Romantic

You might expect scientists to heap scorn on Hollywood's depiction of aliens, but they're generally forgiving. Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at the Technical University of Berlin, remarks that most science-fiction aliens are either riffs off the weird life we see in Earth's deep ocean, such as the squid-like creatures of Arrival, or versions of now-extinct animals from earlier in our planet's history, such as the adult trilobite in Prometheus. "If you want to study a lot of different body shapes or forms, look at the Cambrian Explosion," he says. "If you look at a museum exhibit of life from 500 million years ago, you see trilobites and other unique types of life. What irritates him and others isn't what movie aliens look like, but the magical things they do. Leave aside their physics-defying technology and consider just their most basic attributes, such as metabolism. "Prometheus was especially terrible this way," says Caleb Scharf, the director of astrobiology at Columbia University. "[That movie had] the idea that a little thing can grow into an enormous thing when you're not looking, even though there's nothing to eat.