Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: Life, what does it even mean for something to be alive? It’s genuinely a weirder question than it might seem, with loads of edge cases that display some but not all traits generally associated with a living creature. In a fantasy world where the laws of physics and chemistry are not exactly what we know, things get complicated. (Part 1 of 2)
Let us consider our Gestalt.
It is a what we consider a biological form. A carbon-based biological machine using water as the solvent and so on. There are many qualities we find in ourselves that we all too often assume to be the biological standard across the universe.
What then have we found in our encounters with other forms of life. Note that this study will not include any beings that exist as Konzeptionelle Gestalt, as these entities are worth a discussion of their own.
Firstly, we’ve encountered beings that are similar to us in many ways. The Elb for example. Superficially a plant like an organism innately capable of applying the Klein principle appears very different from us. Yet the only distinct difference on a biochemical level is that the Elb are anti-chiral. Specifically in regards to their amino-acids.
Taking everything into account quite a similar being when we compare it to the second class of life we’ve encountered – beings based on an alternative biochemistry. Though their Gestalt is still fairly similar to our own, composed of what we’d call mundane mater, some of the entities humanity made contact with use silicon instead of carbon, or ammonia instead of water. Though we cannot co-exist with these beings, our mutual environments being lethal to each other. A limited form of communication is still sometimes possible. It is worth noting that the Zeta-17 Predator is not an ammonia-based life form, it merely uses the compound as part of its otherwise conventional biochemistry. Several other hypothetical alternate biochemistries exist as well, possibly awaiting the right sort of discovery to confirm.
Moving further away from our own human life we encounter plasma-based life. No longer working under the same rules that govern our own chemistry, but still capable of self-organisation. Currently, no sapient plasmaforms are known, but it should remain a theoretical possibility. Here we end what would be considered mundane mater based life.
Not to say, however, that the life we have discovered in this universe ends here. We are merely entering the realm of what we call exotic mater composition. These entities are often multidimensional, four or up. They include such groups as the Blacklight Entities, the Etamini, the Great Weavers, Pyxis Dwellers, etc. We often conflate exotic matter life forms with the so-called Great Races, though this is a misconception. While all of the Great Races classify into this group this is purely coincidental, not causative.
Still even further removed from human life are the Solars and from there the procession of entities that lead up to the Elder Gods. Due to their vastness entities classified as Solars or greater tend to not take much interest in even the Great Races. Yet, despite the massive, sometimes incomprehensible differences these entities still exist as part of the Gestalt.
The way humans perceive life is very limited, but for the average human, perhaps it is best not to know.
Esoteric Musings... 