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Alien plants; What would alien 'plants' be like?
Topic Started: Jul 18 2008, 04:34 PM (891 Views)
ItHasTeeth
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Megaposter
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We always talk about alien animal/animal-like fauna & what they would be like, but what in the worl would the flora-like organisms be like? It's just something I find perplexing to grock.

How do people go about solving this problem?
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Carlos
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Adveho in me Lucifero
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Doesn't this belong to the Habitable Zone section?
Lemuria:
http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5724950/

Terra Alternativa:
http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/forum/460637/

My Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/Carliro

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Livyatan


Yes it does and I have moved it.

Personally, a lot of my flora (for Tethys II) are rather similar to flora on Earth. Now back when there was the Xenobiology Forum (Saxophlutist and Xenothinka would remember this one), I had all sorts of walking flora (animal-like in other terms) for a alien world I was working on.
The grand Livyatan on deviantArt: link

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Saxophlutist
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Giant Blue Anteater and I have concepts planned for plants that use silicon in building vascular structure. (Though they aren't truly alien, but merely the descendants of diatom imports to another planet.

Plants are very tricky to create without making them too Earth-like, but Ramul on deviantart has some really cool vegetation concepts for his Red Earth Project. http://spec-evolution.sytes.net/topic/337745/1/#new
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Xenophile
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Formerly known as alienboy.
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Alien plants are a very difficult subject. For one thing, photosynthesis is likely to be very different to plants living on a planet orbiting a different type of star. For example plants living on a homeworld orbiting a red drawf are likely to be black in order to absorb as much energy as possible energy from their less powerful parent star. Different color pigments will have to considered for plants living on planets receving light from none G-type stars. Something I have been interested in is plants that reproduce without the help of flowers. The first flowering plants evolved side by side with some of the first insects on earth. How would plants distribute pollen pollen without the help of animals ? Further more without flowers you cant have fruit ( sniff sniffel ) . hopefully in the future I will be able to post images of alien plants I have disigned.
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Viergacht
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faceless fiend
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I just had a discussion with a friend on this subject. He mentioned that while the details may differ, any plant that photosynthesizes would probably look very familiar because it probably still use the fibonacchi seqeucnes to arange branches, leaves, petals, etc.
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ATEK Azul
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alien plants might work on chemosynthesis which would make very different plants, they might be all roots and spread deep and wide inorder too gather nutriants. this would mean that above ground would be very barren and all plant eaters would have too dig for food and the only above ground plant life would be the flowers and fruit of these root systems.
I am dyslexic, please ignore the typo's!
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