I suppose the next step beyond vegetarianism and veganism will be mineralism: Food using molecules certified never to have been part of any known living organism. I remember there was a fictional advertisement for such a product in a sci-fi story, but not exactly where.
This actually makes sense to me in terms of logical coherence. I understand and support people who follow ethically-motivated diets but the fact is a line is always drawn somewhere. Plants are alive. Why is a carrot’s life less important than a rabbit’s? I don’t think we’re good at making claims about where particular organisms sit along a gradient of consciousness we can’t even properly define. I like to imagine oth…
There is no reason to imagine that if there was alien life it would be able to comprehend us at all, for fictional convenience it has been usual to depict aliens as basically just humans in Halloween costume and there is every reason to assume they would be entirely incomprehensible instead. Even in soft SF, try say Iain M Banks' repeated reference to other forms of life which show essentially no interest in the scale of events that our human-like characters are engaged with. The Stellar Field Liner, a vast entity living in the magnetosphere of a star, the Excession, seemingly a living portal to other universes, or even just the Dirigible Behemothaurs which are island sized creatures that think a Galactic Cycle (225 million Earth years) is not very long.