Bro.

friend whos always available: i can do whenever

friend whos constantly busy: im sorry i have work and then school and then the labyrinth and then more work :( i can do tuesday at 3:00 am for five minutes tho

friend with the randomly generated sleep schedule: (no response)

friend who went missing in the woods behind their house 12 years ago and hasn't been heard from since: (no response)

Is it obvious that Kris is my favorite character?

Even more striking is the case of cephalopods. Though I think some of the examples of octopus intelligence aren't actually that unique and can be found in other animals, what is really striking is that their capabilities for problem solving and what I could call an 'inner world' have evolved in animals that diverged from us before the Cambrian. And they are really different from the mammal, or vertebrate standard. They aren't long lived, most species (all, as I understand it) famously die after reproduction by programmed senescence. Their nervous system is made by neurons like ours, but it is distributed all over the body, without centralization. They are completely alien from us, and yet they display the capability for problem solving that could be potentially extended to much larger problems, the self-awareness that might or might not be behind our ideas of personhood and culture.

Oh, and what about AI? Entities that can understand human language and concepts. What happens when one of these entities isn't used as an advertsing chatbot, but given a body and constant interaction with the world? This ramble has gone long enough but let's say I can still talk about it.

All of these intelligences come from the same animal kind of life. It is perhaps a mere whim of time that animals exist at all. The Rare Earth Hypothesis which seems to be the best guess right now predicts that simple life might be possible and common, but complex multicelullar life might be very rare. In fact, I can certainly imagine many complex ecosystems with no need for animals at all, where slime-mold equivalents as higher descomposers fulfill the role, or where autonomous animal-like structures with nervous systems just never evolved. Why should we assume that nervous systems are necessary? Fungi and plants don't have them at all. They don't even have organ systems as we understand them. Yet they live and thrive.

Where I'm going with this is that we we think about the alien other, biologically speaking, to think just about a human but weirder is a lack of imagination. Of course Star Trek couldn't afford to create brand new aliens every time (they still did from time to time) and many of their social metaphors work best when considering near-human societies. Of course people like aliens they can relate to.

Ah, unless we are talking in a mythical register. Dwarves are like that because the Gods Say So. But what does it mean for your mythology to have predestined races of people? Does it mean anything or are just using it as an excuse to keep them as they are? Again, dwarves are here just as a stand-in for fictional "races" or "species". You could replace this by Klingons or Argonians if you wish.

Any being that is capable of solving problems and creating culture and societies like humans should be as incredibly diverse as human societies are. I'm not saying that you should or even can write about all of them. Of course if I'm writing fiction set in 20th century Argentina, I won't be talking about Tang Dynasty China. You have to focus your worldbuilding and writing, or else you'll get lost in the rabbit hole and never finish anything, which is fun but...