Name: What Actual Aliens Might Look Like
Uploaded: 2026-01-13T17:20:57.000Z
Duration: 15 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We know that life on Earth is incredibly diverse and exists in the strangest and most extreme places.

From blue dragon sea slugs to aye ayes or chrysomalan snails with shells of iron or whatever this is supposed to be.

Let's use our imagination and real science to travel to three possible worlds, each more alien than the next.

Put on your future science suit and enter the portal to witness wonders never seen before.

Five times smaller than our sun and a lot less bright.

A bit larger than Earth, but orbiting its star 20 times closer.

You see the ice hell of the planet Aiper.

It's tidally locked, so one side experiences a never ending night and the other an eternal day lit by the star's dim glow.

In the region facing the dim star directly, temperatures are warm and pleasant.

The hell of ice has melted into a shallow black ocean.

Churned by a never ending storm where hot air meets the frigid winds from the icy outskirts.

But below this inhospitable chaos, we find calm stability.

An ecosystem in almost perfect balance lets dive in.

Instead of meeting open water, we splash into a floating underwater jungle.

Kelp forests made from seaweeds up to 65 meters long, sheltering countless smaller creatures.

On Earth, we get abundant white sunlight.

So our plants evolved to be green, absorbing the most useful red wavelengths for photosynthesis and reflecting away the rest.

But Oculus shines not nearly as bright and its dim rays are even further dulled by the storm.

So here plants are a deep black to make use of the weak infrared leftovers, which also gives the eye of Aiper its striking black color.

Over billions of years, the jungle has occupied all possible space in the eye.

Its roots extend deep into the seabed mud, anchoring them and providing access to nutrients.

They drop their seed in the few free spaces in the mud.

Big and streamlined, teardrop shaped creatures push through the dark water.

Just like many sea creatures on Earth, their shape is optimized for the lowest drag when traveling through water.

Like underwater cattle, they lazily swim through the forest, grazing on leaves in peace.

Suddenly, a patch of strange looking leaves begins to move and wraps around a distracted grazer, dragging it down into hungry jaws.

A predator that's had eons to adapt its camouflage to f. But not only by imitating leaves.

Both Hunter and prey never evolved eyes in this dark underwater murk.

Instead they do battle with sounds and textures.

Countless species are singing to each other, sending warnings or invitations, forming a collective song.

Like the noisy jungles alert except howler monkeys and screaming PIs are replaced by chattering seed eaters poking at the mud with snapping pincers, squeaking spike bulbs loaded with poison.

And the flailing fins of starfish shaped grabbers hunting small prey.

In this stable and never changing ecosystem, their music will never end.

For billions of years you seem to have been noticed and blind creepers are crawling towards you.

You want to explore this world, not become part of it.

So it's time to leave the clouds of Nimbus.

You're immersed in the blinding light of the B type star Caeruleus.

Shining hot and blue, orbited by a dozen lava planets burned to a crisp.

A gas giant very much like Neptune in size and composition.

Except there's a lot more water and seething hot.

Chaereuleus showers it with 900 times more light than Neptune, so its atmosphere is warm enough for gigantic white clouds the size of countries to be lofted upwards by titanic warm updrafts rising from the hazy depths.

Millions of years ago, and astonishingly quickly, life emerged and evolved inside tiny water droplets.

Deeper down in the planet, like extremophile microbes on Earth, they found ways of breathing methane and using exotic enzymes to harvest sulfur and nitrogen compounds from the air.

As Caeruleus grew hotter and brighter, the higher altitudes of Nimbus became habitable and and life spread.

Let's dive into the gigantic white clouds to meet it.

Up here live quadrillions of tiny beings.

A kind of cloud plankton, so small they're carried on the gentlest air currents.

The most common type resembles flat four legged spiders barely a millimeter wide, tinted yellow by the sulfur they consume.

They gain lift with wispy electrostatic threads thinner than spider silk, pulling on the charge differences between the top and bottom of the cloud oceans.

A technique Zistica's crab spiders use to travel great distances.

On Earth, you're just in time for mating season.

Billions of cloud plankton gather to join their threads into huge parachutes that ride updrafts for hundreds of kilometres.

Here in the hot heights, they hatch their eggs.

Before their life comes to an end, other tiny creatures latch on most of them predators looking to feast on fresh younglings.

The other way to stay up in the sky forever is to become a living balloon, like the enormous sky whales.

Taller than a skyscraper, almost completely made of a wafer thin membrane.

They heat up trapped gases, making them less dense than the air around them, giving them buoyancy.

The bigger their gas envelope, the more lift it produces.

So sky whales evolved to be as large as possible.

Only a lumpy car sized spherical bag of organs hangs at its bott.

Heating up all this gas requires a lot of energy, so it's time to feed.

The spherical body opens up, unfolding and lowering a huge sticky net into the white clouds.

On Earth, the largest animals to ever exist, blue whales feed by filtering millions of tiny krill each day.

Similarly, the sky whales of Nimbus filter sky plankton out of the clouds.

Most is consumed right away and burned in specialized glands to generate heat.

The rest is converted into an orange and energy dense nectar for later.

This nectar is the most valuable resource on Nimbus.

Numerous predators are looking for it, but

none so hungrily as the frog sized jet squids, evolutionary cousins of the whales.

Several of them trail each sky whale, waiting for it to be distracted or sleepy after a succulent meal.

Jet squids are far less efficient floaters, but

they're able to superheat and expel gases in short bursts like a rocket.

Like vampiric hummingbirds, their long and pointy beaks try to pierce their prey and lap up some of the nectar inside.

Unlike in the stable eye aiper, life on Nimbus is doomed.

B type stars like Caeruleus live for a few hundred million years at most.

Soon it will be burning through its fuel at an astounding rate and violently burn our gas giant.

Life on Nimbus is only 600 million years old and has barely 10 million years left.

Is this tragic or is this unique ecosystem lucky to have existed in the first place?

Something to ponder as you move on before your jetpack runs out of fuel.

13 times more massive than Jupiter and with a magnetic field 60 times stronger.

It belongs to the yellow star Sturgeon, which is about to disappear behind Orsted's shadow.

But you're interested in Monnier, one of Oersted's many moons.

It should get as much sunlight as our Earth.

But its three hour orbit around the brown dwarf means its days are extremely short.