Flandry offers Kit a drink, if not something alcoholic, then maybe just:
"'Buttermilk, for heaven's sake?'
"'Hm?' She raised a fleeting glance. He discovered Vixen had no dairy industry, cattle couldn't survive there, and dialed ice cream for her...
"She was pleased enough by discovering ice cream to relax a trifle." (p. 198)
I have carried Julian May's Galactic Milieu Trilogy all the way downstairs but am not going to start searching through it at this time of night. Somewhere in there is a colonized terrestroid extra-solar planet with a dairy industry where the milk is tinged blue by the different planetary chemistry.
We commend auctorial attention to detail:
Are any exo-planets terrestroid?
Will any be colonized?
Will some have dairy industries?
If so, how different will their milk be?
One thing is certain: there will be more differences than we can possibly imagine in every aspect of life, not just the milk or lack of it.
3 comments:
Note that we now know that -most- stars have planets -- they're common as dirt.
In Heinlein's TIME FOR THE STARS, it is thought that Earth-like planets are as common as eggs in a hen yard.
Heinlein may be right, in the sense of planets with similar size and composition and in the liquid-water zone. We've just gotten the capacity to see planets that size and we've already spotted some. Whether they have life is a different matter, and if they do it may not be complex life. We'll find out about the life, at least; the Webb telescope that just began operations will be able to do spectroscopic studies of exoplanet atmospheres. Oxygen is so reactive that only biological processes can keep it in an atmosphere for any length of time.
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