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we're asking the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge.

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Without the stars, no life would exist on Earth or any other world which might harbor it,

but could stars themselves

host life. Sometimes in science fiction, particularly in what we call space opera, where the

science is very subordinate to the fiction, if present at all, we'll see an alien race that evolved

to live inside stars. At first this notion can seem rather fantastic, and indeed

it probably is, but we'll look at some ways in which it could conceivably occur,

either naturally or by artifice. We will focus particularly on the idea of a star or stellar

object being a conscious mind itself, and indeed that notion long predates science.

Mankind has had a lot of deities down the millennia, but perhaps the most common is a sun god,

Vah or Amon of Egypt, Apollo, or Helios of Greece, or Soul of Rome, being but a few of many

dozen of such deities we have recorded, and doubtless there are more we do not.

Indeed, we name our son's soul, when we wish to distinguish it from other stars, and it is from that we get the term

solar system. Of course much of that would depend on what we mean by life and also what we

mean by a star, both in terms of what counts as a star and where exactly a star ends and space begins.

One might argue that just as life on Earth occupies only the thinnest edge of Earth's crust,

Earth and the other planets occupy but the edge of our own Sun, whose total mass outnumbers

...