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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 Ammon 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 sun's soul when we wish to distinguish

...