One of the funnier quirks of Star Trek is that all alien sentient life forms look just like humans, just with funny bumps on their faces or pointy ears. Better special effects gave us different aliens, but most still ended up with a head, eyes, mouths, and limbs. The new movie Project Hail Mary explores a different kind of alien life- things that don't resemble anything we've ever encountered before. And that's what we should really be looking for.
What if life on other planets isn't dependent on liquid water? What of the building blocks of life elsewhere were based on, say, silicon instead of carbon? The search for life elsewhere has been based on detecting signals that indicate planets are like earth, but that might not be necessary. The search for signals of an advanced technology may be looking for the wrong patterns, or may be a completely useless framework. Alien life may be different in more ways than we can even imagine, and a lot of that depends on how you define "life." The Conversation poses five ways we may have been thinking about alien life all wrong, with links to further information on each idea.
As for Sci-Fi, it's selection bias: "The advent of TV and films, with extraterrestrials played by actors, toned down the fantasy. For budget reasons, humanlike aliens with just some specific non-human body features became the new standard."
19th century "authors used features from other animals, such as insects, crabs, and octopuses" ..."described sentient trees, tentacled seal-like creatures pushing against a harsh atmosphere, and life made of silicon and magnesium. Some other aliens are the octopean Martians from H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898), the Selenites from Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901), the birdlike Tweel from Stanley G. Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey (1934) and even a sentient star in Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker (1937)." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrials_in_fiction#19th_century
In 1887 Les Xipéhuz introduced "Les Xipéhuz", translated as "The Shapes". The bizarre, geometric creatures resembled "bluish, transparent cones" with their point facing upwards."In A Martian Odyssey (1934), the alien Tweel is like a plucked flamingo with its brain in its body" - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231019-the-weird-aliens-of-early-science-fiction
I would add The Blob (1958) as perhaps the most notable. And most recently, The Ring Builders (unseen) or The Dark Gods (shown) from The Expanse (2015-2022).
Books:
https://bookdna.com/best-books/with-non-humanoid-aliens
https://www.torforgeblog.com/2024/04/08/our-favorite-non-humanoid-aliens/
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