I understand why it looks that way from good reaction, but there was nothing my dad wouldn't have done for my mom. I've never seen two people who loved each other more completely, trusted each other more thoroughly, or gave a bigger priority to each other's happiness. But apparently they had an awful lot of sex.
Several people have mentioned budgetary restrictions, which is a huge part, but there are practical considerations, regardless of budget. Even with a big budget, it's only recently that they've been able to make convincing non-humanoid aliens that interact with other actors (mostly through CGI). Earlier, there were good examples of movie monsters or aliens that were done with stop motion or puppets, but not in a way that they shared the screen with the human actors in a meaningful way. Can you imagine if, say, the Vulcans on the original Trek series were wildly non-human - how silly it would have looked? The technology just wasn't there to pull it off.
Also, most aliens, even in books, are some variation of earth life. They're reptile-people, big spiders, intelligent bugs, or whatever. I think that's mostly because it's pretty hard to envision something truly novel/new. So lots of books, movies, and shows come up with some rationale for why everything in the galaxy looks like some kind of earth life to excuse that.
Sharing an overly personal story because I think it's funny.
When my first marriage was swirling the drain, and my wife and I hadn't had sex for a number of months, I was visiting my parents, who were in their late 60s at the time. I noticed that my mom kept getting up to go to the bathroom, so I asked my dad if she was okay and he said she had a yeast infection that was bothering her and they didn't know what to do about it. I told him that those were generally pretty easy, she can get a cream that will take care of it in about a week. Not much else to it other than avoid sex for a couple weeks.
My dad looked incredulous. He said "A couple WEEKS? Like two full weeks? No sex at all for TWO WEEKS? If we don't do that, will it go away on its own?" My dad, pushing 70, was having a hard time coming to grips with the thought of going two weeks without sex, while I was in my 20s and hadn't had sex for four or five months.
I remember driving home and thinking, "Well there's something I didn't need to think about."
I make a pretty good living and my family really loves cheese, so I buy fancy stuff pretty frequently, but I check the prices because some of them are just ridiculous. The ten to twelve dollars I spend on a chunk the size of a deck of cards or two is bad enough, but some are two or three times that price for the same amount and I just can't bring myself to do it. I could do it, but it's just hard to believe we'd enjoy the cheese that much.
My wife and I love cheese and often have it for a snack, especially if we're drinking, so I usually keep a few different types to serve with crackers. Our son brought his GF over one time and everyone wanted a snack, so I brought out a cheese platter, and they both loved it, especially the GF, so now they always ask for cheese when they come over.
Today, Christmas, they came over with a couple who are their best friends. We had a couple others too, so I bought close to $100 worth of different cheeses. We had Wensleydale with blueberries, stilton with lemon and honey, aged white cheddar soaked in red wine, havarti, guda with hatch chili, warmed camembert, and regular aged cheddar. It was pretty fun seeing everyone trying them all and talking about which the liked the best.
Very true. The harder cheeses have very little lactose, and the softer cheese have more. When they make cheese, the curds separate from the whey. The whey is liquid, and has most of the lactose.
Okay, I haven't told this story for a long time, and it's Christmas, so here we go:
When I was dating my first wife, I went to her parents for Thanksgiving dinner. Among the dishes on the table was blackberry jello with grapes in it. Seemed like a 50s kind of dish, but whatever. I took some of everything, and planned to clean my plate. My future MIL was telling a story when I put the first bite of the jello in my mouth, and my brain screamed that something was horribly wrong. I thought there must have been something rancid in the jello or the grapes - the grapes didn't even have the right texture. I was about to spit it out - it was revolting - when I realized it was a taste I'd had before, not something rancid. All this was really just a moment, but it seemed like forever before it clicked: it wasn't grapes, it was green olives. She made blackberry jello was green olives in it.
I thought for a moment that it was a prank, though that family wasn't the pranking type, because no one else had taken any except the mom, but she had a mound of it and was eating it. I finally said, "It was surprising to bite into a grape and find out that it's an olive," and everyone tittered. Future MIL said that no one else likes it, but she does, so she makes it for herself.
I'm my late teens and early twenties, I had several occurrences of gay guys hitting on me, to the point where I started to worry that there was something about me. It seems funny to me now, but I really did have a period of wondering if I could be and was just repressing it because of my Catholic upbringing. But ultimately I realized that I just didn't find guys attractive at all, and even the thought of kissing a guy was kind of a boner killer. So I get what you're saying, even though on the surface it sounds funny to say you wondered if you could be gay.
Sometime later I ended up with a couple of close gay friends, and I mentioned it to them. They said it was probably because I put out a very non-judgemental vibe and didn't seem like a homophobe, so it probably didn't seem risky to hit on me.
So a patent existed prior, but that doesn't mean they were made. SAAB made them standard 14 years after this car. Do with no other data, I'd say no and no.
Edit: just realized that reads like I'm being pissy, but that wasn't the tone my finger was swiping with. Thanks for the data!
I'm just barely a boomer, but I'm also a software engineer/manager. Sometimes younger folks assume I need help with computers/tech, or are surprised when I'm knowledgeable about them. It's starting to change for me, too, though. I haven't kept up with newer languages, and as a manager I really don't write any code outside of the occasional Excel VBA, so I'm getting pretty stale.
I understand why it looks that way from good reaction, but there was nothing my dad wouldn't have done for my mom. I've never seen two people who loved each other more completely, trusted each other more thoroughly, or gave a bigger priority to each other's happiness. But apparently they had an awful lot of sex.