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Originally Posted by thrash
As you note, it makes sense of some fairly common science fiction tropes. It takes a not-inconsiderable amount of work, though, if you're bringing all your timelines up to a consistent present. Most "hey, look at the dinosaurs!" approaches don't ask what they would look like with 66 million additional years of non-catastrophic evolution.
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Actually, non-catastrophic evolution is comparatively easy: most radical evolution happens after big extinction events. The Cretaceous is 80 million years long, and its remarkably stable in terms of form. Species come and go, but without big shakeups, not two much gets shaken up. Alter the sizes and feather patterns on the dinosaurs, make a few basic sizes much firmer, Add in an oddity or two and you've got what you need.
For farther evolutionary divergence, just use the alien life generator from space. Ditto for building civilizations: building from scratch can be as good as generating alternate histories. Just say most of the divergences are early bronze age or before.
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Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw
Don't see why you'd need to bring everything to present: planet of dinosaurs is certainly a trope in things like Planetary Romance about Venus.
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You can certainly limit things to just the present, but I see no pressing need to, and in many ways it makes things simpler to not do so.
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Biggest difficulty might be in justifying weird human features in case you really need some green-skinned alien space-babes.
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Not really. Human evolution was quick, quirky, and bizarre. We're close to the great apes, but our phenotype is very different. The bipedal aspect is very recent, as is hairlessness and female breasts*. We're pretty darn genetically homogeneous, and we've had some narrow bottlenecks. Its very easy to justify most star-trek style races, at least appearance wise.
I will grant you that space babe green is a very unlikely color though.
*yes, all mammals produce milk for their young, but almost none keep the enlarged glands year round as a secondary sexual trait and pad them with fat to make them look bigger.
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Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw
9) Mirrorskies
In 1997 Earth discovers a naturally-occurred portal to another world. (Where exactly it would have to be to both have avoided detection for so long and be accessible-enough to make cross-world travel worth it I have no idea.) On that world are other portals to other worlds. There is apparently an entire multiverse linked by said portals, some uninhabited, so inhabited by TL 8 societies (with occasional hidden ones at lower or higher TLs) who treat the portals as just another natural choke-point in international relations.
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This is pretty similar to the Hell's Gate Series. I wouldn't mind working with that.