this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Forgive me if I am uninformed, as it has been a while since I read Dune and I never read the complete series, but that universe doesn't have aliens in it, does it?
Does Foundation have any either? I've only watched the series on Apple TV (which I know is very divergent from the books) but it also seems to involve mainly humans and their creations than anything else.
No, you are correct. Both series are in the Humans are the only sentient space civ camp.
If you want to split hairs, it's said that it seems like sandworms weren't originally native to Arrakis and had to have originated elsewhere.
Where they were from originally and who brought them there is never really gone into, it could potentially have been aliens, or given how far in the future takes place it could have been previously human settlers who died out and been lost to history thousands of years prior to the events of the book.
You could also probably really get into it about whether some of the tleilaxu creations really count as humans.
Even in the latter books when the people from the scattering return from distant galaxies there is still no sign of any other sentient species.
Certainly there's no evidence of other civilizations, but space and time are vast, other civilizations could have risen and fallen before humanity ever came to be and evidence of their existence lost to time. They could exist in places humans wouldn't look, possibly even in forms we wouldn't recognize, or maybe they even purposely avoid us, folding space and time around themselves, hiding from prescient vision, etc. Maybe they're even out there and humanity is aware of them and they just have nothing we want and they're not posing a threat so they're never really worth talking about in-universe, certainly wouldn't be the first time humans didn't give a shit about another civilization, not even the first time in the scale of the books like how the harkonens never game much serious consideration to the fremen.
That's of course all just baseless speculation based on basically nothing in the books, pretty much just the old "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence" thing.
Also, depending on what we're willing to accept as a sentient species, what your interpretation of the butlerian jihad is, how you feel about Brian's books, etc. there's also the matter of thinking machines to consider. I'd personally call that a stretch, but we're here talking about a weird sci Fi book, so weird sci Fi stuff isn't off the table.