Meeting aliens has been a staple topic in science fiction since at least the 1920s. Could that meeting turn into love or sex. That's a fit topic for SF author, Charlie Stross, who dives into it in this blog post.
The first problem with a human/alien relationship is obviously determining whether the alien is in fact alive at all, or just an oddly-shaped rock: then determining if it's a heterotroph or an autotroph, whether it has separate cells with nuclei or is a syncitium or rhizome network, does it have rigid walls or flexible membranes ... and then we go down the variant-biochemistry rabbit hole.
(As you probably guessed, I'm not a fan of the "humans with extra latex make-up on their head" school of alien biology in SF.)
For example, oxygen. We breathe oxygen! Can't live without it, in fact. But did you know that for about the first two billion years of life on Earth oxygen was a deadly poison to pretty much everything? And there was almost no free oxygen in the atmosphere because the Earth's crust still contained huge quantities of unreduced iron compounds. It was only about a billion years ago when the crust finally became fully oxidized that free oxygen began building up in the biosphere ... and poisoned 99.9% of all the life on Earth, because it was an excretory end product of early plant life, and most organisms back then were methanogens.
But wait, there's more!
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