Interesting! I'd like to hear their path and struggle in developing technology/cities/ect. And I'd like to clarify, it's not like I dislike the idea of alternative organisms developing civilization, I'm just curious about how other people have conquered the various challenges in a realistic, scientifically grounded sense. The challenges are steep and highly specific and I can't really develop an answer myself.

As for the aesthetically pleasing part, I disagree. Deep sea creatures aren't as developed as humans when it comes to aesthetics. I like to think that the cognitive awareness and desire to mate with a more attractive organism is an advanced and complex brain function.

Even animals that are less intelligent, like crustaceans, do have some sort of awareness of these sort of things. This is why they're symmetrical instead of asymmetrical. When an animal becomes more complex, lets say a horse, their aesthetic needs increase. Along with the organism becoming more aesthetically complex, it also has more cognitive capacity to notice these sort of things. Horses are known to choose their partners according to appearance. This extends over to lions, monkeys, and other animals as well. This behavior is not nearly as complex as human aesthetic desires however.

Anyways, what I'm saying is that as an organisms intelligence increases, its aesthetic desires increases along with it. This means as an organism becomes more intelligent, it will also become more attractive as generations pass. Uglier genes are never in season and will be spat out of the gene pool.

This is one of the reasons why scientists think humans are hairless, it was simply just an attractive trait. There is the aquatic ape theory, but everyone knows that's just bullshit.