Intrigued by the often-heard phrase "life as we know it", Anderson wanted to set the aliens of his new series apart from the conventional extraterrestrials of 1960s television and cinema. He therefore worked from a basis of "life as we don't know it",[31] and made the Mysterons that were to feature in the series a race of sentient computers as opposed to organic lifeforms,[25] although this is not explicitly stated in the television episodes. The initial intention was that the original Mysteron civilisation came from another galaxy.[25] Having established a settlement on Mars in the distant past, they fled the planet centuries later, abandoning their computer complex.[25]