There would have to be a reproductive system, but it could be budding, seeding, fission, egg laying—not necessarily live, warm-blooded birth. They would require some sort of sensory systems, the analogs of eyes, ears, smelling apparatuses.
But their 'eyes' would have evolved for the peak spectrum of their own sun, not necessarily ours. In the clouds of a gas giant? On land? In a desert? In a jungle? They would need a way to eat or consume energy, and they would need to excrete waste. For intelligence, they'd need to communicate—by voice? Blinking phosphorescent patches?
Street cred: TV producer and executive. Actors have to play these roles. What aliens look like in the real world will depend on where they evolved. An alien that evolved in interstellar space would have very different needs from an alien that evolved on an Earth-like planet. Everything we know of that grows follows a symmetrical pattern.
Cut a tree in half lengthwise, the branches and roots on one side would be fairly similar to the other. The same applies to humans and all living growth, even inorganic growth such as crystals and galaxies. Plant-like aliens are unlikely because photosynthesis doesn't encourage complex survival strategies.
The need to chase food favors mobile life. If such life evolved in a thick atmosphere, it's likely to be a horizontal creature. A thinner atmosphere would favor the most vertical animals. Two legs and two arms are more efficient than four legs, so incorporating the rule of symmetry, it's not unlikely that aliens would have evolved just like humans: bipedal and upright.
So one might say most aliens don't look like anything because they are invisible. Street cred: Sci-fi author. Never mind the little green or gray men with oversize craniums and oversize eyes and tiny mouths.
Never mind the cat-men or lizard-men or dog-men or people with blue skin and strange, tattoo-like markings or odd brow ridges or pointier ears. Why would an alien look that similar to us? Yes, it looks nice and even, but what's the point? Why have two sides exactly the same when you could have something completely different on the other side? Even the Daleks figured this one out—they had a sucker arm on one side and a laser on the other. And bipedal? Ridiculous—one good push and we fall over.
Why would another world's race evolve with that exact same design flaw? Why would another world's race grow eyes, and a nose, and a tongue, and all the other fiddly bits we have? They wouldn't. We grew opposable thumbs so we could better grasp objects. Monkeys developed prehensile tails for the same reason.
We have eyes because light breaks down into the visible end of the electromagnetic spectrum here. And if that other world had a completely different chemical composition, so would we.
All life on Earth is carbon-based, but that wouldn't be the case elsewhere. Life forms could be silicon-based or iron-based or anything else at all. They could have any number of arms and legs—or none at all.
Maybe they can sail through space unaided, and use stellar radiation for a food source and a sensory array, detecting changes in the radiation the same way bats detect sound waves. Who needs eyes and ears when your entire being resonates? Who needs a distinct brain when your consciousness is spread throughout just like our nerve endings are with us? Why have skin when your form is held together by electrostatic shock and mental control, and can condense or expand at will?
There's no doubt that humans and all our societal quirks would be fascinating to aliens. But what about how and why we work? The alien might be surprised that we don't live very long. And with the short years that we have on earth, on average, we spend a large majority of that time working. The aliens might be ok with that part, but they could be surprised that many humans spend so much of their time working for managers who don't appreciate them and organizations who don't treat them very well.
Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes, even if they belong to an alien, to see how things really are. We can get so used to our work situations, even if they are less than ideal, that we forget that there can be a better way to work.
A look in the thesaurus can also help show us what our work habits are really like. Synonyms for employee are servant, cog, or slave; manager is also used as slavedriver, boss, or zookeeper; and work synonyms are daily grind or struggle.
Put that all together and we are all cogs working for a slavedriver going about our daily drudgery. This means that a large majority of habitable planets are much older than Earth.
If we believe that humans and the planet we live on are not particularly special compared to other civilizations on other planets, we would conclude that the stage of the biosphere and technology on other occupied planets must be, on average, older than the corresponding stages we see on Earth.
If we humans are now on the cusp of colonizing our solar system, and we are not much faster than other civilizations, those civilizations should have completed this colonization long ago and spread to other parts of the galaxy. Geochemical and paleobiological research has recently confirmed that the oldest traces of living beings on Earth are at least 3.
The Earth itself is only 4. The consequences are rather dramatic: If life is quick to form after its host planet has formed, we get good probabilistic support for the existence of simple life on many planets in the Milky Way, and potentially complex life on some of them. Valencia, Spain, Oct. One is Michael Michaud, In principle there may be several reasons for this attitude. I n , two revolutionary books transformed our view of both the universe and ourselves.
One, written by Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius, was titled De humani corporis fabrica On the Fabric of the Human Body , and it laid the foundations of modern medical science by proving once and for all that our bodies are not mystical objects but physical systems amenable to scientific study—and not very different from the bodies of animals. The other, entitled De revolutionibus orbium coelestium On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was of even greater significance by a little-known Polish polymath by the name of Nicolaus Copernicus.
It overthrew the cosmological paradigm that had reigned for almost 2, years and was supported by the political and religious authorities of the day. In doing so, he inadvertently redefined the very word revolution , from a purely technical term inside to a household label for any dramatic change in any field. Now, of course, most scientists agree with the obvious: that Earth-like planets can spontaneously generate living organisms, and some worlds will eventually spawn an intelligent species.
The Nottingham paper has drawn a lot of attention because it claims that the number of inhabited worlds is likely paltry. But, in fact, by making your own assumptions you can derive just about any estimate for the number of intelligent cosmic species. For myself, I figure that an absolute minimum would be 70, the number that managed to bag speaking roles in "Star Trek. IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.
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