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Why extraterrestrial life may not seem alien
- candlemas 5y agoScience is finally catching up with UFOlogy: https://thebiggeststudy.blogspot.com/2009/10/what-will-they-be-like-humanoid-form.html https://thebiggeststudy.blogspot.com/2009/10/what-will-they-...
- ignoranceprior 5y agoIf Star Trek taught me anything, it's that most aliens look like humans, except for some bumps on their forehead. Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoStar Trek TNG kind of lampshaded that in "The Chase", where its is revealed that alien species are similar and biologically compatible because they share a common humanoid ancestor. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Chase_(episode) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Chase_(episode)
- sydthrowaway 5y agoThe actress is also The main Founder in DS9
- roberttod 5y agoI hope that also applies to the evolution of morals for intelligent lifeforms. I think it's safer to assume any aliens will have bad intentions but maybe any lifeform that can build interstellar technology has come to the same conclusions that we (albeit slowly) are coming to.
- caymanjim 5y agoI don't think any sophisticated intelligent beings could evolve without their primary social interaction being cooperative. You can't build a spaceship if you don't learn to get along with others. You wouldn't evolve complex thought or even language without social pressure. This doesn't necessarily automatically translate to cross-species cooperation, or even intra-species, as evidenced by our own history of wars and subjugation, but in the grand scheme of things, our baseline is trending towards more peaceful existence. I expect the same pressures that would make aliens follow the same form factor as us would also drive them towards similar social constructs.
- avaldes 5y ago> You can't build a spaceship if you don't learn to get along with others. We literally built rockets and started spacial exploration out of a pissing contest. It has been clearly on mankind history that we don't need to cooperate as a unified peaceful race to advance technological progress.
- rretwer 5y agoI have a somewhat less optimistic view about your points of view. The humans and most of the successful creatures on Earth are terrific natural born killers. Cooperations in humans has emerged only as a way of better milking of resources from otherwise dangerous environments for one individual-at-the-time endevour of surviving. The evolution of complex thought on Earth had a lot to do with other species competing with humans for food, and simultaneously hunting humans as a food source. I share your opinion about not automatic cross-species cooperation, but baselining to peace is not what's happening on our society of speaking predators, most of the order (in the whole planet), of the apparently peaceful society, is being continously kept by sheer force or menace of inmediate violence retribution (nation-states, others). I.E. You could turn-off the lights of big city for a couple of days and few will have doubts about a tragic outcome. As we are the only society of intelligent species (at least, we are speaking folks), we know, we should be carefully analyzing those facts when hypothesizing about alien intentions.
- roberttod 5y ago
- fairity 5y agoI think it’s safe to assume any highly evolved alien species will have moral constructs that support self-preservation. Whether those morals extend to preserving other intelligent life forms (I.e. humans) seems unlikely since the prosperity of other life forms will inevitably lead to more competition for scarce resources. The fact that human moral constructs apply to other intelligent species seems to be a bug that arises solely from the fact that we’re currently capable of out competing all other intelligent species.
- WitCanStain 5y agoThis assumes that the hypothetical aliens draw (ultimately artificial and arbitrary) distinctions between themselves and other intelligent species. Who knows, they might consider us, another intelligent species, to be 'one of them' in some sense and thus deserving of protection.
- namarie 5y agoWhat exactly is a "scarce resource" on a galactic scale? I'd think there isn't one.
- avaldes 5y agoHabitable planets with the exact chemistry to support your species without expensive or slow terraforming.
- jessaustin 5y agoThose could be scarce on a solar scale, but probably not on a galactic one.
- namarie 5y ago1) Not really scarce on a galactic scale and 2) if different species' chemistry are radically different (and why wouldn't they be?) there wouldn't be competition even if habitable planets were scarce.
- benlivengood 5y agoMy optimism says that radical consensual transhumanism might be a universal Schelling point and that if humanity reaches that point we'd fit fairly well into any advanced alien culture that reached the same values. Probably the biggest value difference at that point would be the morality/consciousness thresholds for tiers of personhood. I don't think any morally advanced culture would be willing to accept an indefinite policy of "live and let live" between the cultures as a whole; there are some injustices (slavery, murder, torture) that wouldn't be tolerable to exist in the known universe.
- goatlover 5y agoBut that raises a moral conundrum of interference with an alien culture’s development and impact on their world. On Earth, intervention in other societies has not gone over that well. If you have relatively equal societies in terms of technology, then you risk devastating warfare.
- benlivengood 5y agoIt's definitely a moral conundrum as evidenced by the U.S. civil war, the two World Wars, and some interventions in genocides, contrasted with the lack of intervention in other genocides or in Soviet and Chinese (to pick on the largest) mass murder/starvation of citizens for political reasons. I agree that equally powerful societies face the hardest choice; whether to risk everything to save everyone or to knowingly allow atrocities to continue while preserving themselves.
- mimixco 5y agoI read somewhere that the most likely "alien" visitor is a bacterium, virus, or other organism that rode here on a meteor fragment. That achieves interstellar travel without the need or intelligence or intent. It was also the subject of the terrific movie The Andromeda Strain.
- birdyrooster 5y agoAlso for me was the scariest movie I saw growing up even against Child’s Play, Halloween, Friday 13th.
- mimixco 5y agoYes! Still scary. The realism of it is alarming to this day.
- ncmncm 5y agoIt has no realism at all. Why would an organism with no experience of Earth environment outcompete life evolved to it?
- outworlder 5y agoWhy not? We see invasive species outcompeting native species all the time.
- ncmncm 5y agoThey all come from an extremely similar environment, and typically eat or infest very similar prey/hosts.
- jnurmine 5y agoPerhaps it evolved on a planet with an Earth-like, but much harsher, environment. To draw an analogy from fiction, what would happen if one sent Giger's Alien in all its glory, razor tail and all, to compete in an entry-level boxing match? The Alien has no rules, has acid for blood, tongue-crushes the skull of the referee, and so on.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoSoviet writer/philosopher Ivan Yefremov (probably, the most influential soviet Sci-fi writer) argued rather convincingly, that humanss have ideal body size and layout for intelligent beings, and that extraterrestrial life would probably look somewhat similar.
- genesis126 5y agoGod: "I thought so too"
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoThe article mentions that we have 4 limbs only because the creature that left the sea had 4 fins. It could easily have been 6 or 8. He makes it seem as though 4 was just plain random.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoHaving more limbs is less efficient biomechanically - the creature would need a larger heart to pump blood through al organs, that requires more energy, so such creature would need more food. Now, it is known that creatures can lose limbs through evolution, but never gain them, so it is likely that multi-legged species would gradually lose extra limbs over time.
- Joker_vD 5y ago> creatures can lose limbs through evolution, but never gain them Wait, so where did the limbs come from anyway, if they could not be gained?
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoEarly creatures had mady different body plans. We have 4 (all vertebrates), 6 (insects), 8 (arachnids) and multilegged creatures (millipedes), as well as legless creatures like snakes (who had 4 legs before they lost them). It seems that vertebrates have certain period when this layout was 'cast in stone' [1] [1]: https://biology.stackexchange.com/posts/21793/revisions https://biology.stackexchange.com/posts/21793/revisions
- 4e530344963049 5y agoReduced by 73% Reduced page load from original size of 5.11 MB to 1.36 MB. https://trimread.org/articles/82 https://trimread.org/articles/82
- ramboldio 5y agoIf any life on earth was extraterrestrial, I would bet on fungi. It somehow works too well.
- actusual 5y agoMy grass is in heavy agreement. Mushrooms pop up in my yard within hours of watering.
- ssully 5y agoWhile it's technically not a fungus, I had my first experience with Fuligo septica, or Dog Vomit mold. My wife were gardening in the late evening and went inside as it got dark. About an hour later I let the dogs out and this yellow mass was in the mulch, probably about 6x5" in size. We assumed it was vomit from a racoon or something, but figured it out when it grew back the next day (in two spots this time). I would remove it every morning, but it would grow back for the entire week in different spots in the mulch. It was fascinating, but incredibly gross and kind of creepy!
- larkost 5y agoNote that the mushroom in question has been growing just below the surface for some time. The part we are used to thinking of as a mushroom is, on many species, something like an inflatable flower that is used to release their spores. It is built just below ground over a long time, then inflated at the right moment (rains), and then abandoned while the below-ground main body starts working up the energy to do it all again.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoUnfortunately for them, many are quite tasty.
- ahurmazda 5y agobiggest hope for the survival of human race in the face of an alien onslaught is that we taste like yummy chicken. this way, they will keep us around for a long time
- TheDudeMan 5y agoIt seems likely that a civilization would experience a robot apocalypse/revolution prior to achieving interstellar travel.
- jnwatson 5y agoThe first life we encounter from another civilization might not be evolved at all. Presumably a civilization with the capability of interstellar travel might also have the technology to manipulate the underpinning of life itself. In fact, if we do discover something from another civilization, it is quite reasonable that it would be some sort of Von Neumann probe. It might be made of mechanical parts, "biological" parts, or something in between. A Von Neumann probe would be highly engineered, and might have no trace of evolution to it.
- JetSetWilly 5y agoNot only that - for all we know a biological civilsiation could have existed 3 billion years ago which then spawned a machine civilisation that now has as much relation to its distant origins as we do to some prebiotic soup on Hadean earth.
- sandworm101 5y ago>> A Von Neumann probe ... might have no trace of evolution to it. Except that the very fact that it exists represents many evolved traits. If they are sending probes then their are either curious or expansionist, both evolved traits tied to competition for resources and/or survival. A species totally devoid of any history of evolutionary pressures wouldn't act that way, which is one of many possible great filters: once we have access to the infinite resources of space, perhaps we just stop caring and don't bother expanding. Such logic allows us to learn much simply from the existence of an otherwise silent Von Neumann probe.
- XorNot 5y agoWell also, a Von Neumann probe is a type of life. It's very unlikely that a self-replicating machine would not develop it's own technological drift in the replication protocol.
- sigg3 5y agoIn all likelihood, yes. But when dealing with infinity, we must appreciate the likelihood of the unlikely too. Personally, I favor the prospect of the insanely lucky idiot race, that clumsily and completely by chance manage to launch a probe so seemingly sophisticated that every sentient race that discovers it readily submit to its perceived superiority.
- xtracto 5y agoGreat read, thanks. This is a very interesting subject to me. A couple of years ago I read a theory about alien life that was a bit different from this: Given the age of our universe, sun, earth and humans: Universe 14 000 million Sun 4 600 million Earth 4 550 million Earth Life 3 500 million Humans .2 million (200,000 years) The probability of some alien life being within say, a range of [-.5 mllion, .5 million] of the life on earth is VERY slim. It is most likely that life out there is either in very early stages (protezoric) or that it is way farther than our current form (how will humanity look like in say, another 500,000 years?, assuming it continues to exist and evolve)
- willis936 5y agoThis is assuming independent genesis. Panspermia has a lot of merit.
- machiaweliczny 5y agoI think terdigrades might already be alien. How they evolved on earth?
- superduperycomb 5y agoI believe if you look at their genetics they fit snugly within the tree of life
- andruby 5y agoWhat would be the odds that other planets/habitats have a similar "tree of life"? I don't know. Given the huge number of similarities in DNA, I'd say it's extremely small.
- bumby 5y agoI don’t want to speak for the OP but I read their comment as “why did they evolve certain features that wouldn’t have be reasonable given the evolutionary pressures of earth?” E.g., their ability to survive high levels of radiation or vacuum. There’s some speculation that a large amount of their genetics were transferred from other animals.[1] I wonder how much this muddles the tracing through the evolutionary tree. [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/52/15976.abstract https://www.pnas.org/content/112/52/15976.abstract
- rendall 5y agoThere's an entire genre of these kinds of books that extrapolate generalities (life throughout the Universe) from a single data point (life on Earth), but the truth is, that's not even an educated guess. We do not know if our evolutionary pressures are universal. We do not know if the evolutionary solutions developed here are appropriate even on other Earth-like planets, much less everywhere. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions could lead to radically different planetary environments, necessitating radically different mechanical solutions to survival, some (many, most?) of which we will never have even imagined. What creatures would form under an intense magnetic field? In methane? In close orbit around a dim star? In a hot cloud nebula? Could we even recognize them as alive, much less intelligent? Definitely not if we're looking for bats and monkeys and octopuses No, I think the whole genre of "life is much the same everywhere" suffers from a profound lack of imagination
- theyellowkid 5y ago>There's an entire genre of these kinds of books that extrapolate generalities (life throughout the Universe) from a single data point (life on Earth), but the truth is, that's not even an educated guess. Hey, whatever sells a pop science book pounded out over a long weekend. It's funny how sure everyone was about slowing expansion of the universe and the idea of close rocky planets/distant Jupiters, but only lucky guessers are remembered. It could simply be that patterns for lifeforms on Earth were set so long ago that everything sort of rhymes. Veer that path at the beginning and you end up with a significantly different answer.
- cletus 5y agoI expect that there are some things that are "universal" and some that aren't. For example, if life--any life--forms on a planet, it is likely that some macro-organisms will evolve that consume other organisms. On Earth we have plants that are eaten by animals that are eaten by other animals and so forth and these all act as a form of "battery" in that solar power is converted into energy and increasingly stored in larger "blobs". This is almost necessary for large life to exist. Well, for carnivores at least (eg many whales eat krill and there are a bunch of filter-feeders). So the chemistry of life elsewhere may be similar or it may be totally different but something like a carnivorous trait is I think almost inevitable. Once you have that then certain other traits became almost inevitable. Flight, for example. It may be that flight is impossible given local conditions (eg high gravity, atmosphere or the lack thereof). That doesn't mean we'll end up with feathers and birds per se but evolutionary pressure will likely mean available niches are filled. On Earth almost every environment has life, only really excluding the coldest, driest, highest and deepest of places. Also, consider sensory organs. I expect the ability to detect parts of the EM spectrum, sound, taste/smell and tactile feedback will all likely evolve with sufficient time. And that itself has consequences for what life looks like.
- actusual 5y agoThis is interesting, and I have a more mathematical way of thinking about this. If we were somehow able to segment evolutionary pressures, and normalize their values such that they sum to one, I'd hypothesize that as the average evolutionary pressure goes to zero (meaning high number of evolutionary pressures that are generally uniformly distributed), then this author's hypothesis is true. But as the average evolutionary pressure grows (fewer pressures, or highly skewed distribution of pressures), I imagine it would lead to VERY different looking life. I'd also hypothesize that as the average value increases, it leads to system instability.
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- ncmncm 5y agoSeeing how alien ctenophores seem, despite having evolved here, the thesis seems shaky. Aliens will probably eat, breathe, see, smell, and hear, but might do it in ways that would fail to qualify under definitions we can write based on life we know. And they will probably have processes and senses we don't, or even just don't yet know any earth creatures have.
- feoren 5y agoLight, pressure waves, chemical compositions, temperature, pressure, body position, magnetic field, distance (sonar) -- what is there around us that some life on Earth is not already sensing? What other senses could aliens have?
- ncmncm 5y agoWe don't know, do we? We never would have even looked for a magnetic-line slope-angle sense without inventing compasses, and then also understanding the structure of the earth's magnetic field. Likewise, we only understood echolocation after we invented it; before, we had no clue any animal used it. Octopods have no sense of joint angle. Some bugs taste what they walk on. Thinking the only interesting phenomena in the universe are ones we already know about, or know something useful to do with, is akin to the fundamental failing of TFA.
- armchairhacker 5y agoI always wondered, what if there is "life" that exists going backwards in time? Like, consider our laws of physics, except entropy is decreasing. Imagine a "life form" which interacts with the world, grows, replicates, and evolves backwards in time. So to us, it would seem to start out as a massive colony, then shrink and devolve. To them, we would seem the same. How would you even detect them? Communicate with them? You can't just send a message, because they would instantaneously "forget" it (since they process information backwards), and vice versa. I doubt we could consider them "alive" at all. Also, their laws of physics would be so different. Imagine shards of glass, at rest on our world, suddenly start joining together into a glass bottle. That's what life looks like to them. Yet everything else is the same. They live in the same, the same laws of physics. They could even exist on our planet. Except we exist in a state of increasing entropy, and they exist in a state of decreasing entropy.
- DesiLurker 5y agoits possible but since we are in very very very early (think 10E9 out of 10E100) stages of our universe I'd imagine the reverse part would happen towards the end of our current time, assuming the time reversed processes have same endpoints as time fwd processes.
- prof-dr-ir 5y agoAn intelligent being in a 'state' of decreasing entropy seems a little difficult to imagine. Much more realistic, IMO, would be a civilization that was made entirely of dark matter. Perhaps they might be able to infer our existence if we built some insanely powerful particle accelerator (and vice versa). If not then we would presumable only be able to communicate through gravitational effects...
- carabiner 5y agoThe question isn't whether life could exist in a reversed universe, but whether this universe could exist in slices within ours like in the movie Tenet.
- yawaworht1978 5y agoWe humans have only our definition of life form. These are limited by physics and our logic. However, we can't even see the whole universe, with no scientific break through, we never will. We don't exactly know the full story of the big bang, we can't explain the very beginning. We don't know what happens in black holes, our logic rules literally breaks down there. I could well be that there are life forms which we couldn't even imagine, which are not limited by our known physics. We know a little bit about space time and gravity and the elements. Dark matter still unexplained, no universal formula for everything in sight, i have seen DNA mentioned, maybe some creatures do not need any DNA. Too many factors are unresolved, we don't know whether there have been, are or will be totally different species. Imagine, at one point in history, earth didn't even exist, before animals, there were only bacteria. Earth lifetime is nothing on the grand scale of things. Humans are a more intelligent version of very common mammals. With a couple more things gone wrong, like a flu or smarter predator animal in the past, humans might have never come to be. I greatly appreciate scientists and people discovering and accumulating the knowledge, and I understand the scientific methods have to be followed accurately, else we diverge into pure speculation. But limiting possible alien life to earth like planets might not be all there is.
- wuunderbar 5y ago> Earth lifetime is nothing on the grand scale of things. Nit: Isn't the estimated age of the universe 14 billion and earth 4.5 billion? I wouldn't call that nothing.
- varispeed 5y agoI used to explain to myself what was before the universe - that it simply didn't exist, just like myself didn't exist, but in fact my body is a continuation of life since its inception - like my parents knew their parents (or at very least they had a brief contact with their mothers), their parents knew their parents and so on back to something that sparked life, but that something also must have come from something. So still can't get my head around what was before the universe. I know these visualisations that show for example that something that has beginning and end can be divided infinitely, but when I picture it, this exists in some sort of space.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoThe Cambrian Explosion shows that life can do all sorts of divergent things. The similarity of many current life forms (e.g. fish that are totally unrelated but work about the same) has more to do with environmental pressures producing similar results, that it has to do with what's possible?
- drdeadringer 5y agoI recall a Youtube video [can't find link right now] between Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson where they discuss probable expectations of alien biology based on parallel//independent evolution on Earth. Eyes were one example.
- petters 5y ago> there are certain things we can still say about them with reasonable certainty. Topping the list: They evolved. This is far from certain. They can be designed by someone who was designed by someone who evolved, for example. The evolved life forms may be extinct for millions of years. Even simple life forms on other planets may be designed, e.g. for someones (analogous to) amusement.
- petters 5y agoFollow-up: Earth is at a tipping point right now. So far life has been governed by evolution. But within a short time (≤10,000 years, say) it will likely be possible to simulate a human brain quite cheaply. Then things will get weird quite quickly. See Robin Hanson's book about "Ems." For these reasons I think we can expect that aliens really will be quite alien to us.
- godelski 5y agoThere's a lot of "we only have humans for our definition" or "we only have Earth life" but I think these comments miss a lot. Let's really break down what we would expect to see in intelligent and comparable (or even more advanced) life from extraterrestrials. We know they have to use tools. You might point to crows, dolphins, or others and note that they use tools. But they don't in the same way that apes do. We're much better equipped to manipulate objects by using hands than using a mouth. Tentacles might be a better comparison but actually fingers allow for a lot of fine manipulation. Though I'm sure octopi could make tools that better work for them there's some mechanical reasons to believe hands are better. I mean there's the fractal nature of an arm helps with fine manipulation. We know there's things like milk that help impart high nutrient content diets to young and there are correlations between lactate and fat to brain mass. We know this is a more efficient delivery system than say what birds to: eat, per-digest, and regurgitate. We actually expend a lot of energy to create milk. These are just two (very incomplete and naive) examples, but what I'm trying to say is that not all options are equally likely. Maybe it won't be a hand. Maybe it'll be a tentacle with fractaling appendages (personally I wouldn't expect this because such a system is more complex) but I wouldn't expect something with (non-vestigial) wings, especially like a bat wing. Membranes can be easily punctured when working with objects and makes it hard to reach into confined spaces because of the necessity for large surface area to be able to fly. So while yes, we only have Earth as a reference point we also have a lot of physics, biology, evolutionary pressures, game theory, and an understanding of tools and mechanics to lean on as well. I do think this does provide some restrictions to what is likely. _Not everything is on the table or equally likely._ I don't think it's naive to think that we have some good ideas of some basic characteristics that alien life would look like (we can apply similar ideas to non-highly intelligent life). I think it's naive to believe that anything is possible. These are claims that "sound smart" but are very naive and actually demonstrate a lack of basic knowledge. So can we stop pretending like astrobiologists are idiots and haven't thought about this stuff? I don't know about you but I trust them more than I trust myself. They've spent significantly more time thinking about these things and have a far better background than us (except the handful of biologists and astrobiologists that are here).
- ajoy 5y agoI think we have to consider the possibility (most likely), that the advanced versions of these lifeforms are much further along the evolutionary tree than we are. They might have evolved like us, but continued evolving and now look nothing like us.
- NonContro 5y agoWon't all extraterrestrial life just look like crabs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
- nbm546 5y agoStudies like this show how much we humans have no imagination. Sure, there will be Da Vincis, Einsteins, Pollocks along the way, but they are not the standard not very imaginative sapiens-sapiens by any measure.
- seph-reed 5y ago"Evolution" as we know it is just a phase At a certain point, there's no limits to survivability. You can redesign yourself in any way, and not die from it (or have back-ups if you do).
- marcodiego 5y agoPrions are the simplest naturally occurring replicating structure I know of. Maybe there are resilient prions around, maybe they occur naturally in other very different environments... maybe there are alien prions.
- ryankrage77 5y agoSome sci-fi concepts make for interesting jumping-off points when theorising about alien life. Perhaps there are aliens that have evolved or learned how to exploit physics as-yet unknown to us, giving them abilities akin to magic. Entities/shards from Worm come to mind. How about purely informational beings with no physical body. Could they be considered 'alive?'. We can already simulate the nervous system of a nematode (http://openworm.org/ http://openworm.org/), what if you scale that up to a fruit fly? Or an octopus? If it's 'thinking' in exactly the same way as a flesh-and-blood creature, is it conscious? Sapient? Sentient?