• Question: If sentient life exists outside of Earth, is it likely to resemble us?

    Asked by stormwhite to Arttu, Ceri, James_M, Philip on 22 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Ceri Brenner

      Ceri Brenner answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      hmmmm i’m not sure it would. We have evolved over time to adapt to our earth and so unless the planet where the alien life has come from is exactly the same as ours (and what’s the chances of that?) then i guess it wouldn’t resemble us physically, but is our intelligence a product of evolution or is that something that is unique to sentient life? If so, then they might resemble us in terms of intelligence or the way they think. Wow, it’s quite philosophical if you think about it beyond appearance.

    • Photo: James M Monk

      James M Monk answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      I don’t know. When you think about it, most of the land-living vertebrates have been similar to us throughout the course of Earth’s history (4 limbs, torso, head…). One argument might be that if there was an alternative body shape that was equally good or better then evolution might have exploited that, so the 4-limbs shape is already optimal. On the other hand, maybe it was just chance, and we all evolved from the same basic body-shape.

      Certainly if an alien planet has substantially different gravity to us then that would affect any creatures living there.

      So I think an alien might resemble us, but wouldn’t be surprised it it looked completely different.

    • Photo: Arttu Rajantie

      Arttu Rajantie answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      In principle they could be very different. One can even imagine life forms that are not based on carbon like us. For example, the astrophysicist and science fiction writer Fred Hoyle played with the idea that a gas cloud in space could be an intelligent organism in his book “The Black Cloud”. One reason why it would be really interesting to find other life in space is that if it has similarities with us, it suggest that that is the only way life can develop.

      Alternatively, it could mean that we somehow share the same origin. For example, comets could carry some building blocks of life in a frozen form for long distances across space.

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