Take all your knowledge about green, large disgusting insects, or grey humanoids with big oval eyes, and leave them to horror films and science-fiction thrillers. A new study suggests that the ugly aliens people commonly imagine might not be so funny-looking in reality. In fact, if they are indeed real, they might look very similar not to animals or ET, but to humans.
One of the problems with trying to understand how aliens look like is that we don’t know exactly anything about them — we don’t even know if their existence is real or just a myth. We can only imagine how they would walk, breath, feel, think, and probably the most important thing: feed.
However, British scientists discovered that they might have passed through life-processes similar to ours, including natural selection. Thus, shaping their bodies with many of our characteristics.
Previous research about evolution practically explains that we are how we are thanks to significant transitions. We became more complex because we developed from simple organisms into a higher status — making us able to be and look as we do today.
Just like us, aliens might have done it too.
Natural selection and evolution on another planet
Million of years ago, Earth passed through conditions so extreme that we wouldn’t even be able to breathe as we do right now if they continued. When everything started to calm, simple organisms began to develop, and then to adapt to the hard environment. Soon after, human life would appear as we know it.
Knowing that aliens passed through natural selection just like us, might shed light on not only their physical behavior but also physiological. However, this is more complex because we would have to know millions of years of history, and the actual lives of the extra-terrestrial society.
If these significant transitions didn’t occur, we definitely wouldn’t have two eyes, two arms, legs, mouth, brain, or any other parts of our body.
Sam Levin, from the University of Oxford, is the lead researcher on the first study performed to explain the physical composition and appearance of foreign life forms. According to him, aliens might have undergone natural selection just like us, making them able to evolve and adapt to new environments — thus, becoming wiser or stronger.
“A fundamental task for astrobiologists (those who study life in the cosmos) is thinking about what extraterrestrial life might be like,” says Sam Levin, the researcher in Oxford’s department of zoology. “But making predictions about aliens is hard.”
Oxford’s lead researcher said that he based the study mostly on the unique example of life he has: “life on Earth.” According to Levin, we have made “mechanistic” predictions about aliens taking what we see on our planet, and also common knowledge — like chemistry, geology, and physics.
What makes this study the first of its kind is that scientists used evolutionary theory to make “predictions that are independent of Earth’s details.” This might be the appropriated way to estimate more about our space-neighbors.
The researchers said this study made them feel very excited about finding other life-forms in space. If scientists are right, someday we might know unique things about our own species — like technological advances, the development of another global human population, life meaning, or what happens to us when we die.
We still have to wait until we see one of them — if they exist
Although scientists suggested facts about the appearance of aliens, this can only be proved when they encounter a specimen. This is why Levin said he can’t still predict which features they would have — like legs, arms, or eyes. That’s further information that scientists have not accessed yet.
However, Levin believes natural selection and evolution gave the team a valuable “tool” and point of view to make them understand more about extra-terrestrial life. In the paper, he attaches a few examples “of the kinds of strong predictions” they were able to do thanks to this theory.
“By predicting that aliens have undergone major transitions – which is how complexity has arisen in species on earth, we can say that there is a level of predictability to evolution that would cause them to look like us,” Levin said. “Like humans, we predict that they are made-up of a hierarchy of entities, which all cooperate to produce an alien.”
Just like humans, aliens might also be organized in a hierarchy. Thus, having different organisms to “eliminate conflicts, maintain cooperation, and keep the organism functioning. “
We already know that there are hundreds of galaxy besides ours, and space is so huge that we can’t certainly say there’s no life outside of our planet. According to the researchers, there are potential “hundreds of thousands of habitable planets” just in our galaxy alone.
When talking about the existence of aliens, Levin said that “we can’t say whether or not we’re alone on Earth, but we have taken a small step forward in answering, if we’re not alone, what our neighbors are like.” – the Daily Mail reported.
It will be just a matter of time to know if there are indeed extraterrestrial life forms.
Source: Science Daily