Movies and science fiction literature fuel the belief that aliens are monster-like beings very different from humans. However, research says that aliens may look more closely similar to humans than they think.
The media has long-defined extraterrestrial life as horrible and hostile creatures with the sole goal of controlling or dominating humanity. If not their green appearance, they’re typically imagined as reptilian creatures with extremely non-human traits and equipped with incredibly advanced technology.
People have been exposed to such imagery from science fiction movies, TV shows, and even books like Star Trek, Star Wars franchises, and Doctor Who. Star Wars shows the many planets, cultures, lifeforms, and advanced technology outside Earth. Star Wars portray extraterrestrial life as creatures making peace with humanity, and Doctor Who is chiefly a story of protecting humans from hostile aliens, the extraterrestrial.
While these materials are highly entertaining, they are only creative interpretations of how these creatures must be without a factual basis. Unsurprising, given how tricky it is to find evidence that extraterrestrial life even exists in the first place.
However, if they exist, isn’t it a massive wonder what they would look like?
This blog aims to describe how aliens might look according to some resources and studies. What form do they take, according to research? Here are some accounts from experts to give you their best guess and the closest description of the extraterrestrial’s appearance.
Microbial Life
A mathematician, astronomer, and astrobiologist developed the astrobiological theory known as panspermia. This posits that life on Earth arrived as microbes traveling through space on meteors and interstellar dust. He derived this theory from the assumption that microbial life landed billions of years ago during the Hadean period. This was around the time when numerous meteorites hit the planet.
In a paper published in August 2017, he suggests that extraterrestrials might have been deposited around the universe and on the moon during this collision. The recent evidence he gathered reopens the possibilities of microbial life existing within the lunar surface.
Soft-Bodied Fossils
A retired International Space Station (ISS) commander thinks the bizarre 500-million-year-old soft-bodied fossils in Canada’s Burgess Shale hold some clues and structure to this curiosity.
“It’s so wildly different to the life we’re used to. There was such wild experimentation through Earth’s four billion years of life.” He notes that there might be life on Mars, Enceladus, or Europa, which look like an organism that died during a mass extinction. However, he adds, “But I might have that completely wrong. Interpretations reflected on Star Trek might be a closer representation.”
Human-Looking
This description would be the farthest from what people have predicted. Whether aliens have big green eyes or will walk on two legs is still debated. However, scientists believe evolutionary theory provides an additional tool to understand what aliens will be like.
They have shown some examples of robust predictions people can make with it. Like humans, extraterrestrials are predicted to have a hierarchy of entities cooperating to produce an alien. At every level of the organism, scientists think there will be mechanisms to maintain cooperation, eliminate conflict, and keep the organism functioning.
Scientists at the University of Cambridge assert that the same universal laws of biology on Earth also apply to aliens. Among these, the most important is that species, human or extraterrestrial, evolve by natural selection, the bedrock idea of evolutionary biology proposed by Charles Darwin. No matter how alien biochemistry works or planetary environments differ, scientists argue that some version of Darwinian selection would work and channel alien evolution to restricted possibilities.
There exist thousands of habitable planets throughout the universe. People are still on the track of studying and discovering whether or not humanity is alone in the vast space. By forecasting that aliens have undergone major transitions – which is how difficulty has arisen in species on planet Earth, we can say that there is a predictability level to evolution that causes them to look like us humans.
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