How to look for extraterrestrial life? This question is trying to answer a variety of astrobiologists, writers and artists, ultimately bringing to our world the images of Vulcans and Klingons and other exotic forms that are not like any one earthly form. But often the vision of these artists is limited. As noted by the research team of the University of Oxford, all of astrobiology attempts to “draw” extraterrestrial life, as a rule, take the basis of life on earth and extrapolated it using chemistry, Geology and physics.
Seems logical, isn’t it? For example, the eyes on the planet are found everywhere — it would be logical to find them and the aliens? We — life forms based on carbon, so it would be worthwhile to expect that forms of life on the other side of the galaxy will also be based on it?
However, according to researchers from Oxford, which was published in November 2017, a study in the International Journal of Astrobiology, natural selection is the most solid Foundation on which we can build their predictions about extraterrestrial life; natural selection remains directed force that leads us to life as we know it. In the absence of the Creator, the authors point out, natural selection is necessary for the development of the body, and we probably did not consider his body, if he has not passed through natural selection.
Although natural selection is necessary for life, scientists added that the development of complex life requires significant transitions, when several parts of the body “striving for the same goal.” These transitions, in turn, caused by restrictive environmental conditions. Combine this line of thinking with a more mechanistic extrapolations of chemistry, Geology and physics, and you will have a more reliable way to predict the shape of an alien.
And what could be this form? Scientists definitely do not point to the Klingons and Vulcans as examples, but they can actually be more like us than we think, and so many believe.
Cambridge palaeobiology Simon Conway Morris believes that aliens may be very similar to us, partly due to convergent evolution, an aspect of natural selection that leads to the independent evolution of key biological traits such as eyes and wings.
Birds and bats, for example, have independently developed the ability to fly. The alien life form emerged from one and the same process of natural selection may develop the same adaptation for navigation in the environment. Their eyes can be very different from our own, but serve the same purpose.
Conway Morris even goes so far as to apply this principle to knowledge. He argues that human intelligence may be a cosmic inevitability, although the physical brain itself can be quite inhumane.
And if aliens think like us, does that mean they philosophize as we are? Writer Scott Bakker thinks it is. He believes that intelligent aliens will beckon the same uncertainty that affect us here on Earth. They may also wonder how to look like aliens and how they can think of.
Aliens can look like us externally and internally due to natural selection
Ilya Hel