Alien Evolution

Excellent post, if I could way above you, I would. This thread is getting saved straight in my favourites and also being printed off as I have nothing to do at college tommorrow.

Another Gem ! Two in the same week. May have to visit more often.

Kudos to JBI. What a breath of fresh air ! That was really an entertaining read.

One day, we are really gonna FIND life, perhaps Mars. The instant we do,
Xeno - Biology will leave Sci-Fi and become a true science. And this work along
with a few others will become a direct or indirect input to the speculative areas
of the science.

But there is a dark side of the force, Luke. If JBI decides to do a sequel,
I can suggest some out of the box topics for you. I appreciate the photo documentary by the way.

Seems to me you would really like Star Surgeon by Allen E. Nourse, 1959. (Not
to be confused with Star Surgeon by James White, 1963) Dal was a good ol boy,
even though he wasnt human.

Assuming life originates from water it makes sense we are all symetrical making moving through water easier and more effecient. If you need to walk on land you need legs, if u need to fly you then need wings, nature has given insects,amphibians,reptiles, birds & mammals these and all groups have come up with similar designs. I disagree with the number of scientists who argue alien life would not resemble life as we know it. It's common sense generally it would.

Originally posted by thepostman
Assuming life originates from water it makes sense we are all symetrical making moving through water easier and more effecient. If you need to walk on land you need legs, if u need to fly you then need wings, nature has given insects,amphibians,reptiles, birds & mammals these and all groups have come up with similar designs. I disagree with the number of scientists who argue alien life would not resemble life as we know it. It's common sense generally it would.

Very pleased to see one point I was considering making but I ran out of steam.

Symmetry!

Very few animals are structurally asymmetrical. There are exceptions like flat fish but it seems like a long shot that intelligent life would be asymetrical so out go three legged,one eyed monsters.

Well i though i'd revive this discussion because its such a well written topic,

Has anyone seen the programe "The future is Wild" on animal planet if not check this link out:

animal.discovery.com...

Its basically a what if scenario, humans leave earth and come back 200 million years in the furture to see how life has evolved. Some of the conceptuial animals they have came up with are quite far out but some are quite belivable

There just some of my faves megasquid , flish and toradon .

This program is on bbc2 right now if anyones interested.

An excellent read, and very educational.

I'm still a little fuzzy on what your conclusion was. What I gather is your saying alien life could be of a various form like insectisoid ect., which is easy to imagine. Then you show how some other life forms may appear using aliens depicted in movies, and show that as time goes on we are depicting them more scientifically. All, which I agree with and is thought inspiring. Then all of a sudden you say that we are not being visited, at least not very often, because our planet and we are not that interesting?

I believe that if life can exist it will, and all of it is interesting. Imagine coming into contact with an alien race that is even very similar to our own. Just in what you wrote about our evolution and history, they would have their own evolution and history to study. This would be enough to keep us busy for a while, and additional conclusions on life could be determined having more than one example to learn from. Then we might contact another alien race and the same will continue. Maybe they have contact and knowledge of even more species. In short, we would learn something from every encounter, and it would be no different from aliens visiting us.

Problem is they seem to visit and keep their distance, so we can't learn from them. I can only assume that they tried this in the past with disastrous results, so they try not to intervene.

In any case, I think they would find us interesting, and our planet would be an attractive place to stay, so I think they would and are visiting our little neck of the woods.

To add to your idea of nature coming to the same solution by different means. I think that when we do venture out and find other life, we will find that there are certain rules of nature that will apply on all planets. For example, it would not surprise me that aliens would have similar humanoid forms like us, because of some rule in nature that says this is the form that fosters intelligence the most. Not that it is the only one, but I would bet it is true.

Again, excellent read. Regards.

Originally posted by Hal9000

To add to your idea of nature coming to the same solution by different means. I think that when we do venture out and find other life, we will find that there are certain rules of nature that will apply on all planets. For example, it would not surprise me that aliens would have similar humanoid forms like us, because of some rule in nature that says this is the form that fosters intelligence the most. Not that it is the only one, but I would bet it is true.

I too, think that the universe is structured. That some aspects of Nature would be universal.

Think about where Humans would be today without opposable thumbs!

We couldn't hold things up to our faces easily , we wouldn't be able to make or use the same types of Tools that we do with our thumbs. Without Tools we would never have gotten this far. You could basically say that the world as we know it today was made possible by our opposable thumbs!