“By now it has become a common futurist prediction and science fiction plot device that intelligent and sentient life forms can be created which are not biochemical in nature and are thus fundamentally different from all currently known life,” distinguished Princeton astrophysicist Edwin TurnerSend an email to The Daily Galaxy “Whether or not this would actually be possible,” he explains, “depends on the nature and origin of consciousness, a topic about which we have little more than entertaining whistling-in-the-dark guesses at this point and no clear path toward obtaining any better understanding of this deep mystery.”
Natural Selection Shapes Aliens
In a landmark 2017StudyPublished in the International Journal of Astrobiology, scientists from Oxford demonstrated that aliens can be shaped by the same mechanisms and processes that have shaped us humans. They evolve to become stronger and fitter over time.
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Only One Sample is known from the Universe
“A fundamental task for astrobiologists is thinking about what extraterrestrial life might be like.” said Sam Levin, a researcher in Oxford’s Department of Zoology. “But making predictions about aliens is hard,” he noted “We only have one example of life – life on Earth — to extrapolate from. Past approaches in the field of astrobiology have been largely mechanistic, taking what we see on Earth, and what we know about chemistry, geology, and physics to make predictions about aliens.”
Complexity’s Arrow
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.
“In our paper,” said Levin, “we offer an alternative approach, which is to use evolutionary theory to make predictions that are independent of Earth’s details. This is a useful approach, because theoretical predictions will apply to aliens that are silicon based, do not have DNA, and breathe nitrogen, for example.”
Alien Natural Selection
The team used the idea of alien natural Selection as a framework to address extra-terrestrial evolutionary and space complexity.
A handful of events known as major transitions have led to an increase in species complexity on Earth. These transitions occur when a group of separate organisms evolve into a higher-level organism – when cells become multi-cellular organisms, for example. Both empirical and theoretical data indicate that major transitions require extreme conditions.
The paper makes predictions about complex aliens’ biological makeup and gives some insight into what they might look like.
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Mirror Sapiens
“We still can’t say whether aliens will walk on two legs or have big green eyes<” said Levin. “But we believe evolutionary theory offers a unique additional tool for trying to understand what aliens will be like, and we have shown some examples of the kinds of strong predictions we can make with it.”
“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.”
‘Like humans, we predict that they are made-up of a hierarchy of entities, which all cooperate to produce an alien. Mechanisms will be in place at every level of the organism to resolve conflict, maintain cooperation and keep it functioning. Some examples can be provided.
‘There are potentially hundreds of thousands of habitable planets in our galaxy alone. 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.’
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Rare Evolutionary Transitions
In the next 2019 Research Oxford University has developed a statistical model to show that there is little chance of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. “It’s still unknown,” observes mathematical biologist Michael Bonsall, “how abundant extraterrestrial life is, or whether such life might be intelligent. On Earth, numerous evolutionary transitions were needed for complex intelligent life to emerge, and this occurring relatively late in Earth’s lifetime is thought to be evidence for a handful of rare evolutionary transitions.”
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“In addition to the evolutionary transition,” Bonsall, “the emergence of intelligent life also requires a set of cosmological factors to be in place. These factors include whether the planet is located in the right area for water to exist, whether life emerges from it, and whether the planet itself can be considered habitable. Most crucial in this is the lifetime of the star the planet is orbiting; if this lifetime is short in comparison to the necessary evolutionary transitions for life, then intelligent observers might never get a chance to emerge (often referred to as the Great Filter).”
Avi ShporerResearch Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research via Oxford University Sam LevinAnd Edwin Turner.
Avi Shporer Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google ScholarAvi was once a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
