Scientists have figured out what aliens look like: they may look much more normal than previously thought.
According to Express, according to new research, the foundations of biological evolution should be the same throughout the universe, that is, natural selection on any planet will lead to the fact that aliens will look exactly like representatives of the human race.
Scientists at Oxford University were the first to apply evolutionary theory to predict how extraterrestrial beings might look and act.
“The main challenge for astrobiologists is to think about what extraterrestrial life could be,” said Sam Levin, a researcher in the Department of Zoology at Oxford. “But making predictions about aliens is difficult. For this we have only one example of life - life on Earth. Past approaches in astrobiology have been largely mechanistic, taking into account what we see on Earth and our knowledge of chemistry, geology, and physics. We propose an alternative approach that is to use evolutionary theory and forecasting that is independent of the details of the earth. This is a useful approach because the theoretical predictions will apply to aliens whose bodies are based on silicon, have no DNA, and breathe nitrogen, for example.”
Scientists speculate that alien life may be influenced by the same environmental factors as on Earth, where complex life forms result from major transitions - extreme events that force a group of individual organisms to evolve into one higher-level organism: like cells becoming multicellular organisms.
“We still can't tell if the aliens will walk on two legs or if they have big green eyes. But we believe that evolutionary theory offers a unique complementary tool for trying to understand what aliens look like, and we've provided some examples of how we can make predictions with it,”Levin said. “Assuming that aliens have undergone major changes - this is how complex species arose on Earth, we can say that there is an evolutionary level of predictability, due to which they would look like us. Like humans, they are made up of a hierarchy of beings that interact with each other.”