Aliens may be more like us than we think

Risingbd Desk: Scientists might finally have worked out what aliens would look like. And they're shockingly familiar. Alien life tends to be imagined as strange powerful monsters: either grey humanoids or insect-like killing machines. But they might actually look a lot more like us than we realised, according to pioneering new work by scientists looking to understand what extraterrestrials would actually look like.

The problem with imagining life on other worlds is that sadly we've only got one example to go by - our own. So we tend to imagine something that either looks like us or looks like something else on earth, but there's no guarantee that would be accurate.

Instead, the new study applies evolutionary theory to understand what alien life might look like. And it finds that it would be subject to the same processes and mechanisms that helped bring us about - leading to the conclusion they might actually look a lot like us, too.

"A fundamental task for astrobiologists (those who study life in the cosmos) is thinking about what extra terrestrial life might be like," said Sam Levin, a researcher in Oxford's Department of Zoology. "But making predictions about aliens is hard."

"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."

That's one reason why scientists are so excited about the possibility of finding life on other planets, for instance - like the suggestion that there is alien life in our own solar system on Saturn's moon Enceladus. Looking at another form of life would signal a profound way of understanding the very possibilities of how living things arise, and what life itself means.

"In our paper, we offer an alternative approach, which is to use evolutionary theory to make predictions that are independent of Earth's details," Levin said.

"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."

Source: The Independent

risingbd/Nov 2, 2017/Mukul