The Science of Aliens, a new exhibition at the Science Museum, reveals that the answer to the perennial question “Are we alone?” may be closer than we thought. While many will be drawn to a presentation of the Daleks and androids that have fuelled the world of sci-fi, and some interesting insights into the more “alien” habitats within the Earth’s crust itself, the real meat lies in the exhibition’s third area. Taking impetus from a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary, Aliens, and working with the producer Nick Stringer, I was part of a team of scientists thrown together to brainstorm new biospheres into existence. We imagined a world with an atmosphere much thicker than that of the Earth. How would life evolve? We can be pretty sure that there will be plants, but here on the satellite we called Blue Moon the forests are gigantic — trees a kilometre high. Swooping through the dense canopy are the stalkers, flying horrors that are vaguely wasp-like but much larger.

Highly social and predatory, they hunt immense flyers, creatures that we dub the sky-whales. The other planet we nick-name Aurelia — it is roughly Earth-sized, but orbiting a much smaller and dimmer star than our Sun. It is different in another important way: gravitational forces have locked Aurelia so that one side is permanently in sunlight, the other in perpetual and icy darkness. Life again adapts, and here we conjure up umbrella-like forests, aquatic foragers known as mudpods, and ostrich-like hunters, the gulphogs. In some ways this is a very stable world, but actually danger is never far away. From lethal predators to the star’s sudden and intense ultraviolet flares, we envisage a dynamic alien ecology.

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I remember seeing this programme, I'm glad it took a different approach other than 'life as we know it'. and the thing is, all these creatures could survive in conditions other than earth's condition.

this museum sounds pretty interesting

cool but my opinion is to stop saying what if and actually find out

omg. there actually might be aliens? id love to find out.... i know this so mediocre and well a little narrowminded but what if they eat us or something and take us over! i know everyones equal and humans are not the only superior human but hello. aliens.

^um.........yes........I`m sure after travelling thousands upon thousands of light years they would just decide to eat us or destroy us. They may be radically different from us if they exist and they may very well wish to destroy us but I find it highly unlikely!

But we don't have to speculate. We know that aliens exist, and we also know that they are all humanoids. That means that some aspects of evolution proceed the same way everywhere. For instance, we can understand by Darwinian reasoning how being bipedal primates with two free hands and a The Humanoids, edited by Charles Bowen (1969). This comprises most of the scientific data on the subject. A scientific fact is one where we can rule out all observable alternatives. If we give such a fact the valuel of one, then mere apocryphal lights in the sky that could be a dozen things that cannot be ruled out will have a value of zero. No how many zeroes we add, we still have zero. Thus, it irritates me that television documentaries never mention the landed occupant cases. I guess they do not provide any visual footage. Just good data.

Cebrakon