Extraterrestrial

Could human-like aliens be commonplace ?

By T.K. Randall
July 2, 2015

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) With our own planet being the only known habitable world in the universe it is difficult to predict what an intelligent extraterrestrial life form might look like, especially when taking in to account the sheer number of possible environments that must exist across the cosmos.

According to evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris however it seems that there is actually a pretty good chance that intelligent aliens will turn out to look rather a lot like ourselves."Given the number of potential planets that we now have good reason to think exist, even if the dice only come up the right way every one in 100 throws, that still leads to a very large number of intelligences scattered around, that are likely to be similar to us," he said.

His predictions are based on a theory known as convergence which suggests that evolution is a predictable process that follows a rigid set of rules no matter where it occurs.

"I would argue that in any habitable zone that doesn't boil or freeze, intelligent life is going to emerge, because intelligence is convergent," he said. "One can say with reasonable confidence that the likelihood of something analogous to a human evolving is really pretty high."

Source: Sky News

Tags: Extraterrestrial, Life