Hollywood films and science fiction literature fuel the belief that aliens are other-worldly, monster-like beings, who are very different to humans. But new research suggests that we could have more in common with our extra-terrestrial neighbours, than initially thought.
In a new study published in the International Journal of Astrobiology scientists from the University of Oxford show for the first time how evolutionary theory can be used to support alien predictions and better understand their behaviour. They show that aliens are potentially shaped by the same processes and mechanisms that shaped humans, such as natural selection.
The theory supports the argument that foreign life forms undergo natural selection, and are like us, evolving to be fitter and stronger over time.
Sam Levin, a researcher in Oxford's Department of Zoology, said: "A fundamental task for astrobiologists (those who study life in the cosmos) is thinking about what extra-terrestrial life might be like. 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.
"In our paper, 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."
Using this idea of alien natural selection as a framework, the team addressed extra-terrestrial evolution, and how complexity will arise in space.
Species complexity has increased on the Earth as a result of a handful of events, known as major transitions. These transitions occur when a group of separate organisms evolve into a higher-level organism - when cells become multi-cellular organisms, for example. Both theory and empirical data suggest that extreme conditions are required for major transitions to occur.
The paper also makes specific predictions about the biological make-up of complex aliens, and offers a degree of insight as to what they might look like.
Sam Levin added: "We still can't say whether aliens will walk on two legs or have big green eyes. 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 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. At each level of the organism there will be mechanisms in place to eliminate conflict, maintain cooperation, and keep the organism functioning. We can even offer some examples of what these mechanisms will be.
"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 neighbours are like."
Explore further:
The aliens are silent because they're dead
More information:
'Darwin's aliens' International Journal of Astrobiology (2017)
Going
Eikka
That sounds awfully close to the Gaia hypothesis, which simply asserts that everything is ultimately at balance all the time - that even viruses, germs and cancer have some ulterior purpose in the homeostasis of life.
It doesn't count for the fact that natural selection doesn't care if -you- survive, or that any particular organism resolves its internal conflicts. It only matters that it survives long enough to reproduce, and that reproduction as a species doesn't need to be a stable system either - it just goes on as long as it may.
All the organisms are "broken" in this sense - none of them are in balance or conflict-free, or ultimately "functioning" - they're simply there because they haven't died out yet.
Jayarava
This is why I wrote an essay 3 years ago titled "Why Artificial Intelligences Will Never Be Like Us and Aliens Will Be Just Like Us." (27 June 2014) http://jayarava.b...ver.html
Convergence will make "aliens" entirely comprehensible. However, if we are talking about finding non-terrestrial life, say in the subterranean sea on Enceladus, then there is no reason why it will be like life on earth, except that it must be based on chemistry and chemistry places the same limits on it that it does here.
sirdumpalot
torbjorn_b_g_larsson
@Eikka: Yes, that too. I am sorry for my unintentional down vote, I was aiming at 4 but the web page GUI is unforgiving, I seem unable to correct.
antialias_physorg
Really? In most movies aliens are vaguely humanoid (because until recently you needed an actor to slap some paint onto underneath) and also invaribaly almost human size (because filming interactions between a human and a mountainous creature or a human and something the size of a single cell organism is rather hard).
Oh...and they also had to be sexy a lot of the time.
If anything Hollywood films have been remarkably dull in imagining aliens.
As for evolutionary theory. That only helps if you positthe environment it works in, first. The environment selects (and also the interaction between individuals of a species once they start having an impact on the environment - like making a dent in the food supply. at that point you get intra-species competition.)
Dark_Solar
KBK
Interesting realistic aliens in media, are not going to entertain the masses, so no movies about them, overall.
Reality appeals to the eclectic and intelligent, which is a small group. And if realistic aliens somehow make it to the general public, then the real issues will be elsewhere and appeal to that small eclectic group again. Just the way it is.
Even science, if it is imagined as being university educated and more...still has it's bell curve and issues in this regard. The same problem of the masses: telling the difference between the visionaries and the crackpots.
Just like the masses, they can't really understand that there is an even more intelligent and more eclectic outsider group which is more connected to the coming realities - than they are.
High intelligence hides and riddles - for all the right reasons.
rrwillsj
This 'article' is nothing more than an outline for a comicbook or an animated cartoon.
Watch out for those copyright infringements!
Jason Chapman
Nero_Caesar
TheGhostofOtto1923
This allows our bodies to be more efficient in allocating resources to support bigger brains, which in turn can invent and use better tools and weapons, as well as participate in more complex societies.
Using tech requires rigid limbs which can exert opposing forces and carry heavy objects. Opposing limbs can pound, hack, saw, twist, and pry materials. They can knap flint, cut firewood, sew garments, and eventually turn screws.
Screws are essential to complex machinery which must be assembled and disassembled for repair.
So we can expect sentient beings to have at least 2 limbs for motation and 2 for manipulating materials, as well as the binocular vision of predators.
Jayarava
Jayarava
Otherwise I agree. Classical mechanics principles apply everywhere on the scales of mass, length, and energy we are talking about. Levers and fulcrums, grabbing and holding, applying energy, these are all universals. Getting into space requires any organism to live in a particular kind of environment and to solve a very particular set of engineering and technical problems.
For me metallurgy - from primitive minding and smelting, to blacksmithing, to the production of high-tensile strength, high melting-point alloys, is the iconic range of technologies. It requires certain abilities as you describe. Without it no alien will ever get into space, let alone cross parsecs to get to us.
TheGhostofOtto1923
It gave us the ability to kill dangerous animals at a distance. It enabled us to clear the forests and fields of the predators which had been hunting us and keeping our members in check.
Once we crossed this threshold, our principal enemy became the people who wanted the same food we did.
Humans began to assemble in ever larger groups for protection. Natural selection began to give way to group selection, and individual fitness yielded to the ability to contribute to the fitness of the tribe.
Any species which began to eliminate their attritive elements through technology, wherever we may expect to find them, would have had to follow the same path that we did.
cont>
TheGhostofOtto1923
Through enhanced conflict our brains swelled and our knowledge of the universe accrued. How do you explain the absence of technology among your 'sentient' aquatic animals?
Perhaps octupi could one day fashion pointy fishbones and build rock fortifications but they would first have to kill the fish that eat them.
TheGhostofOtto1923
TheGhostofOtto1923
As a result they were outgrown and overwhelmed.
Telekinetic
Since most of you need a peer-reviewed paper to believe anything, these beings aren't in the habit of allowing themselves to be tested. It's actually the other way around, which has been known, under lock and key, by governments for a very long time.
Eddorian
ddaye
Well yes, for their very first voyage off their own planet, which in our case used combustion engines and carried Captain Bligh's sextant for navigational backup. But to get here they must do interstellar travel, so their early fire-and-sextant space technology will likely be as tiny an influence on their travel here as chimps' bug-fishing twigs are a tiny influence on nuclear weapons.
Mimath224
While I admit you may be right your comment does say one thing pertinent to the article. That if they are already here then they have to ability to adapt to our atmosphere which suggest that there own native atmosphere/environment/evolution isn't that different from our own. But being a 'romantic rebel' I like to think of ET as life as we DON'T know it, Ha!
cantdrive85
thomasct
sascoflame
EnricM
Have these scientists by chance seen this image in a dream? And most importantly, were there any other creatures in that dream? Maybe some visions of a sunken city, or (may God keep my sanity) a hint of a creature of vaguely humanoid shape, winged and with tentacles where it's face should have been?
Were this the case, gentlemen, I am afraid that He Who Sleeps Eternally make be close to awaken.
EnricM
Ah, yes. The Vegans are nice people, I love their cuisine, But the people from Lyra are kinda annoying to have as neighbors, specially when they practice playing their national instrument, the Lyre.
EnricM
Yes, that's totally true and documented. The newer models of spacecraft were however light-bulb shaped, this was abandoned for more environmental friendly CFLs or LED which also allow the spaceships to be made in more fancy colours and designs.
antialias_physorg
Exactly. Evolution can go round and round in cycles. This has happened several times in the history of predator-prey relationships, where prey developed ever tougher hides to the point of scales and plates (at the cost of becoming slower) while predators evolved larger jaw muscles and longer teeth/claws (also at the cost of speed due to increased mass. If you look at something like the sabretooth tiger then that thing could hardly sprint).
At which point prey evolved to be faster/lighter causing predators to shed mass and the cycle started all over again.
It didn't lead to exactly the same organism each time around, but the record shows that there was no one direction towards armor/teeth/speed/size/whathaveyou where organisms evolve to continuously.
Predictability only works in a static environment. And by all we know environments are anything but static over the course of history.
Osiris1
antialias_physorg
Maybe we're just looking for heliographs where people have invented the telephone?
Or they are just getting smart and not broadcasting stuff to places where it doesn't matter? Even we are starting to figure out that when you want to convey information from A to B it's more efficient (read: cheaper) to do a directed broadcast instead of blasting it in a 720° arc.
Especially across large distance you want to do directed broadcasts, otherwise your power needs explode. And since we're not of interest to them why would they even broadcast in our direction? There'd be no point to it.
Moreover if they have even close to light speed travel then sending information pods is a LOT better in terms of certainty that the information will arrive and not be overheard.
The universe could be filled to the brim with information shuttle traffic or directed EM broadcasts and we'd never see it with our current 'eyes'.
rrwillsj
It has been penned; that if wishes were horses, we'd be up to our eyebrows in manure! And here we all with a long list of steershit commentaries.
Osiris1
Jayarava
"Strictly speaking" this is wrong. Because earth has life it is better at turning low entropy sunlight into higher entropy heat. For every photon of visible light that falls on the earth, life radiates 20 photos of infra-red light back out into space. This is much more efficient that any other planet we know of. Overall entropy always increases, even more so in the presence of life.
There are now many different arguments for complex chemistry being the thermodynamic path of least resistance in the environment of the early earth. The reverse Krebs Cycles, for example, is just bucket chemistry - throw in the ingredients, and at a given concentration the reactions spontaneously take place producing more complex organic molecules. This could easily have occurred at the sites of warm alkaline undersea vents.
Jayarava
Otherwise I think we agree on the role of tech in the evolution of any space-faring species and the parallelism that this would inevitably lead to.
TheGhostofOtto1923
"Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Eighteenth-century philosophers[FULL STOP]
-Hmmm perhaps you're right. A corrupted term which could apply to just about any animal or machine.
How about sapience then?
"Wisdom or sapience is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight. There appears to be consensus that wisdom is associated with attributes such as compassion, experiential self-knowledge, non-attachment and virtues such as ethics and benevolence..."
-A virtual stew of indecipherable philo doublespeak.
Perhaps knowledge-recorders and tool/weapon users is better-
TheGhostofOtto1923
'Self-aware' is when a fly perceives your hand approaching to squish it, and flys away to protect itself.
Combing our hair in a mirror or praying to a god is just another degree of complexity.
Any attempts to make it more complicated than that is philo perfidy.
rrwillsj
While our actions are the most stupid of self-destructive misbehavior.
torbjorn_b_g_larsson
torbjorn_b_g_larsson
Not that old creationist drivel again, clad in nauseating religious pseudoscience and false claims to make *sure* the discussion stops right there. Besides what Jayarava notes, obviously life as everything else obeys thermodynamics (which is physics, not engineering) , it obeys it precisely in the way of engineers: organisms are fridges! ("Freezing" order inside by radiating heat on the outside, driven by internal heat machines of cell metabolism.)
More science, less superstition and/or false claims on nature, please!
Moltvic