Imagine that the humans of the future manage to travel to other worlds and meet… more humans. According to an astrobiologist at the University of Cambridge, that scenario may be more likely than you think.
In a new interview with the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary paleobiologist in the BBC’s Department of Earth Sciences, stated that researchers can “say with reasonable confidence” that a similar evolution has occurred. the human in other places in the universe.
The core of Morris’s belief comes from the theory of convergent evolution, which states that “random effects eventually average so that evolution converges, tending to produce similar organisms in any given environment.”
The scientist used the examples of flight, which “has evolved independently on Earth at least four times: in birds, bats, insects and pterosaurs.”
In short, the theory of convergent evolution posits that evolution itself is a law of nature and, as a logical end point, it is likely to operate in the same way on different planets as it does here on Earth.
In other words, it is theoretically possible that the blue and green alien humanoids you see in Star Trek or Star Wars may be out there – and may have even visited us as multiple witnesses to close encounters claim.
Morris is not the only Cambridge man who believes that extraterrestrial life would have evolved “analogous to that of a human.”
Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist at the aforementioned British institution, wrote a complete book on the concept of extraterrestrial evolution.
“Because evolution is the explanatory mechanism for life everywhere, then the principles we discovered on Earth should be applicable to the rest of the universe,” Kershenbaum told Quanta magazine earlier this year.
Kershenbaum argued that while it is “tempting” to imagine alien races that do not have the same cultural interests as humans, such as philosophy and literature, we must remember that they did not emerge from a vacuum as advanced technological beings.
Even extraterrestrial life forms with higher technology than humans, Kershenbaum noted, would have “evolved from a pre-technological species.”
“If that pre-technological species went on to develop all the things we have now, it is likely that they were built on building blocks that served that social purpose, things like bonding between group members, passing on useful information and ideas. between them, “he added.
“A pre-tech alien civilization could be singing, dancing, and telling stories like the pre-tech human civilization did, because it has the same purpose.”
It is compelling to imagine other worlds where humanoid life forms, in Kershenbaum’s words, are “singing, dancing and telling stories” as on Earth.
And if the laws of evolution are as strong as Darwinists like Kershenbaum and Morris believe, that increases our propensity to interact and communicate with aliens and, unfortunately, to fight against them as well.
