Star Trek’s Humanoid Aliens May Not Be Far Off
by Andrew Whalen October 18, 2018 (newsweek.com)
• In his new book, The Equation of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution, Charles Cockell, an astrobiologist at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, argues for the possibility of a “universal biology.” Extraterrestrials could look “eerily similar to the life we see on Earth,” said Cockell. “Life on Earth might be a template for life in the universe.”
• The possibility that aliens may be too strange to even recognize as intelligent life has been proposed as a possible response to the Fermi Paradox, which ponders why we haven’t yet encountered signs of extraterrestrial civilization.
• Cockell believes the physical laws underlying evolution likely reverberate up through complex, multicellular organisms, essentially establishing a restricted scope of biological possibilities, many or most of which may already be expressed on Earth. While Cockell’s suppositions are frustratingly untestable, his book gives argumentative validity to our depictions of aliens as four-limbed humanoids with roughly similar sensory apparatus.
• [Editor’s Note] Modern science continues to view life in the galaxy from the standpoint of a Darwinian ‘natural evolution’. But what if ancient beings from a billion years ago became the ‘creators’, and genetically manipulated a variety of infinite types of beings throughout the universe? And what if a creator in our particular part of the galaxy adapted these genetics to a standard human-form template to create the dominant intelligent humanoid being that dominates this section of the galaxy?
It’s commonly accepted that of course extraterrestrial life doesn’t look like aliens do on Star Trek. Real aliens, wherever they are and whatever they may look like, certainly haven’t spent a few hours in a makeup chair to add brow ridges or threat ganglia. The possibility that aliens may be too strange to even recognize as intelligent life has been proposed as a possible response to the Fermi Paradox, which ponders why we haven’t yet encountered signs of extraterrestrial civilization.
But while it may be spectacularly unlikely that alien first contact will be with people who look like us (except with bowl cuts and pointy ears), a new book argues we shouldn’t be so quick to assume extraterrestrial life will be so far out of our biological frame of understanding. Alien life may be more Star Trek than Lovecraft.
The Equation of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution by Charles Cockell, an astrobiologist at the University of Edinburgh, argues for the possibility of a “universal biology.”
“My view is underpinned by a simple proposition,” Cockell writes. “Evolution is just a tremendous and exciting interplay of physical principles encoded in genetic material. The limited number of these principles. The limited number of these principles, expressed in equations, means that the finale of this process is also restrained and universal.”
Cockell argues that carbon and water aren’t just incidental to life on Earth, but are close to the optimum material and medium for the emergence of organic life (so no silicon-based Horta), themselves bound by the narrow physical parameters in which organic molecules can exist.
Extraterrestrials could look “eerily similar to the life we see on Earth,” Cockell told Forbes. “Life on Earth might be a template for life in the universe.”
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Charles Cockell, Fermi Paradox, The Equation of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution, University of Edinburgh
