• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 618 0

for what would constitute a legitimate signal, a process that was simplified effectively by Carl Sagan in Contact, where the ETIs reasoned that sending a sequence of prime numbers would be distinguishable from, say, the signals produced by rotating neutron stars. To date, no such signal has been detected, and SETI scientists continue to improve the technologies to broaden the spectrum of electromagnetic energy from which they can search the skies, along with the number of possible star systems that can be scanned at any one time. It is truly a needle-in-a-haystack problem, with a couple of hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone boggling the technological minds that do the searching.

Will ET Look Anything Like Us?

One aspect of alien agenticity that has always bothered me is the depiction of ET as a bipedal primate with very humanlike characteristics. What are the chances of that happening on some other planet? Of the hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of species that evolved here on our planet, only one lineage evolved into bipedal primates, and only one subspecies of that lineage has survived to this day. If we do encounter extraterrestrial intelligences, what are the odds that they will be anything remotely like us, much less what are typically portrayed by alien abductees as bipedal primates with bulbous heads, large almond-shaped eyes, and some gnarly stuff on their foreheads speaking broken English with a peculiar accent? The odds are not high—not even low, I contend.

Nevertheless, I could be wrong, and no less an evolutionary theorist than Richard Dawkins has challenged me on this very point after the director of his foundation produced a short YouTube video of me in alien garb explaining why I think that the chances are close to zero that intelligent and technically advanced aliens would evolve to be anything like the ones we see in films and hear about in abductee accounts.20 Dawkins wrote:

I would agree with [Shermer] in betting against aliens being bipedal primates and I think the point is worth making, but I think he greatly overestimates the odds against. [University of Cambridge paleontologist] Simon Conway-Morris, whose authority is not to be dismissed, thinks it positively likely that aliens would be, in effect, bipedal primates. [Harvard University evolutionary biologist] Ed Wilson gave at least some time to the speculation that, if it had not been for the end-Cretaceous catastrophe, dinosaurs might have produced something like the attached.

Figure 8. A Bipedal Dinosaur as Alien ET

In a rerun of the history of life on earth, if dinosaurs had survived might some of them become bipedal tool users? Paleontologist Dale A. Russell speculated as much in a projection of how a bipedal dinosaur might have evolved into a reptilian humanoid, rendered here by Matt Collins, after Russell’s original illustration in D. A. RUSSELL AND R. SEGUIN,RECONSTRUCTIONS OF THE SMALL CRETACEOUS THEROPOD STENONYCHOSAURUS INEQUALIS AND A HYPOTHETICAL DINOSAUROID, NATIONAL MUSEUMS OF CANADA, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL SCIENCES, 1982.

* * *

I replied to Dawkins along the lines above—that if something like a smart, technological, bipedal hominoid has a certain level of inevitability because of how evolution unfolds, then it should have happened more than once here. Dawkins’s rejoinder to me is enlightening:

But you are leaping from one extreme to the other. In the film vignette, you implied a quite staggering rarity, so rare that you don’t expect two humanoid life forms in the entire universe. Now you are talking about “a certain inevitability,” and pointing out, correctly, that a certain inevitability would predict that humanoids should have evolved more than once on Earth! So yes, we can say that humanoids are fairly improbable, but not necessarily all that improbable! Anything approaching “a certain inevitability” would mean millions or even billions of humanoid life forms in the universe, simply because the number of available planets is so huge. Now, my guess is intermediate between your two extremes. I agree