Why Movie Producers Are (mostly) Right About Extraterrestrials.
There have been a lot of movies recently about aliens coming to Earth for whatever reason, usually involving attacking us. While the plots in these films may be different, they all have one thing in common, the aliens are always anthropomorphic.
While this could simply be because either we’ve become lazy and unimaginative (possibly), it could also be because we project ourselves and our image/morals out into the Universe and assume they must be like us. Friends of mine always scoff at films involving aliens, saying the beings “look too human”, whatever that means. I guess they want aliens to be better than us, with six ambidextrous arms, twelve super-fast legs and the morals of Mother Teresa. It seems Hollywood got some things right.
Just take a quick look at our own planet, and you’ll see life is pretty much uniform, in the sense most animals have either two or four legs (with the odd sea based exception) or just the one head. Evolution might have tried a five or nine legged animal in the past but those have almost definitely died out. The point is I guess, is that life always creates the most energy efficient form. Having nine arms or legs might seem like a great idea at first, but all that extra food/brain power needed to support those extra limbs doesn’t really give a good enough benefit in the wild, hence they would have been wiped out by more efficient predators.
Life on another planet would also follow the same basic rules and regulations as life here, if we are assuming the laws of nature are the same in the entire Universe. Nine legged creatures would also have died out on an alien world, as would have the four headed, four-brained creatures, leaving only the most energy efficient form, that is, the human form. Obviously, there would be differences biologically such as internal organs etc but I do believe they will have a similar function to our own. The type of planet they originate from would of course have an effect on their physiology. If they came from a planet like ours which was the size of Jupiter for example, they would have to have denser muscle structure due to the greater gravitational forces.
Maybe one day not too far away, we’ll discover we have brothers and sisters elsewhere in the Universe, and we’ll then start treating the ones we have down here a little better….unless that is, they DO come to destroy us.
