Exobiologists, who have remember never actually studied alien life first hand, look for so called "Goldilocks" or habitable zones around stars. Although they may be able to decode certain emissions from a far distant world all the "artist impression of what --- might look like" images and speculation is just that.
Scientists are looking for planets that "could evolve or develop life similar to that on Earth". It is all guessing and to some a search of this type seems "the most likely way of discovering alien life"...but all the references and so on are then to micro organisms -bacteria, algae and so on. Which we will never discover beyond our solar system because we have yet to actually travel to or find such things in our own system.
What good is it to anyone to declare that a planet some 100 light years away "might" (triple underlined emphasis) "be suitable to support basic life forms"?
Rather like the CETI and SETI (Communications with Extra Terrestrial Intelligences and Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligences) everything is based on what we know or think we know about our Earth. We think life will develop like the amoeba then slightly higher life forms until a human type race develops.
I recall once giving a talk and pointing out that had the dinosaurs not died out, had they remained the dominant life form, then they would have over millions of years developed to be the actual "highest life form" and humans be extinct or whatever. Two astronomers decided I had gone too far and told me that I was promulgating fantasies and had no credibility. A few years later there were several television science documentaries that used scientific data to speculate on this same subject. The possibilities are still discussed today by many in the scientific community.
Well there are prejudices. Ask some palaeontologists whether dinosaurs could have developed into a humanoid or semi-humanoid dominant species and some will positively screech at you that such a suggestion is an insult to the dinosaurs. There are some who suggest pteradons might still be flying around but that after 65,000,000 years evolution would change the dinosaurs -far, far too far for them. Evolution only works, apparently, if you are using it for your pet theory. Take the Loch Ness Monster for instance: even as a 12 year old I could not understand why naturalist Sir Peter Scott and others were seriously suggesting that a plesiosaur of some type was in the Loch. After 65 million years would it not have changed?
Well crocodiles, snakes, bees,Sea stars, horse shoe crabs, sharks -and others were around at the time of the dinosaurs -evolution can be a touchy subject in arguments.
Some have asked why the billions of dollars worth of deep space telescopes are not turned to study planets in our own solar system. These pieces of equipment produce great images but are designed and built for deep space viewing not near space and you might wonder, with asteroids whizzing past Earth, more money was not spent on near space telescopes and detectors? We have had to rely on space probes to gather data and even then some argue about what finds indicate.
I well remember the actor Vladek Sheybal's character in the 1970s TV series UFO arguing that more money was being spent on imaging deep space while the microscopic world on Earth had no real funding. My own interest came at Secondary School (Greenway Boys Secondary Modern, Southmead, Bristol) in the early 1970s when I was allowed to help Mr Soper the Science teacher set up tesats for the next day and also get use of the microscope. A few years later, as a regular visitor to the newspaper section of Bristol Central Library, I read in an 1800's newspaper about Andrew Crosse (17th June 1784 – 6th July 1855) "The Thunder and Lightning Man" and his 'creation of life' -the Acarus.
Below: Acarus crossii
In more recent decades scientists have begun to probe the microscopic world more and with video recording as well as still photography we find a whole 'universe' of living creatures on Earth -with many yet to be discovered.
In fact we might say that every human is their own solar system supporting life and life supporting it. According to Greg Foot from BritLab in the video Disgusting Things That Live On Your Body “In a rather gross way, you are practically a walking petri dish, a home for more bugs and bacteria than you’d care think about.”
"Consider the skin on your face. As smooth and peachy as it may look, every square centimetre houses around one or two “demodex spiders”. They mostly lie low, but once you’re asleep they crawl across your face to mate and lay eggs in your pores. Don’t feel too disgusted, though – in return for their food and lodging, these spiders clean away some of the harmful bacteria that might cause a dangerous infection.
"Away from the face, humans can host three different types of lice, each of which has evolved to the unique environments of the scalp, pubic regions and the rest of our bodies. As the video explains, studying these bugs has helped scientists to work out when our ancestors started to cover their modesty with animal skins – after millions of years of walking around butt naked.
"By far the most numerous inhabitants are the microbial colonies inside the body itself – there are 10 times as many bacterial cells as human cells. Most are crucial for us to break down food into the nutrients we need to survive; these immigrants pay back just as much as we give them".
Now I know what the Reader is going to ask: "What has this got to do with what aliens might look like?" The thing is that we have this human prejudice that any intelligent life out in space must have developed like us. Why?
What if alien life developed similarly, but obviously larger, to the tardigrades, known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets? They are a phylum of water-dwelling eight-legged segmented micro-animals and were first described by the German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773 - who called them little water bears. They range from 0.05 millimeters to 1.2 mm (0.002 to 0.05 inches) long, but they usually don't get any bigger than 1 mm (0.04 inches) long.
LiveScience ( https://www.livescience.com/57985-tardigrade-facts.html ) reported that:
"Research has found that tardigrades can withstand environments as cold as minus 328 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 Celsius) or highs of more than 300 degrees F (148.9 C), according to Smithsonian magazine. They can also survive radiation, boiling liquids, massive amounts of pressure of up to six times the pressure of the deepest part of the ocean and even the vacuum of space without any protection. A 2008 study published in the journal Current Biology found that some species of tardigrade could survive 10 days at low Earth orbit while being exposed to a space vacuum and radiation.
"In fact, water bears could survive after humanity is long gone, researchers found. Scientists from Harvard and Oxford universities looked at the probabilities of certain astronomical events — Earth-pummeling asteroids, nearby supernova blasts and gamma-ray bursts, to name a few — over the next billions of years. Then, they looked at how likely it would be for those events to wipe out Earth's hardiest species. And while such catastrophic events would likely wipe out humans, the researchers found little tardigrades would survive most of them, they reported in a study published online July 14, 2017, in the journal Scientific Reports.
"To our surprise, we found that although nearby supernovas or large asteroid impacts would be catastrophic for people, tardigrades could be unaffected," David Sloan, a co-author of the new study and researcher at Oxford, said in a statement. "Therefore, it seems that life, once it gets going, is hard to wipe out entirely. Huge numbers of species, or even entire genera may become extinct, but life as a whole will go on."
So imagine long-lived Tardigrade type species with developed intelligence and evolving into a dominant life form that develops space travel. Not much they get exposed to in space or on other planets is going to be very life threatening.
If we look at the known microscopic life on Earth we find so many differing types and to many the images of these are mind-blowing. Hollywood movie makers wanting suitable aliens need not ask someone to "imagine" a creature -they need only to flip through microscopic images online. A good place to start would be this site: https://listverse.com/2017/02/22/10-shockingly-intricate-microscopic-organisms/
Below: (it IS organic!) the Enterobacteria Phage T4
Any species, to survive, needs two things. The first is to be the Apex creature on their planet with no superior predators. Secondly, if the conditions are perfect for them then evolution (that some times dirty word) should step in. Why not an intelligent gastropod such as a slug, snail or whelk? Even some aquatic or amphibean- a cold-blooded vertebrate animal of a class that comprises the frogs, toads, newts, salamanders, and caecilians. These are distinguished by having an aquatic gill-breathing larval stage followed (typically) by a terrestrial lung-breathing adult stage.
It may be that certain life forms develop a higher intelligence but have weaker bodies and they may develop ways of encasing their bodies in a natural or manufactured body shell -perhaps not revealing any of the original body form. Cases may be developed for certain tasks or to assume a similarity to the dominant life form on another planet that the species is studying.
Taking it further, there could be life forms that have none of their original form but are intelligences encased in robot like bodies or even assume a "colony form" comprising anywhere from 5, 10 or even 50 individuals.
Rather than "thinking outside the box" it is more a case that we need to "think away from the humanoid of Earth".
Exobiology is based on what we know of Earth and life here. It is a good basis to start from but rather like theoretical physics it needs to go beyond "Earth-like" and ask how life on planets not like ours could develop because until we actually get to openly "meet and greet" genuine alien life we have no references.
Unless UFO percipients have encountered such entities?
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