Imagine if future humans could travel to other worlds and find more humans. According to an astrobiologist from Cambridge University, this scenario may be more likely than you think.
In a new interview with BBC’s Science Focus, Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary paleobiologist from the university’s Earth Sciences Department, said researchers can “say with reasonable certainty” that human-like evolution has taken place elsewhere in the universe.
Morris’ beliefs are based on the theory of convergent evolution, which states that, “random effects eventually average out, so that evolution converges, tending to produce similar organisms in any environment.” The journal used the example of flight, which “evolved independently on Earth at least four times, in birds, bats, insects, and pterosaurs.”
In short, the theory of convergent evolution argues that evolution is itself a law of nature – and, as a logical result, it is likely that evolution will occur on different planets in the same way 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 might actually be out there somewhere.
Morris is not the only Cambridge man who believes that alien life would have evolved “similarly to humans.”
Aric Kerschenbaum, a zoologist at that prestigious British institute, has written an entire book on the concept of alien evolution.
“Since evolution is an explanatory mechanism for life everywhere,” Kerschenbaum told Quanta magazine earlier this year, “the principles we reveal on Earth should be applicable to the rest of the universe.
Kerschenbaum argues 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 simply emerge from a vacuum as advanced technological beings. According to Kerschenbaum, even alien life forms with higher technology than humans must have “evolved from a pretechnological species.”
“If that pretechnological species evolved all the things we have now, chances are they were built on building blocks that served that social purpose — things like communication between group members, transferring information and useful ideas between group members,” he told Quanta. “A pretechnological alien civilization could sing and dance and tell stories just as a pretechnological human civilization did, because it serves the same purpose.”
It is interesting to imagine other worlds where humanoid life forms, to quote Kerschenbaum, “sing, dance and tell stories” as they do on Earth. And if the laws of evolution are as strong as Darwinists like Kerschenbaum and Morris believe, this increases our inclination to communicate with aliens – and, unfortunately, war with them.
