For an alien species to be able to achieve interstellar travel - or even to be able to generate signals like radio waves that we'd be able to detect - they would likely have to be not only intelligent, but also capable of creating and wielding tools in a manner which is similar to ours. (They'd also need to live in an environment which allowed development of technologies similar to ours, like electricity - I'll discuss this a little more in reference to octopi, below).
So, one possible explanation for the similarity - or a portion of it - is that the only ETs we've encountered are the ones that, like us, have these capabilities. And having arms, legs, and eyes seems like it might be a general prerequisite for the kind of tool-making capabilities that would produce these detectable behaviors.
That doesn't explain the bi-pedal similarity, since there's theoretically nothing to prevent an alien species from having more than 2 limbs (like octopi). But it's also possible that evolution in general (not just on earth) may be more likely to select for 2 limbs instead of 4 simply for reasons of efficiency. Nature does tend to favor species that make more efficient use of their energy, and more than 2 limbs to walk or manipulate, or more than 2 eyes to see, may not provide enough benefit to outweigh the additional costs to maintain them.
In other words, on any world where a species evolved with more than 2 limbs for each of these functions, if another species evolved which only needed 2 limbs to perform the same functions, then the species with fewer limbs may have an evolutionary advantage over the multi-limbed species - and thus may outcompete them. And the chance that mutations reduce the number of limbs to the "minimal number" will happen over the course of millions or billions of years is probably not small (at least on any planet with similar levels of mutating radiation as ours - which, though I won't delve into it here, is not as big of an assumption as it may seem).
Octopi provide a very interesting alternate form which may make it seem like the possibilities for alien forms are wide open. But the way an octopus brain works to control and coordinate their limbs is very, very different from how a human brain controls our limbs. And it's certainly possible (though I have no idea how probable) that this different brain structure precludes the type of intelligence necessary for higher-level tool-making. It's also possible that this different limb structure makes land-dwelling - and thus the discovery and control of electricity - either much less likely or nearly impossible. So, again, it's possible that having more than 2 limbs for each important function at least reduces the chance that an alien species would develop either the requisite level of intelligence or technology for us to be able to detect their presence.
(For a very, very good take on what intelligence in octopi might look like, please read Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" series. Actually, please read this even if you don't care about octopi - your life will be poorer for having not read this series).
Now, I'm not saying that I think all of this IS what actually explains the similarities in form between us and ETs. I'm just saying that there are other possible explanations for it. And I agree with everything else you said about the similarities in biology (DNA, etc.) underlying the forms.
Thanks for recognizing the depth of the question I'm raising, and thanks for your detailed and thoughtful reply.
I don't presume that the ETs come from other planets, and I don't presume that the way they got here involved some sort of propulsion system that we would recognize. There's so much we don't know.
Six limbs seems like a good number. Centaurs have a great advantage for standing stably on uneven ground and for climbing and running, compared to bipeds.
Eyes up high near the top of the body seem useful, but ears could be anywhere. Ears close to the ground might be more useful. A brain in the center of the body would be well-protected and minimizes distance to all the limbs.
If the atmosphere on another planet were a little denser and the body of an intelligent species a little smaller, it might have both wings and hands. Flight is useful even for a technologically advanced species. The Atacama mummy suggests that humanoids could be quite small -- small enough to fly comfortably even in our earth's atmosphere.
Breathing from the back of the head, like a whale, would be useful for swimming. Beings from another planet might be evolved for navigation on land, sea, and air.
One thing I didn't mention in the article is the genetic code. According to conventional biology, the genetic code is an arbitrary mapping between triplets of nucleic acid bases (ATCG) and one of twenty amino acids. In order for an alien to be genetically compatible with any life on earth, it would have to share the same genetic code, and the chances of this happening by chance would be -- actually, that's an interesting combinatorial problem -- the answer is somewhere in the range of 1 in 10^100 = 1 googol.
Regarding the genetic code, there was a study a few years ago comparing various possible variations, which found that DNA is very close to the optimum from the standpoint of error correction and mutational flexibility. In other words essentially all other possible codes are either too error prone to be viable, or too rigid to permit evolution. So the engineering constraints might well go down to the molecular biology.
Also note that the environmental problems that an octopus has to solve are very different from those faced on land. Environment and function set engineering constraints, which then dictate form.
Add to the list of deductions to consider: that there are many many different "species" of ETs, but we've been allowed to see only ones somewhat similar to ourselves. For what motive, I wonder? Perhaps it would jump us so far out of our earth game / reality that it'd ruin the game. Perhaps these different "species" have very different agendas. Perhaps we're the experiment and our DNA contains material from lots of different worlds. Consider ETs from different dimensions, even. The movie "Arrival" posited octopus-like aliens. Kudos to them. Maybe octopus are aliens living among us.
"Will we be rescued from human folly by non-human beings from “elsewhere” or will they enslave us?"
Why assume these two options? Maybe they simply want to exterminate us and get us out of the way so they can take over the planet for themselves. Like, for instance, use really stupid humans to come up with bioweapon dieases and then even-worse bioweapons to be injected into everyone to "save" people from the engineered pathogens.
This same thought occurred to me recently... that’s it’s kind of a similar scenario as the film They Live or the tv series ‘V’... we’re being quietly swept out of the way without damaging the infrastructure for the new owners... it’ll take a while yet but it’s playing the long game I guess?
I can’t remember where I heard or read it but throughout human history what has typically happened when a less technologically advanced civilisation meets a more advanced one? I can’t remember it ever ending well?
Missing from among the possibilities you list is that the Bible is factual and that “aliens” are those created angelic beings that have fallen from grace, and/or “Nephilim,” the hybrid offspring (“Rosemary’s Babies”) born from the mating of fallen angels with humans. As improbable as that sounds, it is what is left after the impossible has been eliminated from serious consideration.
If you don't know it, I recommend Cixin Liu's "Three body problem" trilogy. As well as being the best sci-fi I have read, it effectively provides a game-theoretic analysis of interactions between alien life forms.
[spoiler alert]
The basic result, which is hard to dispute, is that it is never in any high-tech species' interest to tolerate the existence of any other species. It's all downside for them. So as soon as a species is detected, it can expected to be destroyed.
The main question then is whether faster-than-light travel or information transfer is possible, which will determine how quickly we will meet our end.
But there's a lot more to these books, I cannot recommend them highly enough.
While I do think the series is brilliant, I think the conclusion that an intelligent species would do the work to eliminate another species they encountered is actually very disputable.
Consider that you discovered an island in the middle of the Atlantic with a new species of ants on it that you felt, if it were to reach the mainland, would present various kinds of problems (all downside). What are your options?
Of course, elimination of the ants is one option. And in fact, it might not be that hard - turn the island into Bikini Atoll and be done with it. At least if you don't ever have any plans to use the island yourself; but if you do, that might not be the best approach.
(Side note: I read an article once that speculated that habitable worlds are probably plentiful enough in the cosmos that aliens probably wouldn't want our world to live on, but that we have a very rare concentration of strontium-90 that could attract ETs here. So, damaging our planet in order to neutralize us might not be a card visiting ETs want to play).
But elimination isn't the only approach that could address the issue. For example, if you can just ensure the ants never leave the island, the chance of them ever being a real problem is small. And isolation may easier, use far less resources, and pose less risk than extermination. It also might preserve any other resources on the island that you have your eye on.
Of course, although our current level of technology may make us ants to ETs now, the real threat is that we'll develop technology that could become a threat later, or allow us to break the isolation later. And that means that a strategy of isolation would require more than depending on the ocean to do all the work to keep the ants isolated. You might need to perform other interventions to prevent the ants from ever developing the ability to leave the island, whether via physical intervention (destroying any craft they might create) or biological intervention (seeding their genome with defects that would prevent development of the necessary intelligence), or what have you.
And in fact, a strategy of isolation might better explain some of the observed behavior of ETs (e.g. abductions) than a strategy of elimination. (Side note: Although I won't go down this rabbit hole here, a strategy of subjugation might not look much different from a strategy of isolation in the beginning, at least from the point of view of the ants).
I find it hard to believe than an alien race with technology sufficiently advanced from our own couldn't actually eliminate us if they wanted to. In fact, I'm not even sure it would be that hard to do without damaging the planet; we're not that far from being able to create viruses which could be programmed to spread heavily before killing us off, so a more advanced race - especially one with similar biology - shouldn't have problems with this. So, at this stage a strategy of isolation seems more likely than one of elimination.
Ah but I think we can reasonably assume that any such aliens are motivated by "will to exist" - because otherwise they would not exist.
( Tangentially, "will" is, imo, the main defining characteristic of life. So "AI" is not scary, as nobody is even trying to create computers with "artificial will" and if they tried all they could do would be transfer their own will).
If the aliens have will to exist I think game theory can safely be applied. That's the genius of this analysis - it really can be applied to any life form.
We think in terms of game theory and individual competition and imagine this is universal. It's also possible that other beings in other civilizations are in telepathic communication with one another all the time, are far more integrated as a community than we can imagine, to the point where individual competition doesn't make sense to them.
This is one possibility that I can conceive. There are more interesting possibilities that I can't conceive.
I’ve just watched the thirty part series. It is the best of its kind I’ve seen in some time.
Spoiler Alert 🚨: Delves into what might happen when a species’ members and their culture are all subjected to massive Darwinian forces at the same time on a totally random basis for millions of years. Very well thought out by Mr. Liu.
With light travelling so much faster and further than spacecraft, I expect communication with extraterrestrials to be orders of magnitude more probable than physical visits.
That requires making some unsupported presuppositions. Two hundred years ago, transmitting television signals was nearly unimaginable, and certainly not possible at that time.
Time and space are only illusions of this "physical" "reality" or dimensional perspective. CONSCIOUSNESS supercedes the physical because it does not arise from the physical. We have no idea how advanced civilizations are that are billions of years older than us.
There are perhaps 100 billion trillion stars in the universe. Many of them have multiple planets. How many billions of civilizations more advanced than ours are "out there"?
Nobody knows how many civilizations there are. But from everything we know about physics, which is quite a bit, signaling is easier than travel. Ancient people also knew that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_signal
Because Hollywood doesn't have any genuine extraterrestrial actors! Hence, before the era of CGI all they had for playing space aliens were humans, and there is only so much one can do in the way of costumes for faking aliens!
The Bible scholar Chuck Missler, who also had a grad degree in engineering and was former Branch Chief of the Dept. of Guided Missiles at Lowry AFB, studied the phenomena of “aliens,” “alien abductions,” etc. and wrote and spoke about it as “Too disturbing to accept but also too credible to dismiss,” or words to that effect. If ETs are (evil) extra-dimensional supernatural beings, they have the ability to shape-shift so as to mimic our expectations.
UFO's, Aliens, Abductions and the Return of The Nephilim - Chuck Missler
Yes, one way or another they upset the apple cart of consensus reality, and no one wants to rethink everything from the ground up. However, in an age when we are worried about existential threats to our species, maybe a paradigm shift or two would be weldome.
Jesus likely predicted that angelic beings [“stars”]would “fall” to earth in the end times: ”… the stars will fall from the heavens, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken“
Matthew 24:29
Stars typically symbolize supernatural beings in the bible.
I have enjoyed the thoughtful essay and comments, Josh. This is a remarkably constructive and considerate commentariat.
"We" are facing a novel form of alien intelligence, arising without biological survival imperatives.
What might be different about artificial-intelligence? Will it embody "soul"?
Whence comes soul? Whence comes ego/personality? Are these core necessities of consciousness, or developmental remnants of biological evolution, perhaps vestigial, like the vermiform appendix?
Clearly, there are different views of this. I have a view, but it is not firm, as I have no way to firm it up with testing and confirmation/refutation.
Does all of the reality we experience exist within Universal Consciousness? How would one test this scientifically? Could it be tested "objectively"? I think not. Others say that it could not, but I don't have a clear enough conception to be certain.
So, does consciousness arise out of universal consciousness or out of the capacity for complex material-world processing of data?
The implications for physical life forms could be divergent, right?
What about life-span in space travel? Octopi don't live very long. How far could they go? Would the 30th generation arrive somewhere in a distant solar system? How would embarkation upon that project be decided?
Would a non-biological consciousness, such as AI might become, have an urge to exist? Would it be "curious"? An AI programmed to self-teach might well be "curious". Where would curiosity lead? Would life be valued? Would self-existence be valued?
Would a biological species from an evolutionary competitive world kill itself off before being technologically capable of traveling distantly, taking lifetimes? That is a paradox we are considering.
Is competition essential to evolutionary development? Would that be the same answer if mind exists within universal mind, as if mind arises out of complex biological processing capacity?
Are there interdimensional beings of consciousness which we "can't see"? Would they "communicate" with us somehow, telepathically. There are many stories of brief experiences of an "angel" physically grabbing, shoving or otherwise forcibly saving a person from a moment of certain death.
You may have friends who have related such personal experiences to you. I have one.
His was a Vietnam war experience when he and three other men were running down a trail.
"W" was third.
An "angel" shoved him very hard off of the trail, onto another path, "NOT THERE!" was the powerful communicated message. The last guy followed him. They lived.
A Claymore mine promptly killed the first two men.
I have known "W" for almost 30 years, and have no reason to doubt that he experienced this.
How does something like that work? What might be the physical world mechanism?
I assume there is some mechanism which we could understand if it were explained.
There are recurrently arising stories of nuclear missile silo launch sequences being completely powered off by "aliens" (why not "angels"?). All the electricity turns off to everything. Sometimes there is a nearby "craft". I have not been told this personally.
When I was in my first year of college, Thanksgiving 1976, staying at my grandparent's cattle ranch, our neighbor, "Colonel R" was driving me to church Sunday morning. We were talking about aliens. I thought they were being covered-up from things I had read from a guy hired by the government to explain away their sightings. "Colonel R" told me flatly that there were alien bodies in cold storage in a mountain in Colorado, as if anybody should know that who was thinking seriously about aliens. "Colonel R" was a pilot, retired from the US Air Force.
I also knew a WW-2 Navy Commander, the father of my friends, who had watched alien aircraft hovering and darting in the night sky as a teenager in the early 1930s, along with other boys at the home for kids of bankrupt/ruined parents. They watched for 20-30 minutes and decided amongst themselves that it must be secret/experimental military aircraft. The craft did not make sounds.
It is easy to comprehend how such secrets would be held tightly by those who wish to maintain power over others, largely through management of control-narratives of "reality".
I once read an article concerning the absence of life forms with wheels. Without going into a full repeat of it here it seems that such creatures would suffer from several difficulties from problems sealing themselves off from infection to supplying nutrients to body parts that are essentially separated from the main creature.
Ultimately, such organisms would be more complex than necessary to accomplish the same functions that simpler constructions can perform a situation ably pointed out in the discussion here.
I lean towards convergent evolution, myself. For example, two eyes are the minimum necessary for binocular vision; three+ are excessive, therefore inefficient. Similarly, four legs are ideal for speed and stability; two legs are the absolute minimum necessary. Therefore one might expect most complex animals to have two eyes, and four limbs, the majority being quadrupedal, and a subset - including tool users - to be bipedal.
Similar reasoning can be applied to almost every physiological feature, with the result that the humanoid body plan might be expected to be rediscovered by evolution as readily as aquatic organisms rediscover streamlining.
It's hard to argue with this, as it's a matter of judgment more than statistics. But I'll fall back on the compatibility of their DNA, if you believe these stories of abductions or if you believe the Atacama mummy is of extraterrestrial origin. In any case, the Atacama mummy is a uniquely fixed certainty in this field of great uncertainty. What do you make of Ata?
I remain quite agnostic about the mummies - possibly real, possibly 21st century Piltdown Men.
Assuming the genetic similarity is real, I lean towards either panspermia, or again, convergent evolution down to the the biochemical level. Perhaps nucleotides themselves are a necessary consequence of the engineering constraints imposed by a genetic alphabet. Admittedly panspermia seems most likely.
Josh, the Atacama mummy is a human. The fact that they couldn't match 8% of the DNA doesn't mean it's only 92% human. It just means the DNA had been sitting in a desert for several decades and was somewhat degraded. The article says they tried again later with better techniques and matched 98%. It's a Chilean human female, stillborn or died in infancy.
Space aliens aren't bipedal with faces. We don't know what they are, or if they exist at all. There has never been compelling evidence or a credible report of space aliens visiting Earth. Even if you think UFOs are real, you don't know who is in them (if anyone), who sent them, or what those 'people' look like. Any depiction of a space alien you ever encountered came out of the imagination of another human, and it's no surprise that when humans are tasked with describing a fictional character it's going to be based on the human form.
Bill - I recognize that "human" is one of the interpretations, and that this interpretation has the force of Gary Nolan's science behind it. But there are counterarguments as well. The mummy has 10 ribs instead of 12, and a different configuration of skull bones from the universal primate structure. Also, there are developmental indications that this is not a fetus, but someone who has walked the earth for at least a few years. I've known a lot of short people and a lot of tall people in my life, children and adults and people shrunken with age, but I've never come across a human who was 6 inches tall.
So I regard "human" as one hypothesis that raises as many questions as it answers.
Okay, so it's a human fetus with congenital skeletal defects -- missing ribs, weird skull, and a bone-aging disorder that gave it the bone composition of a 6-year-old child. We know it died somehow; maybe that's why.
The only other option is it really was a 6-year-old child. But as you said, a 6" tall child would be pretty far-fetched. Well, changing it to a 6-year-old 6" tall *space alien* child makes it orders of magnitude more far-fetched.
There's a mystery here. Something very improbable no matter how you look at it. Certainly choosing among highly improbable scenarios is a challenge. But the point of my essay is to try to piece together clues from many strange events. Is there a relationship between these fossil human skeletons with elongated skulls with modern people who claim that they have seen bodies recovered from alien spacecraft?
Was just saying to my nieces over breakfast -- as I read excerpts of this piece to them -- that of all the qualities I admire in my smartest and most learned friends intellectual humility is numero uno. You have that in spades Josh. This is a compelling piece. Grateful for you. Happy solstice brother. Blessings in the new year.
"a super- intellect has monkeyed with physics". — Paul Davies
The "preponderance of evidence" points to a universe of many "dimensions" or frequency levels (our "physical" reality being just the lower range of the possible") with THE PRIMARY REALITY being the energy of pure Consciousness. From that, presumably highest-frequency level, all other energies and "matter" are derived from/out of. What is it? The "ether"? The "quantum field"? Or should we just call it "Infinite Intelligence" or "Source Energy"? Whatever it is, it appears they everything within it is connected. And our individual consciousnesses are part of it because by definition nothing exists "outside" of it because all space comes from it and is contained within it. That we are individuals is part of the illusion. Just as all facets of a diamond are individual and inseparable parts of the whole stone, we are each a point of focus of The Whole. And all we are, all we "have" IS OUR AWARENESS! Without that we do not exist.
So, yes, the physical, time-space universe is DESIGNED for life. And why not? "WE" did it! We the Whole, the Field of Consciousness. We did it for the experiences we can only have in a limited physical reality. For the challenges we have here. For the opportunity to create things here, as mini-expressions of the Vast Creativity of the Whole! For fun!
You've probably seen the book, "The Biocentric Universe"? Yeah, it is! By design!
Faith pretty much described my world: We are consciousness experiencing physical existence. This is the exact opposite of treating consciousness as an epiphenomenon of matter. It implies a Universe of meaning, rather than one of chaotic randomness.
Dr. Stan Grof, a leading transpersonal psychiatrist, hypothesized that aliens are psychoids: non-physical appearances (possibly from another dimension).
". . . consciousness as an epiphenomenon of matter."
Yes, it isn't possible. And that's not hypothetical or theoretical. If consciousness came FROM the brain and/or neurology it would be just as "unconscious" as the protons and elections and neutrons of the atoms and molecules, and quarks and muons and all the other little beasties that are the subatomic particles. But something else entirely is going on because our consciousness is quite independent of physical matter. If it weren’t, we woulnbe able to separate our consciousness from the physical body and still remember who we are! We wouldn't have an ongoing sense of self. But we do! We separate from the physical and we are still very much ourselves. Which also demonstrates that memory does not arise from neurons. The brain is the interface device, but not the ORIGIN of consciousness AND/ OR memory, which go hand-in-hand.
Psychoid. Strange word! "Psych" means mind, I guess, and "oid" means "-like".
I agree this is a key clue. Consciousness is the ground of reality. Our consciousness collectively created the phenomenon of "humanity" -- perhaps we created all of the evolutionary history of life on earth in the process. Perhaps we created the universe with its ET beings. If so, it's a big "we".
It is an illusion that there is "we". That field of energy has no boundaries because it does not exist IN SPACE. Space (as in dimensionality) exists IN IT. The infinite Energy Field therefore cannot be "divided". Only its attention, its focus, its property of awareness can CHOOSE to shift its focus simultaneously into zillions of individual points: the "we". So, yes, "We": "collectively created the phenomenon" of everything and "all of the evolutionary history of life on earth".
But from our points of individual focus, we forgot, because we can only hold just so much in our (conscious) attention at any given time (VERY LITTLE) or we lose the effect of being able to immerse ourselves into this physical phenomenon and take advantage of this particular "playground".
For an alien species to be able to achieve interstellar travel - or even to be able to generate signals like radio waves that we'd be able to detect - they would likely have to be not only intelligent, but also capable of creating and wielding tools in a manner which is similar to ours. (They'd also need to live in an environment which allowed development of technologies similar to ours, like electricity - I'll discuss this a little more in reference to octopi, below).
So, one possible explanation for the similarity - or a portion of it - is that the only ETs we've encountered are the ones that, like us, have these capabilities. And having arms, legs, and eyes seems like it might be a general prerequisite for the kind of tool-making capabilities that would produce these detectable behaviors.
That doesn't explain the bi-pedal similarity, since there's theoretically nothing to prevent an alien species from having more than 2 limbs (like octopi). But it's also possible that evolution in general (not just on earth) may be more likely to select for 2 limbs instead of 4 simply for reasons of efficiency. Nature does tend to favor species that make more efficient use of their energy, and more than 2 limbs to walk or manipulate, or more than 2 eyes to see, may not provide enough benefit to outweigh the additional costs to maintain them.
In other words, on any world where a species evolved with more than 2 limbs for each of these functions, if another species evolved which only needed 2 limbs to perform the same functions, then the species with fewer limbs may have an evolutionary advantage over the multi-limbed species - and thus may outcompete them. And the chance that mutations reduce the number of limbs to the "minimal number" will happen over the course of millions or billions of years is probably not small (at least on any planet with similar levels of mutating radiation as ours - which, though I won't delve into it here, is not as big of an assumption as it may seem).
Octopi provide a very interesting alternate form which may make it seem like the possibilities for alien forms are wide open. But the way an octopus brain works to control and coordinate their limbs is very, very different from how a human brain controls our limbs. And it's certainly possible (though I have no idea how probable) that this different brain structure precludes the type of intelligence necessary for higher-level tool-making. It's also possible that this different limb structure makes land-dwelling - and thus the discovery and control of electricity - either much less likely or nearly impossible. So, again, it's possible that having more than 2 limbs for each important function at least reduces the chance that an alien species would develop either the requisite level of intelligence or technology for us to be able to detect their presence.
(For a very, very good take on what intelligence in octopi might look like, please read Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" series. Actually, please read this even if you don't care about octopi - your life will be poorer for having not read this series).
Now, I'm not saying that I think all of this IS what actually explains the similarities in form between us and ETs. I'm just saying that there are other possible explanations for it. And I agree with everything else you said about the similarities in biology (DNA, etc.) underlying the forms.
Thanks for recognizing the depth of the question I'm raising, and thanks for your detailed and thoughtful reply.
I don't presume that the ETs come from other planets, and I don't presume that the way they got here involved some sort of propulsion system that we would recognize. There's so much we don't know.
Six limbs seems like a good number. Centaurs have a great advantage for standing stably on uneven ground and for climbing and running, compared to bipeds.
Eyes up high near the top of the body seem useful, but ears could be anywhere. Ears close to the ground might be more useful. A brain in the center of the body would be well-protected and minimizes distance to all the limbs.
If the atmosphere on another planet were a little denser and the body of an intelligent species a little smaller, it might have both wings and hands. Flight is useful even for a technologically advanced species. The Atacama mummy suggests that humanoids could be quite small -- small enough to fly comfortably even in our earth's atmosphere.
Breathing from the back of the head, like a whale, would be useful for swimming. Beings from another planet might be evolved for navigation on land, sea, and air.
One thing I didn't mention in the article is the genetic code. According to conventional biology, the genetic code is an arbitrary mapping between triplets of nucleic acid bases (ATCG) and one of twenty amino acids. In order for an alien to be genetically compatible with any life on earth, it would have to share the same genetic code, and the chances of this happening by chance would be -- actually, that's an interesting combinatorial problem -- the answer is somewhere in the range of 1 in 10^100 = 1 googol.
A brain in the mid-section of the body where i
Regarding the genetic code, there was a study a few years ago comparing various possible variations, which found that DNA is very close to the optimum from the standpoint of error correction and mutational flexibility. In other words essentially all other possible codes are either too error prone to be viable, or too rigid to permit evolution. So the engineering constraints might well go down to the molecular biology.
Also note that the environmental problems that an octopus has to solve are very different from those faced on land. Environment and function set engineering constraints, which then dictate form.
Add to the list of deductions to consider: that there are many many different "species" of ETs, but we've been allowed to see only ones somewhat similar to ourselves. For what motive, I wonder? Perhaps it would jump us so far out of our earth game / reality that it'd ruin the game. Perhaps these different "species" have very different agendas. Perhaps we're the experiment and our DNA contains material from lots of different worlds. Consider ETs from different dimensions, even. The movie "Arrival" posited octopus-like aliens. Kudos to them. Maybe octopus are aliens living among us.
Very thought-provoking article. Thank you.
"Will we be rescued from human folly by non-human beings from “elsewhere” or will they enslave us?"
Why assume these two options? Maybe they simply want to exterminate us and get us out of the way so they can take over the planet for themselves. Like, for instance, use really stupid humans to come up with bioweapon dieases and then even-worse bioweapons to be injected into everyone to "save" people from the engineered pathogens.
This same thought occurred to me recently... that’s it’s kind of a similar scenario as the film They Live or the tv series ‘V’... we’re being quietly swept out of the way without damaging the infrastructure for the new owners... it’ll take a while yet but it’s playing the long game I guess?
I can’t remember where I heard or read it but throughout human history what has typically happened when a less technologically advanced civilisation meets a more advanced one? I can’t remember it ever ending well?
Glad to be proven wrong on this one😅
Missing from among the possibilities you list is that the Bible is factual and that “aliens” are those created angelic beings that have fallen from grace, and/or “Nephilim,” the hybrid offspring (“Rosemary’s Babies”) born from the mating of fallen angels with humans. As improbable as that sounds, it is what is left after the impossible has been eliminated from serious consideration.
“Childhood’s End” is possibly prophetic.
Yes, thank you! It may be that the Bible stories are related to #1 or #6, or maybe those two ideas could be merged.
These are interesting:
The Unseen Realm - Trailer https://youtu.be/v529fqrnhJ0?
The Unseen Realm - Faithlife TV https://faithlifetv.com/media/701635
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1577995589/ref=sspa_mw_detail_0?
https://www.amazon.com/Unseen-Realm-Recovering-Supernatural-Worldview/dp/1577995562
If you don't know it, I recommend Cixin Liu's "Three body problem" trilogy. As well as being the best sci-fi I have read, it effectively provides a game-theoretic analysis of interactions between alien life forms.
[spoiler alert]
The basic result, which is hard to dispute, is that it is never in any high-tech species' interest to tolerate the existence of any other species. It's all downside for them. So as soon as a species is detected, it can expected to be destroyed.
The main question then is whether faster-than-light travel or information transfer is possible, which will determine how quickly we will meet our end.
But there's a lot more to these books, I cannot recommend them highly enough.
I read volume 1 several years ago, when that was all we had. Time for me to get back to it...
While I do think the series is brilliant, I think the conclusion that an intelligent species would do the work to eliminate another species they encountered is actually very disputable.
Consider that you discovered an island in the middle of the Atlantic with a new species of ants on it that you felt, if it were to reach the mainland, would present various kinds of problems (all downside). What are your options?
Of course, elimination of the ants is one option. And in fact, it might not be that hard - turn the island into Bikini Atoll and be done with it. At least if you don't ever have any plans to use the island yourself; but if you do, that might not be the best approach.
(Side note: I read an article once that speculated that habitable worlds are probably plentiful enough in the cosmos that aliens probably wouldn't want our world to live on, but that we have a very rare concentration of strontium-90 that could attract ETs here. So, damaging our planet in order to neutralize us might not be a card visiting ETs want to play).
But elimination isn't the only approach that could address the issue. For example, if you can just ensure the ants never leave the island, the chance of them ever being a real problem is small. And isolation may easier, use far less resources, and pose less risk than extermination. It also might preserve any other resources on the island that you have your eye on.
Of course, although our current level of technology may make us ants to ETs now, the real threat is that we'll develop technology that could become a threat later, or allow us to break the isolation later. And that means that a strategy of isolation would require more than depending on the ocean to do all the work to keep the ants isolated. You might need to perform other interventions to prevent the ants from ever developing the ability to leave the island, whether via physical intervention (destroying any craft they might create) or biological intervention (seeding their genome with defects that would prevent development of the necessary intelligence), or what have you.
And in fact, a strategy of isolation might better explain some of the observed behavior of ETs (e.g. abductions) than a strategy of elimination. (Side note: Although I won't go down this rabbit hole here, a strategy of subjugation might not look much different from a strategy of isolation in the beginning, at least from the point of view of the ants).
I find it hard to believe than an alien race with technology sufficiently advanced from our own couldn't actually eliminate us if they wanted to. In fact, I'm not even sure it would be that hard to do without damaging the planet; we're not that far from being able to create viruses which could be programmed to spread heavily before killing us off, so a more advanced race - especially one with similar biology - shouldn't have problems with this. So, at this stage a strategy of isolation seems more likely than one of elimination.
I agree. I'm very skeptical of anyone who claims to know what space aliens think about and what motivates them.
Ah but I think we can reasonably assume that any such aliens are motivated by "will to exist" - because otherwise they would not exist.
( Tangentially, "will" is, imo, the main defining characteristic of life. So "AI" is not scary, as nobody is even trying to create computers with "artificial will" and if they tried all they could do would be transfer their own will).
If the aliens have will to exist I think game theory can safely be applied. That's the genius of this analysis - it really can be applied to any life form.
We think in terms of game theory and individual competition and imagine this is universal. It's also possible that other beings in other civilizations are in telepathic communication with one another all the time, are far more integrated as a community than we can imagine, to the point where individual competition doesn't make sense to them.
This is one possibility that I can conceive. There are more interesting possibilities that I can't conceive.
I am in favor of cauterizing that Pustule on the Potomac so if ET will oblige then, perhaps, I’d be willing to believe...
I’ve just watched the thirty part series. It is the best of its kind I’ve seen in some time.
Spoiler Alert 🚨: Delves into what might happen when a species’ members and their culture are all subjected to massive Darwinian forces at the same time on a totally random basis for millions of years. Very well thought out by Mr. Liu.
With light travelling so much faster and further than spacecraft, I expect communication with extraterrestrials to be orders of magnitude more probable than physical visits.
That requires making some unsupported presuppositions. Two hundred years ago, transmitting television signals was nearly unimaginable, and certainly not possible at that time.
Time and space are only illusions of this "physical" "reality" or dimensional perspective. CONSCIOUSNESS supercedes the physical because it does not arise from the physical. We have no idea how advanced civilizations are that are billions of years older than us.
There are perhaps 100 billion trillion stars in the universe. Many of them have multiple planets. How many billions of civilizations more advanced than ours are "out there"?
Nobody knows how many civilizations there are. But from everything we know about physics, which is quite a bit, signaling is easier than travel. Ancient people also knew that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_signal
"Why do space aliens resemble humans?"
Because Hollywood doesn't have any genuine extraterrestrial actors! Hence, before the era of CGI all they had for playing space aliens were humans, and there is only so much one can do in the way of costumes for faking aliens!
The Bible scholar Chuck Missler, who also had a grad degree in engineering and was former Branch Chief of the Dept. of Guided Missiles at Lowry AFB, studied the phenomena of “aliens,” “alien abductions,” etc. and wrote and spoke about it as “Too disturbing to accept but also too credible to dismiss,” or words to that effect. If ETs are (evil) extra-dimensional supernatural beings, they have the ability to shape-shift so as to mimic our expectations.
UFO's, Aliens, Abductions and the Return of The Nephilim - Chuck Missler
https://youtu.be/_T6HgyodCx4?
Yes, one way or another they upset the apple cart of consensus reality, and no one wants to rethink everything from the ground up. However, in an age when we are worried about existential threats to our species, maybe a paradigm shift or two would be weldome.
Jesus likely predicted that angelic beings [“stars”]would “fall” to earth in the end times: ”… the stars will fall from the heavens, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken“
Matthew 24:29
Stars typically symbolize supernatural beings in the bible.
I have enjoyed the thoughtful essay and comments, Josh. This is a remarkably constructive and considerate commentariat.
"We" are facing a novel form of alien intelligence, arising without biological survival imperatives.
What might be different about artificial-intelligence? Will it embody "soul"?
Whence comes soul? Whence comes ego/personality? Are these core necessities of consciousness, or developmental remnants of biological evolution, perhaps vestigial, like the vermiform appendix?
Clearly, there are different views of this. I have a view, but it is not firm, as I have no way to firm it up with testing and confirmation/refutation.
Does all of the reality we experience exist within Universal Consciousness? How would one test this scientifically? Could it be tested "objectively"? I think not. Others say that it could not, but I don't have a clear enough conception to be certain.
Chittamatra/Cittamatra is the "mind only" school of Buddhism. https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Chittamatra
So, does consciousness arise out of universal consciousness or out of the capacity for complex material-world processing of data?
The implications for physical life forms could be divergent, right?
What about life-span in space travel? Octopi don't live very long. How far could they go? Would the 30th generation arrive somewhere in a distant solar system? How would embarkation upon that project be decided?
Would a non-biological consciousness, such as AI might become, have an urge to exist? Would it be "curious"? An AI programmed to self-teach might well be "curious". Where would curiosity lead? Would life be valued? Would self-existence be valued?
Would a biological species from an evolutionary competitive world kill itself off before being technologically capable of traveling distantly, taking lifetimes? That is a paradox we are considering.
Is competition essential to evolutionary development? Would that be the same answer if mind exists within universal mind, as if mind arises out of complex biological processing capacity?
Are there interdimensional beings of consciousness which we "can't see"? Would they "communicate" with us somehow, telepathically. There are many stories of brief experiences of an "angel" physically grabbing, shoving or otherwise forcibly saving a person from a moment of certain death.
You may have friends who have related such personal experiences to you. I have one.
His was a Vietnam war experience when he and three other men were running down a trail.
"W" was third.
An "angel" shoved him very hard off of the trail, onto another path, "NOT THERE!" was the powerful communicated message. The last guy followed him. They lived.
A Claymore mine promptly killed the first two men.
I have known "W" for almost 30 years, and have no reason to doubt that he experienced this.
How does something like that work? What might be the physical world mechanism?
I assume there is some mechanism which we could understand if it were explained.
There are recurrently arising stories of nuclear missile silo launch sequences being completely powered off by "aliens" (why not "angels"?). All the electricity turns off to everything. Sometimes there is a nearby "craft". I have not been told this personally.
When I was in my first year of college, Thanksgiving 1976, staying at my grandparent's cattle ranch, our neighbor, "Colonel R" was driving me to church Sunday morning. We were talking about aliens. I thought they were being covered-up from things I had read from a guy hired by the government to explain away their sightings. "Colonel R" told me flatly that there were alien bodies in cold storage in a mountain in Colorado, as if anybody should know that who was thinking seriously about aliens. "Colonel R" was a pilot, retired from the US Air Force.
I also knew a WW-2 Navy Commander, the father of my friends, who had watched alien aircraft hovering and darting in the night sky as a teenager in the early 1930s, along with other boys at the home for kids of bankrupt/ruined parents. They watched for 20-30 minutes and decided amongst themselves that it must be secret/experimental military aircraft. The craft did not make sounds.
It is easy to comprehend how such secrets would be held tightly by those who wish to maintain power over others, largely through management of control-narratives of "reality".
I once read an article concerning the absence of life forms with wheels. Without going into a full repeat of it here it seems that such creatures would suffer from several difficulties from problems sealing themselves off from infection to supplying nutrients to body parts that are essentially separated from the main creature.
Ultimately, such organisms would be more complex than necessary to accomplish the same functions that simpler constructions can perform a situation ably pointed out in the discussion here.
I lean towards convergent evolution, myself. For example, two eyes are the minimum necessary for binocular vision; three+ are excessive, therefore inefficient. Similarly, four legs are ideal for speed and stability; two legs are the absolute minimum necessary. Therefore one might expect most complex animals to have two eyes, and four limbs, the majority being quadrupedal, and a subset - including tool users - to be bipedal.
Similar reasoning can be applied to almost every physiological feature, with the result that the humanoid body plan might be expected to be rediscovered by evolution as readily as aquatic organisms rediscover streamlining.
It's hard to argue with this, as it's a matter of judgment more than statistics. But I'll fall back on the compatibility of their DNA, if you believe these stories of abductions or if you believe the Atacama mummy is of extraterrestrial origin. In any case, the Atacama mummy is a uniquely fixed certainty in this field of great uncertainty. What do you make of Ata?
I remain quite agnostic about the mummies - possibly real, possibly 21st century Piltdown Men.
Assuming the genetic similarity is real, I lean towards either panspermia, or again, convergent evolution down to the the biochemical level. Perhaps nucleotides themselves are a necessary consequence of the engineering constraints imposed by a genetic alphabet. Admittedly panspermia seems most likely.
Exactly.
Josh, the Atacama mummy is a human. The fact that they couldn't match 8% of the DNA doesn't mean it's only 92% human. It just means the DNA had been sitting in a desert for several decades and was somewhat degraded. The article says they tried again later with better techniques and matched 98%. It's a Chilean human female, stillborn or died in infancy.
Space aliens aren't bipedal with faces. We don't know what they are, or if they exist at all. There has never been compelling evidence or a credible report of space aliens visiting Earth. Even if you think UFOs are real, you don't know who is in them (if anyone), who sent them, or what those 'people' look like. Any depiction of a space alien you ever encountered came out of the imagination of another human, and it's no surprise that when humans are tasked with describing a fictional character it's going to be based on the human form.
-Bill
Bill - I recognize that "human" is one of the interpretations, and that this interpretation has the force of Gary Nolan's science behind it. But there are counterarguments as well. The mummy has 10 ribs instead of 12, and a different configuration of skull bones from the universal primate structure. Also, there are developmental indications that this is not a fetus, but someone who has walked the earth for at least a few years. I've known a lot of short people and a lot of tall people in my life, children and adults and people shrunken with age, but I've never come across a human who was 6 inches tall.
So I regard "human" as one hypothesis that raises as many questions as it answers.
Okay, so it's a human fetus with congenital skeletal defects -- missing ribs, weird skull, and a bone-aging disorder that gave it the bone composition of a 6-year-old child. We know it died somehow; maybe that's why.
The only other option is it really was a 6-year-old child. But as you said, a 6" tall child would be pretty far-fetched. Well, changing it to a 6-year-old 6" tall *space alien* child makes it orders of magnitude more far-fetched.
There's a mystery here. Something very improbable no matter how you look at it. Certainly choosing among highly improbable scenarios is a challenge. But the point of my essay is to try to piece together clues from many strange events. Is there a relationship between these fossil human skeletons with elongated skulls with modern people who claim that they have seen bodies recovered from alien spacecraft?
Please check out this recent post, which addresses your interest in things off the beaten path:
https://sonar21.com/the-stagnation-of-science-and-the-death-of-magic/
BTW, the author writes occasional pieces for this site, but is not its primary author, who is a former CIA analyst and great source of information.
Was just saying to my nieces over breakfast -- as I read excerpts of this piece to them -- that of all the qualities I admire in my smartest and most learned friends intellectual humility is numero uno. You have that in spades Josh. This is a compelling piece. Grateful for you. Happy solstice brother. Blessings in the new year.
Yes, thank you Brian! I'm proud of my humility, and wear it as a badge of honor.
:-)
Seems that the old Teleological Argument, so derided by our Philosophy professors (and us, if we wanted to pass) may well be correct.
"a super- intellect has monkeyed with physics". — Paul Davies
The "preponderance of evidence" points to a universe of many "dimensions" or frequency levels (our "physical" reality being just the lower range of the possible") with THE PRIMARY REALITY being the energy of pure Consciousness. From that, presumably highest-frequency level, all other energies and "matter" are derived from/out of. What is it? The "ether"? The "quantum field"? Or should we just call it "Infinite Intelligence" or "Source Energy"? Whatever it is, it appears they everything within it is connected. And our individual consciousnesses are part of it because by definition nothing exists "outside" of it because all space comes from it and is contained within it. That we are individuals is part of the illusion. Just as all facets of a diamond are individual and inseparable parts of the whole stone, we are each a point of focus of The Whole. And all we are, all we "have" IS OUR AWARENESS! Without that we do not exist.
So, yes, the physical, time-space universe is DESIGNED for life. And why not? "WE" did it! We the Whole, the Field of Consciousness. We did it for the experiences we can only have in a limited physical reality. For the challenges we have here. For the opportunity to create things here, as mini-expressions of the Vast Creativity of the Whole! For fun!
You've probably seen the book, "The Biocentric Universe"? Yeah, it is! By design!
Faith pretty much described my world: We are consciousness experiencing physical existence. This is the exact opposite of treating consciousness as an epiphenomenon of matter. It implies a Universe of meaning, rather than one of chaotic randomness.
Dr. Stan Grof, a leading transpersonal psychiatrist, hypothesized that aliens are psychoids: non-physical appearances (possibly from another dimension).
". . . consciousness as an epiphenomenon of matter."
Yes, it isn't possible. And that's not hypothetical or theoretical. If consciousness came FROM the brain and/or neurology it would be just as "unconscious" as the protons and elections and neutrons of the atoms and molecules, and quarks and muons and all the other little beasties that are the subatomic particles. But something else entirely is going on because our consciousness is quite independent of physical matter. If it weren’t, we woulnbe able to separate our consciousness from the physical body and still remember who we are! We wouldn't have an ongoing sense of self. But we do! We separate from the physical and we are still very much ourselves. Which also demonstrates that memory does not arise from neurons. The brain is the interface device, but not the ORIGIN of consciousness AND/ OR memory, which go hand-in-hand.
Psychoid. Strange word! "Psych" means mind, I guess, and "oid" means "-like".
I agree this is a key clue. Consciousness is the ground of reality. Our consciousness collectively created the phenomenon of "humanity" -- perhaps we created all of the evolutionary history of life on earth in the process. Perhaps we created the universe with its ET beings. If so, it's a big "we".
It is an illusion that there is "we". That field of energy has no boundaries because it does not exist IN SPACE. Space (as in dimensionality) exists IN IT. The infinite Energy Field therefore cannot be "divided". Only its attention, its focus, its property of awareness can CHOOSE to shift its focus simultaneously into zillions of individual points: the "we". So, yes, "We": "collectively created the phenomenon" of everything and "all of the evolutionary history of life on earth".
But from our points of individual focus, we forgot, because we can only hold just so much in our (conscious) attention at any given time (VERY LITTLE) or we lose the effect of being able to immerse ourselves into this physical phenomenon and take advantage of this particular "playground".