What would an extraterrestrial look like?

This is another controversial question because the only intelligent species we know about is us, and most science fiction representations of aliens make them look like us to a certain extent. Good examples are Spock of Star Trek with pointy ears and Klingons like Worf with dark skin and prehistoric skull ridges. The earlier Klingons looked friendlier.

UFO enthusiasts categorize aliens into types such as Greys, Zeta Reticulians, Reptilians, Pleiadeans, and several minor types. The Greys are the Roswell aliens. As I describe them, they look like bug-eyed cadavers. The Pleiadeans look like humans, and I suppose the intent is to have them blend into human society.

All of these types are used in science fiction stories. Some stories make them look ugly and evil because it adds a horror component. The fact is that we don’t have any idea what extraterrestrial intelligent species would look like. All of our ideas are based on human physiology or some animal or insect species. Although it’s possible that aliens could look like us, the chances are not that good. We evolved on a planet that has all of the things necessary for life like us. The temperature, the pressure, the gravity, the tilt of the axis, the stabilization of the spin by the moon, the protection of the magnetosphere, the ozone layer, the weather, the presence of a specific concentration of oxygen, the absence of a nearby super nova, and evolution itself contributed to our emergence on Earth.

What are the chances of this happening somewhere else? Actually, it’s good considering that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies out there, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. However, beings like us could be a billion light years away, a distance that we won’t be bridging any time soon.

One idea for a different form of intelligent life could have happened on Earth. If the asteroid that annihilated the dinosaurs sixty five million years ago hadn’t happened, we humans wouldn’t be here. But, something else could have evolved, namely an intelligent dinosaur. There was a big-brained dinosaur living just before the asteroid hit. It was small, looked like a raptor, had big eyes and only came out at night to hunt. If this species had evolved into an intelligent creature and formed a technological society and our souls would have inhabited one of these, we would look like the Teenage Ninja Turtles without the shells.

I wonder if we would have liked pizza?

The question is: how did we humans become intelligent? The theory is that it’s because we got out of the trees a billion years ago and began walking around on two legs, freeing our hands to make stuff, such as weapons to kill larger animals for food. Protein from eating meat is what helped develop our brains and weapon making helped in that development. In other words we became meat-eating killers on the road to intelligence.

But, is that necessary? In our case the answer is yes, but that’s doesn’t mean that an intelligent species couldn’t have evolved without those things happening on their planet. We have no way to determine what it would take to evolve an intelligent tool making species, which means that we have no idea what they would look like. That’s why we have science fiction.

Thanks for reading.