ET’s recipe for life
Friday, April 18th, 2008A quick bit of thinking in this blog entry. I was just reading through a BBC News article here, about the chances of extra-terrestrial intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe.
To summarise the article, a guy called Professor Watson at the University of East Anglia claims that the chance of intelligent life existing on an “Earth like planet” elsewhere in the Universe is something like 0.01%. He goes on to claim that humans went through “four critical stages” in evolution to become an intelligent life-form.
However, here’s my take on the subject. Professor Watson says two slightly controversial/questionable things here:
- “Earth like planet”
- “Four critical stages of evolution”
It seems to me that all of these highly intelligent scientists, astrologists, astronomists, evolutionists and other “ists” seem to be certain that life can only exist on a planet that possesses all of the characteristics of Earth - such as liquid water, same amount of gravity, temperature, climate, resources and so on. Has anyone considered that maybe not all forms of intelligent life needs this “recipe” for evolution? Perhaps out there somewhere in some far reaches of The Milky Way we have this intelligent alien that doesn’t need water to survive and doesn’t need a perfect climate to avoid getting a pretty nasty sun tan.
Can you see where I’m coming from here? I’m not a scientist and I may be completely missing the point here but maybe these assumptions made by boffins behind a telescope all over the globe are slightly off. These “recipes for life” that the boffins claim must be identical to that on Earth are all good theories if you want intelligent humans elsewhere in space; but with so many galaxies, stars and planets beyond our Solar System, there could be a planet full of “aliens” with American accents. But the chances are there are probably some pretty weird and wonderful species out there too.
Maybe E.T. is out there now, reading this, on a “computer” that’s withstanding a gravitational pull 500 times that of Earth’s, with a nice cold glass of hydrochloric acid and some helium isotope for dinner.
