Humanity Is By A Nearly Impossible Chance, Thus Intelligent Aliens Must

History's arbitrariness

Nevertheless, as Conway Morris noted, the "diversity of life on Earth is enormous." That humankind looks the way it does, or that an intelligent breed of spiders did not instead evolve to build cities and smartphones, is largely due to chance, other researchers maintain.

The late Stephen Jay Gould, a famous Harvard paleontologist, doubted
that if the tape of life on Earth were replayed a million times,
anything like our species would evolve again. "That we have four
appendages rather than six or three or five - that's an accident of
evolution," agreed Shostak.

Indeed, if you judge success by population size, the most successful
body plan on Earth involves an exoskeleton, rather than our
endoskeletons, and six appendages. The possessors of that robust form:
insects. "They did just fine with six," Shostak said. "There's nothing
magic about four."

Although not well-regarded for their wits as individuals, the remarkable
"hive minds" of bees and ants could point to another manner in which
alien intelligence arises - across many individuals acting collectively,
rather than as discrete beings.

"...aliens might indeed look like us, if to an extent we are them in
terms of basic cellular machinery."



"A verse in more than one religious text speaks of man being made in the
image of God... Is this less likely than us coming about by pure chance?
As the Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said, he "doubted human
life could evolve again by chance if the tape of life on Earth were
replayed a million times." It's worth stopping to think about what this
means. And Conway Morris noted, the "diversity of life on Earth is
enormous. That humankind looks the way it does, or that an intelligent
breed of spiders did not instead evolve to build cities and smartphones,
is largely due to "chance." There is that word again; "chance." Humanity
does exist, so perhaps the only reason we're here is because someone
very much like us designed us this way. A reasonable human should
believe there is a scientific explanation for everything, but when it
comes to intelligent life like humanity, our existence hardly makes
sense in the realm of science; humanity should be nearly impossible, yet
here we are."

Consul Nicholas Moore

Humanity, past tense

"Overall, it seems likely that intelligent creatures much like us are
out there, somewhere. Recent estimates put the planetary census (not
including moons) in the Milky Way alone at around 160 billion. "We think
there are billions of planets just in our galaxy with Earthlike
temperatures," Shostak said. Even if life is rare and intelligent life
still rarer, statistics suggest that other humanoids exist among the
billions of galaxies.

That being said, our thought experiments about alien life might come up
embarrassingly short, Shostak said. Humankind developed a few hundred
thousand years ago, but sentient alien races might have had billions of
years more to evolve, and in that time, and could have evolved an even
better body plan.

"It may be beyond our ability to say very much meaningful about all
these things," Shostak said. "It's sort of like asking trilobites, 'What
do you think will run the planet in 500 million years?'"

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