What would alien life look like?

[Mechaghostman2]

Here's a few of my ideas of what alien life might look like, based on the convergent evolution seen here on Earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68cCz8Ar9_Y

[AFTT47]

A hint for you: People are inherently lazy. If you want a response, you need to do more than post a link to videos. Sum it it up for us so as to gain our interest.

[Paleophyte]

The video makes an argument for a few things alien life might look like based on convergent evolution of various forms on Earth. Which is great if your planet is Earthlike and didn't follow a significantly different evolutionary path out of blind chance. Given a radically different environment their argument falls apart completely. For example, you might be waiting a bit to evolve a crocodile or a shark if your starting point is this: Plasma blobs hint at new form of life.

[Fireball]

To answer the OP. Alien. But then, we don't see tube worms walking the surface of the earth. There is a lot of ground to cover that has no terrestrial basis. Which is a lot of ground.

[Paleophyte]

To answer the OP. Alien. But then, we don't see tube worms walking the surface of the earth. There is a lot of ground to cover that has no terrestrial basis. Which is a lot of ground.

And quite a bit that isn't ground at all.

[ignoramus]

OK, who thinks that an earth like planet somewhere can and will evolve life very similar to our own here.

I'm more interested in the reasoning as to why it shouldn't.

After all, our mother nature has rolled the die countless times as well and this is our end result?

Can we factor in a similar planet but with a slightly different amount of eg: lithium or silicone, etc. Could that steer evolution in a differernt direction?

[Anomalocaris]

I think the notion that convergent evolution will make alien life resemble earth life can easily be taken too far. Of course laws of physics, and their derivatives fluid dynamics and mechanics of materials will likely operate exactly the same way across the universe. So a streamlined pisciform shape is likely to be common amongst large motile organisms that live in a dense fluid, or a very rapidly moving organisms that live in a gaseous environment.

Buy that kind of thing probably represent the limit of likely convergent evolution across totally separate lineages of biological evolution. This is because cases on earth where seemingly different organisms that through convergent evolution came to resemble each other sufficiently closely as to mimic the sort of convergent evolution seen in Star Trek and Star Wars, such as whales and fish, bats and pterosaurs, all evolved from animals that belong to the same phylum and shared identical fundamental body plans.

[AFTT47]

OK, who thinks that an earth like planet somewhere can and will evolve life very similar to our own here.

I'm more interested in the reasoning as to why it shouldn't.

After all, our mother nature has rolled the die countless times as well and this is our end result?

Can we factor in a similar planet but with a slightly different amount of eg: lithium or silicone, etc. Could that steer evolution in a different direction?

A major question mark is intelligent life. Our planet is about 4.5 billion years old but only in the last few million years or so did evolution favor big brains. The dinosaurs did fine for a 100 million years+ without it until that damn asteroid hit about 65 million years ago.

Current understanding is that extra-terrestrial life is probably very common but intelligent life may be rare.

We just don't know yet.

[Anomalocaris]

OK, who thinks that an earth like planet somewhere can and will evolve life very similar to our own here.

I'm more interested in the reasoning as to why it shouldn't.

After all, our mother nature has rolled the die countless times as well and this is our end result?

Can we factor in a similar planet but with a slightly different amount of eg: lithium or silicone, etc. Could that steer evolution in a different direction?

A major question mark is intelligent life. Our planet is about 4.5 billion years old but only in the last few million years or so did evolution favor big brains. The dinosaurs did fine for a 100 million years+ without it until that damn asteroid hit about 65 million years ago.

Current understanding is that extra-terrestrial life is probably very common but intelligent life may be rare.

We just don't know yet.

On the other hand, lineages of non-intelligent extra-terresterial life would likely rarely cross interplanetary divide and perhaps hardly ever cross interstellar divide even when looking at sample pools spanning multiple galaxies. But intelligent alien life may develop interstellar travel capability with significant frequency and thus spread across interplanetary and interstellar divide quite often.

So I suspect that while nonintelligence alien lineages may be very numerous and be everywhere, Intelligent alien lineages, although may be very few, but still can also everywhere.

[ignoramus]

We can never know.

Even if we make contact in the next 1,000 years with other intelligent life, the'y be just as surprised as we are.
If we ask them "tell us about the secrets of the universe and life on other planets" they probably or statistically answer with "fucked if we know, you're the first intelligent life we've encountered ever and we were hoping you'd know!"

imo, our universe is incomprehensibly large and any intelligent life making contact would also be incomprehensibly rare. (as mentioned before)

and all this on an assumption that it is even physically possible to travel very fast.