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Asked by chelseafc13 to Alison, Artem, Caroline, John, Gunther on 14 Jun 2012.
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John Short answered on 14 Jun 2012:
I think so. You could describe us, as well as other primates as bipedal, i.e. we have two arms and two legs, where we walk upright on our legs. We have thumbs and hands that are able to manipulate tools and brains that have the capacity for imagination, of things that are not actually real or based on current reality. For example, people such as Leonardo Da Vinci imagined types of planes and helicopters before they existed. I think that the features we have will be a common set found elsewhere, although the appearance may be different. A good analogy are smart phones. HTC, Blackberry, apple and samsung share features of being able to connect to the internet, text, phone, play games, good camera, but all look a bit different, have different styles, and sometimes such as with blackberry have keyboards etc instead of touchscreen. I think aliens will be like that.
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Artem Evdokimov answered on 15 Jun 2012:
I hope that whoever or whatever is out there is like us in the sense for instance that they might have at least a similar ‘moral compass’. It is unfortunately not altogether clear that there’s not a civilization out there comprised of a single conscious entity which won’t have any clue about e.g. concept of ‘self’ or ‘other’ since it would not ever encounter any ‘other’. Our contact with something like this is a recipe for disaster. Consciousness evolved as e.g. electric currents within semiconductive minerals would not even possibly recognize us as sentient and would instead attempt to communicate with our washing machines and microwaves (there is a famous cartoon about this, I think). So while there may be creatures that share at least some of our structural (in the broad sense) traits, there is also a good chance that there’s forms of life out there that we can’t even imagine.
Comments
nisma commented on :
yes its possible we just need to send a space camera to a different planet and look for proof. Its worth a shot 🙂
Artem commented on :
The problem is that we don’t have a certain destination in mind. Only very large planets have been inferred from their effects on the star (we can’t see the planets directly, too far away) and we can’t get there in reasonable time… yet.