Ways Alien Life Will Surprise Us | Unveiled

Ways Alien Life Will Surprise Us

Around the year 50 B.C., the Roman poet Titus Lucretius is said to have written about tribes of men living on various Earths scattered throughout the universe. We know, then, that the concept of alien life has at least been thought about for more than two thousand years. But while early descriptions suggest that life on other planets would be similar to humans, and despite modern pop culture tending toward innately humanoid characters, it’s unlikely to be that way in reality.

This is Unveiled, and today we're exploring the extraordinary ways that alien life will surprise us.

The little green man motif, or the glowing red Martian, have become film and TV staples to represent any life not of this world. Thanks to stories like "E.T.” and "Star Trek”, aliens (in our mind’s eye) are typically depicted as having followed something very close to our own evolutionary track. They’re bipedal hominids with larger than average heads, elongated limbs with multi-digit hands, plus large eyes and nasal cavities that make them typically reliant on their vision and sense of smell. They’re not like us… but they’re not exactly unlike us, either. This is because being human, and having evolved on Earth, we have become accustomed to expecting adaptations in others similar to those we have witnessed within ourselves. However, alien life has the potential to evolve well beyond anything we can even begin to imagine.

Even on the massive assumption that alien life would be based on the same element as all life on Earth is - carbon - there’s room for endless variety. And the chances that the same evolutionary milestones will have occurred in other creatures on other planets are minimal. We know that the mammals rose to become the dominant class of species on this planet, for example, but how likely is it that the precise conditions to allow for this will have been replicated elsewhere? Answer: not that likely at all!

So, what could the dominating life on an alien planet look like, instead? Just based, again, on the only version of life we know about on Earth, the possibilities go on and on. They could be vertebrates, or insect-like beings, maybe with six legs, no legs, or wings. They might have a skeleton, or an exoskeleton, or no bones at all. They may give birth, lay seeds, or lay eggs. And how might they perceive the universe? Again, based just on successful examples of life on Earth, they could rely on vision or hearing… but also sonar, pheromones, or front feeling antennae. There’s really no predicting it, even when we do limit the possibilities to carbon only.

However, it’s long been speculated that alien life could also evolve from an altogether different elemental base. While, as far as we know, it may be possible for life to grow out of any member of the periodic table… some elements are deemed more likely than others. After carbon, silicon is widely tipped as the most likely because it resembles carbon so well. It’s one of the most abundant chemicals in the universe, and it - like carbon - can connect to four different atoms at the same time. Silicon is strong, reliable, flexible, and there’s plenty of it. All of which makes it the primary candidate to be an alternative building block for life.

As to what silicon-based life would actually look like… according to our current understanding of the constructs of living organisms, it would likely be primitive and simple and lacking the complexity of life on Earth. But unfortunately, we can’t know for sure until we find direct evidence of it. The assumption when searching for intelligent alien life, however, is that even if it isn’t carbon-based, whatever element it is based on must allow for it to eventually evolve into something more complex. Again, from our point of view, there are precious few rules to follow here… and potentially endless possibilities. Life could be swimming through the methane seas of Titan right now. Or bouncing its way through the clouds of a gas giant somewhere. If it boasts a wholly different chemical makeup, then we’ll always struggle to discover it.

It’s one reason why we so often allow our imaginations to go bigger. To skip the individual alien creatures themselves and move straight to the wider civilizations. But, just as alien biology will have evolved utterly independent from life on Earth, so too will alien groups and societies. As humans, we’re part of a mammalian social structure working towards individual species survival and a higher function. The social order for aliens could be totally different, though.

One proposed example of how different it could be is the hive mind. Here, most of the population are simply drones, acting as the arms and legs of a core group - or brain. The group is united under a single purpose, with the collective need always valued over the individual. So, while independent thought (as in human society) can give rise to interspecies disagreements, fluctuating relationships, and sometimes war… a hive mind loses all that instability. It’s unquestionably united. And would have no need for human ideas like social hierarchy, governments, or even geographical borders. On the one hand there’d be no freedom, on the other there’d be no division. And considering that we as species are prone to a culture shock just when travelling to foreign countries, or to anywhere without the same fundamental roots as our own on a personal level, it’s safe to assume that an encounter with any civilization developed on an alien planet could not only surprise the human perspective… but dismantle it.

Finally, and with all of this in mind, how about our attempts to communicate with aliens? Sci-fi movies usually feature some kind of ultimately negotiable language barrier, but would it really be that simple? According to the Polish philosopher (and sci-fi writer) Stanislaw Lem, even if we were able to make contact with an alien species, there would still be some insurmountable blocks preventing us from building any meaningful link with it.

Writing in his iconic 1968 novel, “His Master’s Voice”, Lem explains how similar all of Earth’s languages fundamentally are, even though they can sometimes seem very different. How translations are almost always possible across human cultures because we all, at least, share the same reference points. We all share the same fundamental mammalian lifestyle on Earth - complete with birth, death, survival, and the Earthly passage of time. But it’s likely that an alien race won’t have those same reference points in quite the same way, and so its language could prove totally indecipherable from the outset.

More than that, though, Lem shows how there could be a huge gap in our intelligence, with linguistics being just one part of it. Because what happens if the intellectual difference between our species and an alien group is the same as it is between, say, humans and a worm? The biology wouldn’t matter. The civilization, while interesting, wouldn’t matter. And the communication link could seem futile. We know that, on Earth, communication between species isn’t impossible. Anybody with a well-trained pet would attest to that! But remember that no matter how impressively you teach your dog to sit and fetch on command, it does at least share some reference points with you, it’s human trainer. An alien wouldn’t have those. And, of course, if an alien were just one part of a hive mind, then why should it even break rank to recognise you trying to communicate with it at all? It wouldn’t do so, because it would automatically (perhaps unknowably) be superior and wildly different to us.

Ultimately, we just don’t know what to expect. Biologically speaking, sci-fi is awash with what aliens might look like… but the chances are that none of the depictions created so far will turn out to be accurate simply because there are so many possibilities. Socially speaking, we tend to think of human civilization as having evolved to a reasonably high level, but it could easily be dwarfed into insignificance by something not of this planet. And, when it comes to communication, it may be that we’ll simply never understand what an alien is trying to say.

With all of this considered, what’s the biggest surprise that alien life could throw our way? It’s a relatively easy question to answer… because the biggest surprise of all would be if, against all the odds and despite all the infinite possibilities, it actually did transpire that an alien species had evolved to be just like us. While not impossible, the chances of finding anything that’s even remotely human elsewhere in space are just so incredibly and fantastically low.