What Do Aliens Look Like? Oxford Astrobiologists Draw a Picture, Based on Darwinian Theories of Evolution

When Charles Dar­win laid out his the­o­ry of nat­ur­al selec­tion in 1859, lit­tle could he have imag­ined that, a good 150 years lat­er, this cor­ner­stone of evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry might help us form a men­tal pic­ture of what alien life looks like. But that’s pre­cise­ly how a group of researchers from Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty have done: In a research paper called “Dar­win’s Aliens,” they’ve applied Dar­win’s the­o­ry to alien life, posit­ing that aliens–like humans–adapt to their envi­ron­ment, under­go nat­ur­al selec­tion, and move from sim­ple to com­plex life forms. And, by the end, they could plau­si­bly look some­thing like a “colony of Ewoks from Star Wars or the Octomite” pic­tured above.

You can read “Dar­win’s Aliens” in the Inter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of Astro­bi­ol­o­gy. It’s pub­lished on the Cam­bridge Core web­site.

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via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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