See how far technology has come so quickly? Just 20 years ago, there were very few homes with a computer. Now most of us have internet access built into our cell phones. We are very dependent on technology and hardly ever go a day without contact with dozens of others online. Suppose this continues over the next few millenia. Will humans change form over that time? Expanded brain and eyes, longer fingers, smaller mouth, nose, and ears? As we move farther away from the hunter/gatherer societies we have fostered for most of human existence, it is not inconceivable that we would slowly breed out the senses that allowed us to thrive in that environment. Sounds a lot like what may have happened to allow for the evolution of what most people describe aliens looking like.
What environmental pressures would drive the development/extinguishment of those features? In modern society, a person with big nose/mouth/ears and small eyes can reproduce just as easily as one with small nose/mouth/ears and big eyes.
The OP is making an error that is common in popular culture concerning evolution. Part Larmarkian, and part belief that evolution is directed toward some end.
As noted, unless long fingers confers some reproductive advantage, it won’t take hold in our population. Note that our species is large in numbers, geographically dispersed, and living in a fairly stable environment. Under those conditions, there is not a lot of evolutionary pressure to change (even considering possible climate change in the future).
They could be future humans if we mutate due to extraterrestrial disease. A meteor strikes the Earth, spores are released and - presto! - we all look like Gollum with Klingon foreheads!
Yes, the classic alien is what we imagine humans will look like in the distant future. It’s based on the differences we perceive between our current state and our ape ancestors. We have less hair, bigger brains, and are more dexterous. When you extrapolate these trends further you get an alien.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the OP is correct. Just look at the section in the new Arizona law about being particularly careful to stop and check the ID of people with pale skin and long fingers.
This is basically it. The typical mythological Gray Alien represents past evolutionary trends in human evolution projected into the future. However, the kind of selective forces that produced those trends are no longer operative in the present, so there is no reason to imagine that these trends will persist.
Besides this, as the link mentions, it is extremely unlikely that actual aliens will be nearly as humanoid as the Grays are usually depicted. Given an entirely different evolutionary and ecological history, the probability that an intelligent life form would so closely resemble humans is very low.
Low, maybe, but I wouldn’t say very low, depending on what you mean by “closely resemble.” Basic things, like bipedalism, cephalization, bilateral symmetry, and the number of limbs, don’t seem (to my understanding, anyway) like evolutionary long shots at all.
Of course, it’s hard to speculate when you’ve only got one sample of life to work from; it’s quite possible that there are evolutionary paths resulting in intelligent spacefaring life that we couldn’t even begin to imagine. But it’s even harder to speculate about those things, and we have, as yet, no reason to believe that they even exist. Bottom line, I’d be astonished if our basic body shape was anything approaching unique.
Heck, just look at the variety of forms evolution has managed to come up with on our planet alone. Elephants are pretty smart, for instance, and have something functionally equivalent to a hand which could make and use tools, but it’s a modified nose, instead of being a modified foot (or ultimately, fin) like it is with humans. Or maybe picture something like a land-dwelling octopus. If there’s some alien species out there that wields their tools in their prehensile ears, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. And they’d probably take it for granted that all people in the Universe pick up tools with their ears, and depict aliens as having longer-than-normal earlobes in their popular culture.
What do you mean “how far technology has come so quickly?”
Our cars are still run by internal combustion engines, invented over a hundred years ago. Our airplanes are powered by jet turbines, invented seventy years ago.
We recently started moving our phones (over 130 years old) off of wires and onto radio (maybe ten years younger). Big deal. We have figured out a few neat thigns to do with computers, sixty-some-odd years after ENIAC.
I do see an accelerated rate of gadget making and planned obsolescence, but we are just ringing changes on technology developed decades ago.
Not that I believe in UFOs and alien visitors. But the logic for this I’ve heard is that if there are mysterious, furtive, humanoid visitors to our planet with advanced technology they are far more likely to be from the Earth of the future than from planets an interstellar distance away.
This is because theoretically speaking time travel appears much more feasible, than travel across the unbelievably vast distances between stars. Even with technology far in advance of our own it is difficult to imagine any technique that could be used to travel light years. On the other lots of the mathematics involved in relativity and quantum mechanics permits time travel.
The OP didn’t mention genetic engineering, but that goes along with technology. It doesn’t seem too far fetched a race that moved into space might deliberately select for smaller bodies, and artificial wombs would free womens’ bodies from having to accommodate larger baby heads. Smaller bodies would require less energy and living space maybe, and it might also be easier to engineer really long life-spans into slow metabolism little gray bodies or something. A 50 or 100 year trip between stars might not be that big a deal to someone who can live 1,000 years or more.
You never know which way human aesthetics are going to go, but look at Japanese anime for instance. Teensy feet, huge eyes…
They are future humans, from a post-apocalyptic timeline where the earth can no longer support life. They’re genetically engineered to live on spaceships all their lives. As such they sacrificed the non-essential things that take nutrients and only get in the way of performing their mission, like hair, nails, etc. Since they live in zero-G environment they don’t need nearly the muscle mass we have presently, hence the skinny arms & legs. They need bigger eyes to see in the darkness of space.
Since you can’t grow food on a spaceship, they have to live on Jetson’s space food pills, and are engineered to not need to eat solid foods. They have a very rudimentary digestive system with no teeth and do not excrete solid wastes.
That’s why they do all the anal probing, they’re wondering what’s the deal with the asshole.
True, but could elephants ever develop sufficiently to use their modified noses to build space ships? Or maybe a better question is: among unintelligent animals, is the development of feet (which probably already have a head start on grappling the environment) into tool-use appendages more or less likely than the development of noses into tool-use appendages?
I am by no means prepared to say that it’s impossible for ear- or nose-based tool use to arise and precipitate a technological civilization — and given the size of the universe, it’s probably very reasonable to suppose that such a thing might already exist — but, if we’re talking about land-dwelling animals, my (admittedly uninformed) suspicion is that we foot-evolving bastards have, erm, the upper hand.
