Country Loon wrote:

> New to this group but an ardent evolutionist I have a question.
> I have noticed a similar thread but this is not quite the same.
> 
> Suppose a spaceship lands in central park and out pops the aliens - what
> (logically) will they look like. For instance they are unlikely to look like
> a green blob of jelly as they would have no mechanism for building tools and
> steering a spaceship.Can we therefore assume that such creatures would have
> hands similar to us, one head,two eyes and two ears and probably two legs.
> Maybe the star-trek idea of alien life is not far from the truth. I am not
> saying that green blobs will not exist but that space-travellers must
> necessarily look similar (though not identical to us). A dolphin cannot
> pilot a machine however smart it is unless there are 'speech' driven
> controls and even then there would have to be an evolution in technology
> from the primitive stage to get there in the first place.Or is this
> arrogance?Can somebody invent a fictional character that could pilot a
> spaceship that was radically different from the basic human form and that
> makes sense in an evolutionary framework.
> 
The counter-argument (and the counter-factual) to this is over 100 years 
old: H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds".  The book, not the film or the 
musical!

More recently, (i.e. only a quarter of a century ago), Robert Forward 
wrote a novel ("Dragon's Egg", I think) about sentient amoeba living on 
a neutron star.

Bob

-- 
Bob O'Hara
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
P.O. Box 68 (Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2b)
FIN-00014 University of Helsinki
Finland

Telephone: +358-9-191 51479
Mobile: +358 50 599 0540
Fax:  +358-9-191 51400
WWW:  http://www.RNI.Helsinki.FI/~boh/
Journal of Negative Results - EEB: www.jnr-eeb.org
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