Hey Veeky Forums, how likely is the chance that there's humanoid aliens beyond this Earth?

I mean, just think about it. Noah's Ark with two of every species, which God created, [math]constant[/math] references to the so called "Kingdom of Heaven" (a kingdom beyond our skies), ability to spread disease through certain human nations as He saw fit, "one day for God is years for humans" (general relativity), Jesus taking the shape of a human but doing things no human could ever do, resurrecting and literally flying into the skies. It's very obvious that "God" is really an extraterrestrial civilization that created humanity for whatever purpose, and Jesus, God's son, is one of them, maybe an ambassador or a rogue alien who sympathized with us, early humans living hundreds of thousands of years, this God having created light from scratch (Big Bang), creating oceans and skies (terraforming Earth, just think about how it makes no sense for Earth to be for no good reason the only of the rocky planets to have liquid water on its surface), etc.

Well if it's floating in the air, it needs to be as dense or less dense than air. Even if it's made of graphene, it's still a goddamn balloon. Because it's a goddamn balloon, it's at the whims of wind and air currents and what not.

>>high gravity
high gravity should make the atmosphere denser than earth's meaning they should be having a hell of a time simply staying up.

>>fuck shit up with their tentacles
yeah like it's going to be able to controllably move them around at faster than the speed of sound to stop a missile or bullets

Bunker buster nuclear bomb, hardened tip penetrator, capable of tunneling 22ft through reinforced concrete, or 100ft of earth.

Watch them balloons pop.

very small, i think
the humanoid shape is the product of some very specific circumstances, the odds that these are recreated perfectly are very small, and the chance that they occur on another basis is even smaller
if anything, alien life doesn't fit our definition of "life" at all

I've always imagined a number of things
for one, it doesn't have to be a species. It can just be one thing that consumes shit and grows; reproduction itself is a product of earth-specific circumstances as well, so why assume there are more?
that being said, reproduction is a bit more widespread than the humanoid shape, so I suppose the odds of more than one entity of alien lifeforms existing is larger than any of them being humanoid.

If they are a reproductive species, they may not look like anything close to life on earth
they can be clouds of gas, or liquids
they can be hybrids of that
even consciousness is a product of earthly circumstances, even the most simple goal directive behavior, so even the assumption that if any alien life exists, that it's conscious is a huge leap in logic

Convergent evolution though.
Assuming there's an infinite amount of planets, and an infinite amount of earth like ones, and assuming billions of those have life on them, would it be too far out to assume that something human like evolved on one of them

The chances of meeting these aliens would be small.

>assuming
well there's an assumption
the universes infinity is still a subject up for debate
basing another assumption upon that assumption does not seem the right way too tackle that argument

Depends. Is the universe infinite? If so, 100%. If not, we don't know.

>some very specific circumstances
Are these so specific?

These are, from the top of my head:
- a rock planet (neither gas not ice planet)
- a water planet (near the triple point)
- in the Goldilocks zone (we see many are there)

And all 3 above are really closely related.

Next we have
- land based life (not water based)
- oxygen based atmosphere (as opposed to methane)

This also means we need a moon the size of our Moon, for tectonic purposes.

And that is what we are adapted to. Galactic survey so far suggests there are many candidate planets.

Hey buddy check out /x/

We were watching steven jewniverse while high as fuck

it depends on how evolutionarily advantageous a humanoid shape would be in their environment

i dont think habitable planets( for complex animalia like life) can be that different from earth.

so i do think there would be humanoid like species.

it also depends on how far you are willing to push humanoid. is a gorilla humanoid? a kangaroo?

We have zero data. Even a rough approximation of a guess is not really possible.

>high gravity should make the atmosphere denser than earth's meaning they should be having a hell of a time simply staying up.

This is why whales cannot float.

There's so many fucking planets, that if every great filter was lottery odds, we'd still have countless civilizations in the universe
and it's very likely that many filters are more likely than lottery odds

In the total absence f any data, it's as good a technique for arriving at a guess as any other.

Depends upon conditions.

I'd say that if we were to find alien life it would be microbial or similar to "lesser" animals.

It's possible though given the massive size.

>no fun allowed

am writing a comic book about aliens rn. the possibilities of what life would look like are infinite. in fact our notions of biology might be completely irrelevant when observing alien "life". finding humanoid aliens would be almost impossible. look at almost all other living things on our planet, which are no where near humanoid. and monkeys and apes look similar to us only because we share common ancestors. i think aliens would be crazier than anything we can possibly conceive of. the most likely reason that there could be humanoid species out there would be if they somehow influenced our evolution themselves

i want to hear more because i completely disagree.

given enough time and a specific set of facts you get similar results.

There are no other humanoids here because they are our common ancestor, they are us. Other animals specialize in their specific adaptations(like us)and that's it, there is and was no evolutionary pressure for any other animal to evolve human like. It happened to apes because the ones that were human like, however minimal, survived again and again.

I guess my main argument is how you expect life to differ given the the basics of life on earth are universally the same, if there ever was something else it never survived despite this being a perfect environment for life. (water, heat, low radiation, gravity not very strong) If it's so possible to vastly differ then why dont we have silicon based life forms or life that doesnt use DNA/RNA? I propose it's because it cant exist.

If you're just saying we dont know enough, well thats a cop out.

the percent of life that is humanoid on earth x the likelihood of life not on earth

>If you're just saying we dont know enough, well thats a cop out.

We can't possibly "know enough." We have one data point.

true that is POSSIBLE for there to be humanoid life out there in space, but as to how likely that is...idk. it IS possible that our notion of evolution might not apply on other planets, why couldnt an organism be born perfect with no need for evolution if the conditions on the planet are right. i mean what we call "life" might change once we encounter them. their consciousness could be more fluid than ours and able to take over matter around the alien and mold it into its own body.

>Other animals specialize in their specific adaptations(like us)and that's it, there is and was no evolutionary pressure for any other animal to evolve human like
exactly so why would the dominant species on another planet HAVE TO develop into humanoid form. hell the best body for space travel would be fishlike or jellyfish-like. hell even an octopus would be better in space than humanoids.

yes everything has DNA on our planet, but we are talking about life that would evolve from a completely different environment may have a completely different method of reproducing itself that might not even require "genetic code" but total reconstruction of available matter into a new body.

it's a cop out to make a post like that and say we dont know enough.

tomorrow we will have immortality and flying cars
there are alien remains one centimeter deep from the deepest we've dug on mars

you cant possibly know enough to prove the above wrong

>Depends. Is the universe infinite? If so, 100%
Wrong. Infinity does NOT make everything P=1

>prove?
no
>make an educated guess?
yes

what does current science suggest alien life would look like?
most likely not humanoid

Anywhere something like tropical trees exist will lead to primate like aliens. Some of these aliens might mutate bipedalism and become humanoid.

There was already a primate like reptile in the Permian era showing this is true.

It's either very likely or very unlikely, based on details we literally cannot have until we find extraterrestrial life in multiple locations.

I had an interesting thought while reading this:

What if there were a form of intelligent life that behaves like fungi here on earth, in that they reproduce by producing fruiting bodies (like mushrooms) on the ground, and then those fruiting bodies eject the "offspring" into the air. The correct atmospheric conditions (like a really dense atmosphere) could allow the offspring to stay clustered together in a cloud, and if the airborne "spores" were individual, but had a kind of hivemind, like ants or bees, then that cloud could potentially be considered a single intelligent being.

Maybe that's stupid. It was just a spur of the moment thought.

Cool

I mean, the universe is a big place. But aliens evolving our specific body plan would be an absurdly huge coincidence, and even if they were generally upright with bilateral symmetry and had two walking limbs and two everything else limbs, the details would in all likelihood all be completely different.

Isn't Earth's gravity like 97% of the possible limit for space travel? They aren't bothering us if their planet's gravity is that intense.

two schools of thought on this matter, debate as old as the concept of the other

the first school of thought believes that any intelligent aliens we encounter in space will most certainly look somewhat like a human

this is because a human body is very well designed for what it does, hands are vital for tool development, as is a large brain and a full suite of senses, therefore any aliens that find us will be at least vaguely humanoid, two arms and two legs, a head, visual olfactory and auditory sensor organs, some form of blood substitute.

if we find them though all bets are off.

the second school of thought is that humans are the product of such a niche and circumstantial change in environment that the likelihood of finding anything that tread a remotely similar path is minuscule, here be starfish aliens.

its a pointless argument though because like said we only have one data point to draw these conclusions from, which is a shitty sample size if you ask me.

either way, purge em all. its a dark forest out their and we can't allow ourselves to be put at risk of unnecessary danger, especially since its so easy to cause an extinction event.

I think the universe if full of basic life, bacteria and such. Life will appear where it can.
But intelligent life is super rare.

Humans have only been intelligent for some thousand years, nothing in astronomical terms.

There may be only one intelligent race active at any point in a given galaxy.

Possible limit for current chemical rockets. More advanced types could get you out.

Third school of thought =
Any alien that has the technology to travel to our planet has most likely discarded it's "original self" and merged with the technology they have created. It could be a brain stuck with wires or they could be completely amalgamated with their ship they arrived in by having their consciousness moved from their original body into the ships "hub" or w/e.
If aliens come in contact with us, they have most likely mastered FTL travel.

Solely depends on the circumstances of which they have been raised. The conditions of their homeworld would have a significant impact on their biology. If their home planet has near-identical conditions to that of Earth then who's to say there can't be bipedal hominids on Earth-like planets?

The conditions of earth itself aren't the only factors.

You also have all the different conditions earth had in different geological epochs to take into account which directly affected what evolves. Convergent evolution within cordates doesn't really say much. Octopi are considered one of the smarter creatures in nature and their appearance is radically different from that of humans. They have eyes though, so there is some convergent evolution.

So getting the 'specific set' for humans is deeply unlikely to happen within the milky way galaxy where you probably would find *only* millions of worlds as developed as Earth in regards to ecological complexity as all these woulds would have billions of years of geological history that affected them.

Bipedal sapients most certainly exist, but I don't think they'd be human in proportion and most certainly wouldn't comprise a majority of what sapient beings exist as the range of possible forms is simply unknown. While one can speculate the effects factors such as gravity, atmospheric composition, geological composition, wetness (how much water the world has), the orbital relationships the planet/moon hosting life has, the magnetic field the world has and so on, arbitrating on if humanoid forms would be a commonly occuring thing is something that there just isn't enough data to acutely predict yet.

Either way I err on the side of non-humanoids being way more common than humanoids simply due to how evolutionary development would differ radically and how I can't think of any empirical reason why a humanoid form is needed to develop a complex system on the order that have made on Earth in the past few centuries.

>life beyond earth
possible

>humanoid
impossible. Any life out there would be from a completely independent chain of evolution, so would look nothing like us.

Humanoid aliens are a product of TV science fiction, so actors could play the parts with just a rubber suit or makeup.

Could do with a little more science in this thread.

then describe an alternative evolutionary pathway which could give rise to an intelligent, sentient, technology-using being which isn't humanoid.

I would put money on it that you can't, and that the furthest from us that you could get would be a reptilian humanoid, very much like a Cardassian.

Given the Goldilocks zone criteria, evolution once out of water and moving towards creating technology is pretty much limited to:

>vertebrate (protection, locomotion, strength, mechanical efficiency)
>endoskeleton (weight, breathing mechanics)
>four legs (mechanical/calorific efficiency of larger organisms); then becomes:
>bipedal (use of hands)
>opposable thumbs
>binocular vision
>binaural hearing
>special senses arranged on the highest part of the body i.e. the head (for efficiency, and protection within the skull.)

Change any one of those qualities and you have something which will be inferior to its competition and will be selected against.

So being a bipedal humanoid seems inevitable if life on your planet is going to evolve to the level of using tools and technology. I am open to be proved wrong, and would actually love to be, because I can't envisage any techno-savvy creature which isn't humanoid.

We are the first civilization in the universe. The fist civilization would wonder where the other civs are, which we do, and not see them, which we dont

octopus people on a ocean world could certainly achieve a rudimentary form of technology, they'd mostly be hardstuck in the stone age unless they could harness the heat of geothermal vents but they could do it. They'd just never be able to achieve spaceflight unassisted

Tf u mean unassisted space flight? U think us needing oxygen and shit in space is any different from octoppl needing water?

they'd need to be uplifted, you can't construct a spacecraft underwater, you'd never even get to the point of thinking about a space vessel because you'd never invent an aircraft

the land would literally be their equivilent of space.

kinda sad too because an octopus do well in space so long as it could breath

eight different limbs for locomation that are flexable enough to curl back into themselves would give an octopus significantly better movement in a spacecraft than a human, they wouldn't have any micrograv related bone issues because they don't have bones, they have a built in propellant system for when they're in a hurry or to act as a psuedo air break, cephalopods would be much more useful in space than a human

shame they'd never even think of going there

What technology do you envisage for the octoppl?

Ocean worlds are overpowered.
You get every gradient of temperature just by going deeper into the water, so if you want to live, just fucking move.
The only aspect of structural design you need to account for is how buoyant it is. Makes logistics easy as balls.
Being able to use tools and breathing underwater is life on easy mode.

0%
Not even a slight chance that they exist. Otherwise we would have known. There's not even one single shred of evidence that they exist anywhere.

Think of humans and all the stuff the make, all the trash, all the monuments, all the artifacts and fossils. And we've left so much shit floating around in space.

If there's anyone else out there they'd have left something, anything, that we would have noticed.

>If there's anyone else out there they'd have left something, anything, that we would have noticed.
How? We haven't looked.

The only remotely habitable world we've really searched for life on is Mars. Maybe Titan, if you count one probe taking a few images in one spot as "looking". Everything else is still a complete mystery. If there was life around Alpha Centauri, we wouldn't have the slightest clue about it.