This is the third book in the series that included 'The Theory of Nothing' the "The Universe Revealed.' My purpose in this new book is to more fully explain how science is actually done and how science fits into our culture along with religion and p...
I've talked about this before but there is a new method to understand what an alien would look like.
The method involves looking at early life on Earth. This idea means that we must assume that life will be carbon based and involve DNA. This is a very important assumption, but it's the only one we have to use in this discussion.
There is evidence to indicate that microbial life began 3.48 billion years ago. Almost all life began in the oceans, mostly because there wasn't much land then. The earliest eukaryotes (cells that have a membrane-bound nucleus) might have formed before oxygen, but most of the earliest records show that eukaryotes used oxygen. One of the earliest developments in these cellular creatures was flagella, the method of locomotion and feeding.
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However, what we're interested in are multicellular creatures. There is evidence that these developed around 2.1 to 1.0 billion years ago. But, the real creatures that we want to consider developed during the Cambrian explosion of life, especially the vertebrates. The earliest examples appeared 500 million years ago. It took that long to see something that could possibly develop into an intelligent species. However, that wouldn't happen on Earth until less than a million years ago.
So, what could develop into an intelligent species? That's where it gets difficult because what's needed is a big brain. That didn't happen on Earth until the emergence of simians, ape like creatures.
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As I've said before, there is a possibility that an intelligent dinosaur could have emerged if that KT-Boundary event hadn't occurred. It would have been a raptor with a big brain.
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Could something that evolved in the Cambrian explosion become intelligent? That's not very likely because none of these creatures like the trilobites had a large brain. These creatures evolved into crustaceans like crabs and lobsters. The conclusion is that intelligent life required the development of a species with hands. Raptors had claws that could have been used to make things like tools. On Earth it wasn't until the apes evolved before we see anything like hands. The question then becomes: could something like the raptor dinosaurs evolve on an extraterrestrial planet? That's a good question that's difficult to answer. All we could say is that it's possible.
Development of a smart raptor dinosaur would require a very warm earth-like planet with plenty of water and large amounts of vegetation, essentially a tropical environment. There would have to be plenty of oxygen in the planet's atmosphere and enough gravity to develop and retain a sizable atmosphere. My take on this is that if it happened here, it could happen on a exo-planet orbiting a relatively stable star. Let's hope that astronomers find such a planet soon.
