I am reminded of the XKCD stip on scientific purity:https://xkcd.com/435/ Basically, we'll find any/all intelligent alien life to be roughly our scale and shape because maths says so and its laws apply all the way down the scientific hill. Multi-limbed is staggeringly unlikely because the energy required to produce and control limbs is huge and the benefits have to outweigh the costs or natural selection would just eliminate them. For aquatic we might just see two limbs + tail, but without fire you're not looking at anything beyond smart animal (crow, dolphin etc) levels of intelligence as they won't get enough calories in to support the brain growth necessary (let alone discover electricity).
Yes its kinda beautiful and these laws follow because the 'interesting'ness of a planet is determined by its mass and the generation of star it is birthed from. Not that the universe can't surprise us but life won't go without the complexity provided by carbon based molecules and the energy resources provided by the right kind of star... so the places it can happen are pretty limited, and if it that means an earth sized planet, it almost inevitably means an earth like planet. There are a lot of things you cant build underwater aforementioned fire...? so you need to be a terrestrial organism and then you need locomotion and the ability to observe (now you need a face), manipulate objects accurately, it goes on and on and the sum of all the problems can't have many answers using the same materials.
Terry Bisson: http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html Amusing illustration of one of the other possibilities
Actually, there is a good sign that Earth is rather abnormal. We have a much thinner atmosphere for our mass than we 'should'. Venus (~0.8x Earth mass, 0.9 gee surface gravity) has the kind of atmosphere composition and pressure you'd expect from a planet of Earth's mass/gravity. Earth got smacked by a rather large (Mars-sized!) impactor that blew most of the atmosphere off. (Mars also has a much thinner atmosphere than it 'should', but that's because Mars doesn't have a magnetic field anymore and the solar wind has been blowing the Martian atmosphere off).
Yeah, its core stopped spinning. Which is why efforts to terraform it will be worthless unless we first drill down and position just enough nuclear bombs, in the right place, to restart it (if the documentary "The Core" was telling the truth, and why wouldn't it? /comic sans)
Well it's more of "what guarantee we have that our Earth's core won't stop too, and we eat a little bit too much of ionized waves" ?
None, but it did take a long time and we're bigger, with a bigger moon, and a significantly more active core. It may happen, but we've got a few billion years to worry about it. It's speculated that if we managed to get a thick, Earth-like atmosphere on Mars, it'd still take a couple of million years to be blown away.
Damn all these smart people making intelligent claims about potential alien life before I can show off my own smarts! (shakes fist at heavens!) Bilateral-symmetry for the win! Really? Really!? I'm not saying Gutier is one of the greats, but I think he is good enough for a background writer for a Scifi game. But bringing up Harry Potter as how to do worldbuilding right!? I have to strenuously disagree. I know the Potter series is popular, but popular does not mean good. I think J.K. Rowling writes good young adult fiction, but when she tried to age it up to more mature audiences. . . .well it just does not hold together very well. I may be flamed for my opinion, but I think Gutier is a much better world builder than Rowling. Now characters and prose, that is more debatable. . .
Why didn't the "wizards" just cast themselves out of the dullest franchise in the history of movie franchises? Seriously each episode following the boy wizard and his pals from Hogwarts Academy as they fight assorted villains has been indistinguishable from the others. Aside from the gloomy imagery, the series’ only consistency has been its lack of excitement and ineffective use of special effects, all to make magic unmagical, to make action seem inert. Perhaps the die was cast when Rowling vetoed the idea of Spielberg directing the series; she made sure the series would never be mistaken for a work of art that meant anything to anybody?just ridiculously profitable cross-promotion for her books. The Harry Potter series might be anti-Christian (or not), but it’s certainly the anti-James Bond series in its refusal of wonder, beauty and excitement. No one wants to face that fact. Now, thankfully, they no longer have to. - a-at least the books were good though No! The writing is dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing. Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
A little harsher than I would put. Rowling can be an entertaining read, you just have to disengage the critical thinking part of your brain. Anyways, maybe an author discussion would be a good off-topic thread. Back to Aliens. How about Dr Worm! Combined army needs more of his buddies!
I am a HP fan and I think they're pretty good books in many ways but is here really a place to have a big argument about it?
Well we just finished big political debate several pages ago, so we are still have to do a flame about books&religion don't we ?
