WHAT DO ALIENS LOOK LIKE?
Get the lowdown on what aliens could look like from zoologist and astrobiologist Dr Arik Kershenbaum, then draw your own. Dara Ó Briain will pick his favourite, and the winner will receive a bundle of his books.
We want YOU to draw what you think an extraterrestrial being might look like. But where do you begin? Zoologist and astrobiologist Dr Arik Kershenbaum reveals the clues right here on Earth that will help you design your alien…
Lessons from life on Earth
Although the Universe is full of unexpected surprises – planets with seas of petrol, worlds with diamonds raining from the sky – life isn’t completely unbounded. Life follows rules. If you know what those rules are, you’re going to know something about what aliens are like. The most important rule is that life arises by natural selection. Life adapts to its environment. Complex aliens will have evolved from simple aliens, to solve the problems on their planet. Problems like finding food, avoiding becoming someone else’s food, and reproducing.
Earthly problems are also problems that need to be solved on alien worlds. And when we look at how Earth animals solve them, we can see how aliens might do it too.
WHAT WILL THEIR LIVES BE LIKE?
The trick is to think about how aliens live. What do they really need? The first thing they need is food. All life needs energy, and energy comes mostly from two places, from sunlight (or maybe other kinds of heat), and from other creatures. Plants eat sunlight, but animals eat other animals and plants. Alien worlds will have predators, and they will have prey. Predators will need to be like those on Earth: fast or stealthy. Prey will need to defend themselves using camouflage or armour. And maybe, like on Earth, some creatures will solve their problems in a special way: by grouping together. Wolves hunt in a pack, and zebras stay in a herd to keep safe from lions. Some aliens will be solitary, but some will also be social.
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HOW WILL THEY MOVE?
Of course, if someone is going to eat you, you’d better move. And they’d better move to catch you. So what are the different methods of locomotion? You can move through a liquid or gas, like fish and birds. Or you can move on a solid surface. Maybe you can move through solid earth – but that’s not easy. If you’re moving on a solid surface, there’s so much friction, so it helps if you can lift yourself up a little bit. That’s either with legs, or with slime, like a slug. Legs are incredibly useful, and are bound to be found on lots of other planets. If you move through a gas or liquid, you have a few more options. Wings or fins are an excellent choice, and jet propulsion (like a squid) might also work as well.
WILL THEY BE SYMMETRICAL?
Life on Earth began on the sea floor, and so our ancestors crawled. Aliens that evolved on a floor will crawl too. But if you crawl, you probably have a front and a back – and that means you have a left and a right side too. Symmetrical animals move so much faster than non-symmetrical ones: they have a real advantage. That doesn’t mean that circular (or even triangular) aliens are impossible, but think about how they evolved: why did they get an advantage by being circular or triangular? Maybe circular creatures could evolve in a bottomless ocean, where there’s no advantage to crawling. If you do have simple left-right symmetry like us, you’ll likely have an even number of legs too: the same number on the left and on the right. But if that symmetry doesn’t exist, you could have almost any number of legs!
HOW WILL THEY SENSE THINGS?
If you’re looking for food (and all life is), you need to sense the world. Even plants grow towards sunlight. The ways that life senses its environment on Earth pretty much sums up almost all the ways that it can be done. There’s sight and hearing, of course, but also smell (sensing the presence of chemicals), and quite a few species can sense electrical fields. Some animals even use magnetic fields to find their way around. Light and sound are particularly good ways to sense the world: they’re fast, detailed, and easy to detect. But they both have disadvantages. In an underground ocean, there may not be any light at all. And sound doesn’t travel well in a thin atmosphere like on Mars. It’s the physical constraints of a planet that determine which sense will work best, but one or both of sight and hearing are likely to be important.