E.O. Wilson: Aliens Are Out There and They Probably Look Like This | Big Think

E.O. Wilson: Aliens Are Out There and They Probably Look Like This
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The Pulitzer-winning biologist draws from our own knowledge of evolution and Darwinian theory to posit the physical and mental characteristics of extraterrestrial life. Wilson's new book is titled "The Meaning of Human Existence."
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EDWARD O. WILSON:

Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist (Myrmecology, a branch of entomology), researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), and naturalist (conservationism). Wilson is known for his career as a scientist, his advocacy for environmentalism, and his secular humanist ideas concerned with religious and ethical matters.

A Harvard professor for four decades, he has written twenty books, won two Pulitzer prizes, and discovered hundreds of new species. Considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, Dr. Wilson is often called "the father of biodiversity," (a word that he coined). He is the Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.
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TRANSCRIPT:

E.T. is out there. There just has to be in the hundred million star system a galaxy that we belong, that we dwell in, other cases of life originating, because we now know there's so many planets that almost certainly you're going to have certain planets that are goldilocks, that is a right position nearest their sun, the right size and so on that can have the potential to create life. And of those it seems, and we don't have any basis for this except intuition, that given enough millions of years, in our case we have had half a billion years since life came on the land, to produce a human grade eusocial species. So we can only guess that it's likely that that has occurred in some of them. So ET probably is out there. We don't know if whether it's one of the several planet circling star systems one light year away or whether it's dozens, ten light years away or it goes into the thousands with a hundred light years away. And that's pretty close by galactic standards. And so they're probably out there.

So, here's what I did. In the course of this book actually I did it with some care, the Meaning of Human Existence. I looked over the many examples of the origin of whole new lines of animals that have occurred on the land since the early Paleozoic. Now we're talking going back more than 415 million years, that's a long time. The land of earth was populated by the first plants, then forests and with them a whole array of animal types. But we have these many multiple lines of animals that originated and we can I think reasonably conclude that eusociality, when it did it develop, including big animals that have the capacity to create a big brain, cerebrum, memory storage areas essentially is what it is and this bizarre round head shapes that we have, I mean seen from the point of view of gorilla we have a bizarre funny looking head, that here is what they all have in common. Now I'm talking empirical information. First, you have to be on the land. You can't develop advanced societies and anything like civilization, which in humans goes back a couple hundred, or at least complex eusocial societies, goes back in the human line a couple hundred thousand years.

Well, why not? Why no marine, freshwater creatures? Because they don't have fire. You just have to have, in order to build tools beyond chipping some rock or stone away or maybe crude binding or fashioning materials together, you don't have any way to create more advanced technology without concentrated power source that you can transport from one place to another. ET, and now drawing this again from the record of multiple origins of animal lines on earth, ET has got a head. And the head's upfront and the head contains a central organizing center for all of the senses that are spread out through the body. And the body itself is almost like part of the brain but the information is concentrated in a head that is a forward part. No octopuses limping along on ten legs or anything like that; they got a head...

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/what-does-et-really-look-like-with-eo-wilson

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