The " What If ? " Theory [Archive] - The Project Avalon Community Forum

aoibhghaire

3rd June 2017, 22:09

IMHO I have always been convinced that the template for our planet and other planets like ours in our Milky Way Galaxy and beyond would result with similar manifestations familiar to us evolving on these planets, its all part of the universal design throughout the Cosmos. This would align very well with your theory. In fact, recent research suggests that this evolutionary process is built into the design of the COSMOS. It is called convergent evolution or CE.

CE is the phenomenon posited by numerous biologists and anthropologists of two or more species of widely different origins evolving extremely similar features in response to the same environmental opportunity. Intelligence including that of extraterrestrials (familiar looking) are likely to have converged considerably and to converge further in the future. Much of this future convergence is likely to be familiar to us.

CE is based on a growing volume of related literature. It offers a powerful, updated view of life and a synthesis of evolutionary theorizing within the disciplines of astrobiology and cosmology, contending natural selection and evolutionary development in unison represents a universal force of nature that might potentially lead to the emergence of similarly adapted life forms in analogous planetary biospheres.

CE seems to be consistent with recent advances in the fields of evolutionary development and astrobiology, complexity theory, planetary science and cosmology. Taking cognizance of the need for a truly bio cosmological perspective in all of the mentioned fields of research, CE offers an integrative new vision of evolution, life and intelligence. In a Cosmos where universal convergent evolution occurs, the existence of extraterrestrial life that is analogous to life as we know it to a predictable degree is no longer a mere metaphor, but rather a falsifiable hypothesis that is highly consistent with the adaptive versatility of life on Earth..[1].

The ultimate test for the presence of CE will come from the exploration of extraterrestrial biospheres. When hypothesizing the nature of extraterrestrial biospheres we can allow for radical differences in such parameters as atmospheric density and composition, strength of gravity, depths of oceans and ultra-violet flux and still make good first approximations as to the life forms we might expect to find there.

In what to us will be extreme planets, e.g. having a global ocean a hundred kilometers deep or much larger rocky planets than Earth with extreme gravity, our extrapolations will be tentative, but we can nonetheless envisage life in a range of habitats considerably wider than what we know on Earth.

This tends to support the abundance and antiquity of many extra-solar systems and the extrapolation of current technological trends suggesting that even inter-galactic colonization is plausible; and the recurrence of evolutionary solutions CE in the terrestrial biosphere suggesting that features such as intelligence and tool-making are not fortuitous outcomes, but frequent if not universal. [2]

This perspective suggests cognitive universals underpinning the behaviour of animals with brains. Consideration of what we can know of intelligence in beings elsewhere in the universe obliges us to recognize universal and local factors that are relevant . For example, linguistic communication turns out to be constrained by local circumstances even though the existence of linguistic activity will be universal in intelligent beings.[3][4]

[1] C.L.F. Martinez, SETI in the light of cosmic convergent evolution, Acta Astronautica, November 2014, DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2014.08.013.

[2] S.C. Morris, Three explanations for Extraterrestrials: Sensible, Unlikely, Mad.,International Journal of Astrobiology. Oct 2016: 1-7, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550416000379.

[3] W. Edmondson, The intelligence in ETI: What can we know? Acta Astronautica 78 (2012) 37–42.

[4] www.setikingsland.org