"From a fundamental perspective the question is 'has it ever happened anywhere before?'" said Adam Frank, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. "And it is astonishingly likely that we are not the only time and place that an advance civilization has evolved."
If it's astonishingly likely that life has evolved elsewhere, as Adam Frank proposes, what would they look like? "By predicting that aliens have undergone major transitions - which is how complexity has arisen in species on earth, we can say that there is a level of predictability to evolution that would cause them to look like us," said Sam Levin, a researcher in the University of Oxford’s Department of Zoology.
Hollywood films and science fiction literature fuel the belief that aliens are other-worldly, monster-like beings, who are very different to humans. In the film Arrival, a linguist is charged with figuring out how to communicate with aliens who have landed on Earth. Visually, the aliens—called heptapods shown above—although not human, their subtle, otherworldly fluid movements and the dense atmosphere in which they breathe fits with our idea of biological possibility. As extraterrestrial life forms they seem truly feasible, even real, bearing a strong resemblance to Earth’s most alien intelligent life: cephalopods -squid and octopus.
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