[jambutty]

Originally Posted by jaysay

Just a thought on UFOs when you think of the vastness of the galaxy it would be very starnge if we were the only forms of life, there must be something out there somewhere, wether they are like us or are little geen men is anybodies guess

Just what would an alien be like? Would he be like us? Who knows as no one has ever seen one - or have they?

They would obviously be intelligent and that means a brain and that means a place for the brain to be, like a head. In the interests of bodily efficiency the sensory organs would need to be near the brain and those sensory organs would need to be able to sample light, sound and smell. Without any of those attributes then I suggest that the alien would not have evolved as he did and would have been consigned to the evolutionary dustbin aeons ago.

So the alien would have a head, two eyes for binocular vision, anything less would be too much of a handicap and in any case you need two eyes to judge distances. He would also have to have two ears to enable him to hear sounds from all around him. He would a need a nose so that smells can be monitored and to breath through. Where all these organs might be is a matter for evolution but I suspect that they wouldn't be too different to ours. Our alien would also need something with which to eat with, like a mouth, which would double as a breathing device. So I guess that our arrangement will be pretty much universal as the animal kingdom here on earth has shown.

In a similar way the alien would have something akin to our internal organs encased in a body and legs to propel that body from place to place. The foot would probably have evolved into a four digits affair as we can do without our little toe when it comes to maintaining a balance. Any fewer digits would make the foot narrow and not too good for a major balancing act.

The alien would need arms on the end of which would be dexterous fingers, otherwise he would never have been able to build his space ship in the first place. Whether he has four fingers and a thumb is a moot point but if he has six or more digits then it would interfere with his dexterity. If his hands are to be different to ours then I suggest that he will have just three fingers and a thumb on each hand. It certainly won't be just one finger and one thumb. You need three digits to grip something firmly. It is unlikely that he would have just two fingers and a thumb as the fourth digit adds to the dexterity and grip. So an alien, being evolved further than we are, would probably have just four digits on each hand. Our little finger isn't much use to us except in playing musical instruments or typing. Then again five digits do give a stronger grip.

Finally his body would be covered with a skin of some sort, which would reflect his evolutionary environment. The whole package would walk upright to make the best use of eyes and ears and its height would be determined by where it evolved. A planet with a heavier gravity than ours would mean a shorter person than us unless they were immensely strong and vice versa. In any case a tall body on a planet with a heavier gravity than ours would need one hell of a heart type thing to pump the "blood" around. Evolution would have kept the body short. Then again we had monstrous dinosaurs.

All these organs would need to be nurtured and in order to do so there would need to be a commodity like blood to take the required nutrients to them. I suppose that it could be a gas of some sort but either way you couldn't rely on gravity to do the job so there would have to be a system where the "blood" is pumped around the body against gravity. If the circulation system relied on gravity they would never have crossed the millions of miles of zero gravity to get to us.

So there we have it, our alien wouldn't be too different from us but that would depend on how far up the evolutionary ladder he has progressed and where, in terms of gravitational pull, he came from.

The truth is out there, somewhere.

But has it been here?