funeralxempire wrote:
Aristophanes wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Earth has daffodils. The daffodil species, and its genome, are the product of four billion years of evolution on this planet. An earth like planet a thousand light years away may have independently evolved its own thousands of species of flowering planets, and may well have an organism that outwardly resembles a daffodil. But they couldn't literally be the same species as terrestrial daffodils. They would have a different genome that was the end product of a different several billion years of evolution on a separate planet from earth.
Substitute "daffodil" with "Homo Sapien" and the same thing applies.
Human shaped creatures might well exist out in deep space somewhere. "Humanoids", but not actual "humans". The exact same species couldn't evolve independently on two different planets in two different star systems.
It depends, if you throw down a zillion dice, the number 1 million + 1 is gonna pop up quite a few times. You keep rolling those dice and the number you're looking for will eventually pop up. It's a matter of how many opportunities you have to throw the dice, and that's impossible to say with our current ability to see inside other galaxies and actually catalog everything. Point being it's possible some other planet out there has the exact same conditions as ours, and could go through the exact same process. It could also be that life is determinate, and if it evolves at all it has to take the exact same steps life on this planet has taken to evolve, thus every intelligent life form at our stage of development would be human.
*edit: not that I prescribe to either two theories I proposed, merely I can't deny the possibility of either with the evidence at hand.
It still wouldn't be the same though. Are you familiar with convergent evolution? Basically the general idea is that selective pressures can create two very, very similar lifeforms that aren't actually related closely.
If we were to ever uncover human-like life that exactly resembled H. sapien they wouldn't actually be H. sapien, they'd be something else with their own unique genetic heritage that just so happens to resemble us.
I suppose with an infinite number of universes there might be one with humans all over the place, but there'd be multitudes more with pseudo-humans in all those places that just appear the same but aren't.
This.
Part of the definition of a "species" is the ability to mate and produce offspring with other members of the same population. Horses can make fertile offspring with other horses, they can not make any offspring with elks, and can only make sterile mules with donkeys. So by definition horses, elks, and donkeys are separate species. That despite the fact that all three share outward similarities, are related and share recent common ancestors.
The thylacine (the Tasmanian "wolf") was an Australian marsupial carnivore that evolved independently of the dog like placental mammals on the other continents. Yet it looked remarkably like wolves of the other continents. And it occupied a similar ecological niche as a fast moving predator. But despite that outward similarity the genetic distance between Tasmanian wolves and actual wolves is FAR greater than the genetic distance between horses and donkeys, or even between horses and elks.
The thylacine was the product of over 60 million years of separate evolution from placental mammals including actual wolves. So the now extinct creature was in a real sense "an extraterrestrial wolf" ( a lupine ET). But it could never interbred with terrestrial actual dogs, wolves, or even with dingos, to produce puppies. So it was a "wolf like species", but by definition it could not be classified as the same species as wolves.
Substitute "wolf" with human and the same applies. Another planet might evolve human shaped creatures, and they might be intelligent, and they might equal or exceed us in their acheivements in civilization. In other words they may "occupy the same ecological niche that we do on this planet". But they wouldn't be able to interbred with us. So by definition they couldn't be considered to be of our own species. Therefore they could not be considered "human".
If the exact same 4.4 billion years of history on this planet were perfectly reproduced the resulting creatures would be identical. Including a mirror planet you and me with the exact same genetic code. And no I'm not talking alternate dimensions, I'm talking exact replica evolution which can't be proven nor denied because it's a matter of chance. It's virtually impossible to win the lottery twice, but people have done it, and any evolution on other planets we're talking about is a numbers game of chance as well.
23 May 2017, 3:55 am
