188 | Arik Kershenbaum on What Aliens Will Be Like

188 | Arik Kershenbaum on What Aliens Will Be Like

If extraterrestrial life is out there — not just microbial slime, but big, complex, macroscopic organisms — what will they be like? Movies have trained us to think that they won't be that different at all; they'll even drink and play music at the same cafes that humans frequent. A bit of imagination, however, makes us wonder whether they won't be completely alien — we have zero data about what extraterrestrial biology could be like, so it makes sense to keep an open mind. Arik Kershenbaum argues for a judicious middle ground. He points to constraints from physics and chemistry, as well as the tendency of evolution to converge toward successful designs, as reasons to think that biologically complex aliens won't be utterly different from us after all.

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Arik Kershenbaum received his Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology from the University of Haifa. He is currently College Lecturer and Director of Studies at Girton College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens — and Ourselves.


Jaksot(416)

85 | L.A. Paul on Transformative Experiences and Your Future Selves

85 | L.A. Paul on Transformative Experiences and Your Future Selves

It's hard to make decisions that will change your life. It's even harder to make a decision if you know that the outcome could change who you are. Our preferences are determined by who we are, and the...

24 Helmi 20201h 14min

84 | Suresh Naidu on Capitalism, Monopsony, and Inequality

84 | Suresh Naidu on Capitalism, Monopsony, and Inequality

Nations generally want their economies to be rich, robust, and growing. But it's also important to person to ensure that wealth doesn't flow only to a few people, but rather that as many people as pos...

17 Helmi 20201h 26min

83 | Kwame Anthony Appiah on Identity, Stories, and Cosmopolitanism

83 | Kwame Anthony Appiah on Identity, Stories, and Cosmopolitanism

The Greek statesman Demosthenes is credited with saying "I am a citizen of the world," and the idea that we should take a cosmopolitan view of our common humanity is a compelling one. Not everyone agr...

10 Helmi 20201h 38min

82 | Robin Carhart-Harris on Psychedelics and the Brain

82 | Robin Carhart-Harris on Psychedelics and the Brain

The Convention on Psychotropic Substances was a 1971 United Nations treaty that placed strong restrictions on the use of psychedelic drugs — not only on personal use, but medical and scientific resear...

3 Helmi 20201h 17min

81 | Ezra Klein on Politics, Polarization, and Identity

81 | Ezra Klein on Politics, Polarization, and Identity

People have always disagreed about politics, passionately and sometimes even violently. But in certain historical moments these disagreements were distributed without strong correlations, so that any ...

27 Tammi 20201h 21min

80 | Jenann Ismael on Connecting Physics to the World of Experience

80 | Jenann Ismael on Connecting Physics to the World of Experience

Physics is simple; people are complicated. But even people are ultimately physical systems, made of particles and forces that follow the rules of the Core Theory. How do we bridge the gap from one kin...

20 Tammi 20201h 26min

79 | Sara Imari Walker on Information and the Origin of Life

79 | Sara Imari Walker on Information and the Origin of Life

We are all alive, but "life" is something we struggle to understand. How do we distinguish a "living organism" from an emergent dynamical system like a hurricane, or a resource-consuming chemical reac...

13 Tammi 20201h 23min

78 | Daniel Dennett on Minds, Patterns, and the Scientific Image

78 | Daniel Dennett on Minds, Patterns, and the Scientific Image

Wilfrid Sellars described the task of philosophy as explaining how things, in the broadest sense of term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term. (Substitute "exploring" for "explaining" and...

6 Tammi 20202h 1min

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