Is There a Way to Travel From One Star System to Another?

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If we do meet alien civilizations, they are likely to be at an extremely different stage of development than we are. We've been looking for alien civilizations with our primitive technology and haven't found any. But you can imagine that thet er that one is out there who knows what they're doing, would be able to find us. The chances of actually having some kind of o technological solution for travelling between stars is pretty slight. I don't see what people would be wantingo other planets. If you can get there, you can make what you like. And really, planet earth isn't giving you anything. There's not colonialism in a interstellar sense. Doesn't even seem to be logical

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.

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