Bizarre Alien Life Forms | Known Universe: Alien Contact

it's completely reasonable to think that there's life out there there's just so many possibilities billions of stars and billions of galaxies and other that it uh surely there's life after finding life even primitive microbial life would change our place in the universe by telling us that we're not alone and it would most likely be an indication that we're getting closer to finding an intelligent civilization it would be really fun if we could find an alien that you know could send me an email or Twitter or whatever all day long but the profound question is is life or non-life once we have the microbial we have the potential for intelligence but if we don't have a life-form at all we don't have the potential for anything but what if we do find complex life out there what would it look like would it be anything like what we see in Hollywood movies it is humorous that Hollywood depicts aliens more or less the same way there's a Klingon here and a Romulan there and there's slanty eyes and you know big old brains and so on any sort of alien that resembles a human is ludicrous two eyes a nose and a mouth there's no reason that an alien would have to be adapted this way over hundreds of millions of years all the creatures of our planet have adapted to their environment so the chemistry's are similar which means your genetic makeup isn't all that different from an earthworm or even your pet basically all animals are worms for worms we got a head we got a tail we're long and skinny and that's how we move forward dinosaurs or worms what people don't understand is that evolution is not a road map humans are not at the top of the evolutionary ladder we're not the end point the goal of evolution or anything like that where accidents we're random we eat through our mouths but we can breathe through our mouths and that means we can choke on food that's a terrible design but it's an accident of evolution maybe aliens evolved a different thing maybe they don't need to breathe maybe they can get oxygen in some other way anything like that can go as long as it makes sense for the environment so life on another planet would adapt to its environment and could be stranger than you could ever imagine it's fun to speculate about how life might evolve under conditions that are very different from those here on the earth if you lived on a planet with twice the gravity of Earth there'd be a lot more pull on your body and you'd come crashing down twice as hard if you fell so perhaps creatures there would have stronger stockier bodies with more legs closer to the ground a planet with very little gravity would be like our Moon or Mars I can imagine a creature on a low gravity planet as being long and spindly life on a low gravity planet may be tall and thin with long gangly legs if life evolved on a very dense planet where the atmosphere is soothly of water light you could see creatures as big as whales or elephants actually flying not through the air but through this liquid like atmosphere I think we are currently ignorant actually about the real realistic diversity of life elsewhere

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 899,215

Rating: 4.5713167 out of 5

Keywords: National Geographic, Known Universe: Alien Contact, extra terrestrial, life forms, planets, goldilocks zone video, national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, documentary

Id: 4XbFqB169fk

Length: 4min 3sec (243 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2010