Un repaso escéptico a los extraterrestres

Gran trabajo de PZ Myers en A Skeptical Look at Aliens mostrando porque las concepciones habituales de los extraterrestres —desgraciadamente habituales en otros campos científicos ajenos a la biología— estén más que posiblemente equivocadas a la luz de lo que se sabe sobre la evolución de la vida en la Tierra. Una cosa que se suele olvidar es que estamos más íntimamente emparentados con las especies terrestres de lo que jamás lo estaremos con cualquier especie extraterrestre:

Here are representatives of four groups of animals that show great potential for intelligence: they’re self-aware, puzzle-solving, curious and exploring creatures: the primates, some birds like the Steller’s Jays shown here, cetaceans, and octopods. Science fiction stories love to speculate about meeting and communicating with aliens, but they always cheat and make the aliens mirrors of ourselves, so it’s relatively easy. Here are four species that are far more closely related to us, that share far more in common with us, than any aliens we might ever encounter. Yet we’re trying harder to listen to the conversations of unknown aliens with SETI than we are trying to have a chat with our next door neighbor, Octopus vulgaris. I suggest to you that extraterrestrial aliens are not impossible, but they may be rarer than you think, and furthermore, that they’re going to be weirder than you can imagine. And if you can’t think of what to say to an earthbound intelligent mollusc, you’re going to have a really tough time with the biochemically bizarre, anatomically improbable, historically unrelated tentacled blobs of Fomalhaut or whatever.

Digamos que ante nuestros deseos de comunicación los hechos pierden la batalla.

También en The teeny-tiny bit of my TAM talk I had to cut short comenta de pasada lo que a mí me parece el gran fracaso de mucha ciencia ficción: renunciar a sus propias aspiraciones de mirar al universo tal y como es para retirarse rápidamente a lo cómodo y conocido:

This is the most recent outrageous example of this, from the space fantasy movie Avatar. James Cameron consciously chose (for understandable dramatic and profit-making reasons) to completely ignore what science said and shape his aliens to fit human expectations. And that meant making them sexy.

Por desgracia, no pasa sólo en la película de Cameron.