What kind of aliens are there

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Travel My Hometown In L. Subscriber Exclusive Content. Why are people so dang obsessed with Mars? Eusocial species are very sophisticated, with social cohesion, rudimentary language, sustainable farming practices, and self-built complex housing structures that they keep in sanitary conditions. The naked mole rat could serve as a model for how a species could become dominant on a planet whose surface has become otherwise uninhabitable.

There is a drawback to eusociality, however. A more individualistic approach to social structure, as with humans, seems more advantageous. Personally, I value my individuality quite a bit. Perhaps the biggest threat from intelligent extraterrestrials would come not from a desire to dominate—we love our dogs and cats, after all, even though they are less intelligent than we are—but from misunderstandings.

Like humans, they would likely still have aggressive traits—since both of us, in our past, had to fight to arrive at the top of the food chain. Continue or Give a Gift. Daily Planet. What happens if the answer to that question is no? What if we finally discover we're not alone? Believe it or not, there is a plan.

The idea there might be other creatures in the universe has been around since at least the fifth century B. Four hundred years later, the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus wrote of "other worlds" with "different tribes of men, kinds of wild beasts. In the 17th century, German astronomer Johannes Kepler, in what is regarded as the first science fiction story, wrote about a voyage to the Moon in which travelers encountered reptile-like creatures. At the end of that century, Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens wrote a book speculating on the conditions on other planets and concluding that some of them must harbor life.

Aiming his telescope at Mars in , the American astronomer Percival Lowell saw a web of what he thought were canals—structures so elaborate they could have been built only by beings with intelligence.

With the founding of NASA and other space agencies in the 20th century, people began to explore the solar system and actively search for alien life. We sent satellites to photograph other planets and robots to explore their surfaces. Astronauts walked on the Moon and brought back rocks and dust. Scientists found evidence of water on the Moon and Mars, as well as on Jupiter's moon Europa.

Amino acids were discovered in meteorites that had fallen to Earth. Ever more powerful telescopes and new ways to analyze their readings have led to the discovery of hundreds of planets orbiting other stars. Though no one has found life anywhere other than on Earth, that discovery seems just around the corner. Whatever we on Earth have done, the rest of the universe has imitated perfectly. Radar, broadcast television, Wi-Fi — all these uses for radio will disappear, and the aliens will move on to some other, unspecified technology.

You might not have any problem with that assumption. Radio is a very useful technology, based on some fundamental physics. It might be around for as long as the wheel.

So it would certainly be reasonable to guess that the technological lifetime of societies is 10, years, not Choosing the larger number increases the tally of inhabited worlds by times. Earth-like planets can spontaneously generate living organisms, and some worlds will eventually spawn an intelligent species.