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Originally Posted by Thor
Either way, the fact most people claim aliens to have two eyes, look like humans, etc.. Is the definite part that convinces me they havent seen aliens. The likelihood they look remotely even close to us is staggeringly small.
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Agreed, I think someone even took a look at UFO reports and correlated that with popular culture (movies, books, pictures, etc) and showed that what was reported and what's in popular culture have a strong correlation... which I guess could be explained by the people creating the popular culture being influenced by said aliens, but I think the other way is more likely.
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Originally Posted by 4X4
And the humanoid appearance? Why not? I tend to think that since we are constantly looking for planets with similar surface conditions, beings on other planets would be doing the same thing. We are pretty well adapted to our environment, so why wouldn't they look similar? Maybe opposable toes... Maybe bigger brains... Just as long as we're not talking about Jabba the Hut. And if a galactic traveler were to look significantly different, they'd probably assume a familiar form so that the freak out factor would be minimized.
As for the assumption that technological brilliance = moral brilliance... Well... I don't necessarily agree with that. I gotta think about it a bit more.
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Things like bi-lateral symmetry and such were determined very early on in evolution. So the differences between us and aliens is more likely to be further up the evolutionary chain, differences such as the differences between us and plants rather than the differences between us and dinosaurs.
Then again some things evolve over and over, the eye, wings, etc.. The laws of physics partially determine what kinds things will be successful in a given environment (similar mixtures of water, air, gasses, gravity etc).
Overall it's difficult to say because we have no other data, all earth's life is derived from a common ancestor, without further data it's very hard to know how likely or unlikely things are. Is bi-lateral symmetry so good that most large lifeforms go that way? Or is tri-lateral symmetry vastly superior and we find out we're the odd-balls?