The Daily Mail has reported that a leading space scientist has claimed that aliens may look like giant jellyfish with orange bottoms… and that they are probably not all that bright.
Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock, a satellite expert, government adviser, said it is likely that there is extraterrestrial life, but it is just more alien than you’d imagine.
Rather than being the little green men so beloved of Hollywood directors, they may look like football-field sized jellyfish, complete with onion-shaped appendages and an orange underbelly. But while they might resemble jellyfish, they will live not in the sea but in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-like planet, where they float around. According to Dr. Alderin-Pocock:
“This is what evolution might have come up with on a world such as Saturn’s moon Titan.”
Dr. Alderin-Pocock also suggests that creatures from OUT OF THIS WORLD might be generated from silicon, rather than the carbon, and may be able to live off light absorbed through their ‘skin’ and chemicals sucked in through their giant mouths. Other alien adaptations could include ‘talking’ via pulses of light.
Much of her inspiration comes from strange life-forms recently discovered living deep beneath the ocean, but Dr. Alderin-Pocock discussed the limitations of human perception regarding alien lifeforms:
“Our imaginations are naturally constrained by what we see around us and the conventional wisdom has been that life needs water and is carbon-based… but some researchers are doing exciting work, playing with ideas such as silicon-based life forms evolving on other planets in environments very different to our own. My vision of aliens is an inhuman, silicon-based life form that looks much more like a jellyfish than sci-fi’s little green men.”
However, while the giant jellyfish may be out there, we have little chance of making contact with them. Dr Aderin-Pocock says that while there are billions of planets in our galaxy alone, very few would be able to support life, let alone actually be home to it.
Then, even if life has developed, it is unlikely to be intelligent enough to communicate with us. Finally, if it is able to make contact, the odds of it being around right now are extremely low. She said:
“If our intelligent aliens existed only during the time of the dinosaurs on Earth, it’s not much good to us. This leaves us with an estimate of four intelligent alien civilisations in our galaxy with a means to communicate and overlapping in time with humans.”
