An Ardazirho - human-sized, mammalian, bipedal and digitigrade - has:
humanoid shoulders and arms;
thumbs on the opposite side of the hand;
a long, narrow head;
a low forehead;
pointed ears;
a black muzzle;
lips;
fangs;
gray, oval, close set eyes;
red fur.
I question whether any mobile extra-terrestrial organism will have a head with two eyes above a nose above a mouth with an ear at each side. We inherited our facial features from our earliest terrestrial animal ancestors.
Given the number and diversity of exo-planets, life might be abundant but that could just mean unicellular life. Energized, complex molecules change randomly until one becomes self-replicating, then the multiplying cells are naturally selected, but how often does the transition to multicellular occur?
Do we inhabit:
"...a universe that produces sophonts as casually as it produces snowflakes."?
-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 7.
It does not seem to.
1 comment:
It took just under 3 billion years after the first single-cell organisms for multicellular life to arise. So apparently it's not a high-probability event. On the other hand, once it happens, it spreads rapidly because there are so many empty ecological niches to be filled, and the more complex the ecology becomes, the more opportunities there are.
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