Stevyn Colgan is a former policeman who now writes for the TV series QI. He comes to Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub to talk on “Mr Green and Mr Grey Won’t be Visiting us Today” and he should know all about aliens as he has held Jabba the Hutt’s face and helped sculpt creatures for The Fifth Element.
Why do people believe that aliens would be of humanoid design? If aliens did come to Earth, would that be proof of intelligent design? In 1947, 90% of Americans had heard of flying saucers but only 9% believed that they were of extra-terrestrial origin. 1947 also marked the first UFO sighting by anyone with any credibility when Kenneth Arnold reported seeing one. Ten years later, 25% of Americans believed that they were alien ships. By 1971, 54% thought that they were aliens and 76% suspected a government cover-up.
Why was there this jump? Well, around this time there were a multitude of b-movies featuring aliens. The idea of little green men was really taking off. But, why were they green? The director John Landis heard that when they were trying to make aliens look good on black and white film, green was the only colour that didn’t look like human skin. They were also green on the movie posters. So, why the big, bulging heads? We thought that we were smarter than our ancestors because our brains were bigger. Since aliens are more advanced than us then they would have larger brains and hence larger heads. But why are they humanoid? Alien robots are humanoid too – you could even argue that the Daleks are recognisably humanoid, with a head at the top. Jabba the Hutt was given a face so that it was easier for actors to interact with and it’s still the case today that aliens are seen as humanoid despite the advances in CGI.
20% of people worldwide believe that aliens are visiting Earth. 65% of Britons believe that UFOs are alien ships while 40% of Asians think that aliens are living among us. 74% of Americans believe that aliens will be humanoid, 50% believe in alien abductions and 3% claim to have actually been abducted. With a current population in the US of around 321 million, that means that 9.6 million have been abducted. In the words of Carl Saga, “it’s surprising that more of the neighbours haven’t noticed” This fear of abduction and the idea of a bogeyman has been around for years, it’s just that the current bogeyman is aliens. Modern technology is also having an impact – 2014 was the first year where there were no sightings of the Loch Ness Monster and there was also a decrease in alien sightings. This is due to the proliferation of mobile phone cameras. The Loch Ness tourist board claimed that Nessie must be camera shy.
What could aliens actually look like though? There is a secret war going on between scientists at the moment – astrobiology vs exobiology. Astrobiologists are looking for planets that look like Earth while exobiologists are looking at other planets and trying to determine what life may need to look like to survive on them. Of course this isn’t the first big fight in science – an argument between the US and China over who invented the wheelbarrow ended up with someone having their arm broken. Our understanding of the extremes that life can exist in has changed over the last twenty years, for example there are creatures at the bottom of the ocean that don’t need sunlight or oxygen. Tardigrades can even survive in the vacuum of space and there have been examples of them where they have been dried out for thirty years and have been brought back to life with the addition of water. These are complex organisms and they share our DNA. So, the exobiologists are now coming the fore.
Why would an alien need two eyes? Even on Earth we have spiders (eight eyes) and leeches (six eyes) Does life have to be carbon based? Carbon likes to join together to make compounds but so does silicon, so could there potentially be silicon life? What about digital life? For example is Pacman an eco-system? How likely is it that humanoid life would have evolved on another planet?
All life on Earth has DNA. We share 96% of our DNA with chimpanzees and 50% with bananas. As an interesting aside, Ray Comfort once described the banana as “the atheist’s nightmare” because it is apparently so perfectly designed for humans. Richard Dawkins showed him a picture of a wild banana on a TV show and it rather shut him up. We can probably trace our ancestry back to a creature called Pikaia – it had a nervous system, was bilaterally symmetrical and had two light sensing receptors. It was pure chance that led to humans. If you rewound the tape of history, it would be almost impossible to end up back with humans.
We could have ended up following an evolutionary branch from the Hallucigenia or the Opabinia, which had five eyes and a tentacle. Having said that there are a number of evolution traits that we could probably predict. Eyes, for example, have evolved independently in a number of organisms, probably due to the visible spectrum that we have here on Earth. Similarly, fur has evolved on a number of different animals. We also see that creatures that live in the sea are generally torpedo shaped as this is the most efficient way to travel through thick liquid. Even the most “alien” looking things on Earth share our DNA.
So, the idea that something else would evolve like us on another planet is extremely unlikely even if DNA did exist there. The distances involved also mean that it would take so long for anyone to get here, it’s extremely unlikely – if anything extra-terrestrial ever does reach Earth it’s probably going to be a probe. If we think about the probes that we sent out, such as Voyager, would aliens even recognise us? The attached plaque showed nine planets so they may not even be able to find us. The universe is probably teeming with life but it probably doesn’t look anything like us and it probably won’t ever visit us.
The Q&A session following the talk soon descends into Stevyn talking about some of his favourite facts that he’s learned from working on QI:
Bruce Forsyth is older than sliced bread (and Anne Frank)
When mammoths were living in Britain, the Egyptian pyramids were already 1,000 years old
The wild west was actually in the Victorian era (most of them wore bowler hats)
You could have taken the tube to the last public hanging in the UK
China fell behind the west scientifically because they didn’t invent glass
World War 2 didn’t begin in 1939, that was just when Britain entered the war
People doing charity skydives for the NHS cost he NHS more money in treatment costs than they actually raise
Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub returns to The Canalhouse on the 10th of January at 7:30pm where Meirion Jones will talk about “How to Make $100 Million with a Bogus Bomb Detector” For more information, visit the SitP website: http://nottingham.skepticsinthepub.org/
By Gav Squires
@GavSquires
