According to one University of Cambridge astrobiologist, the scenario where future humans manage to travel to other worlds and find… more humans may be more likely than you’d think.
In a new interview with the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, an evolutionary palaeobiologist at the institution’s Earth Sciences department, Simon Conway Morris, said that researchers can “say with reasonable confidence” that human-like evolution has occurred in other places in the universe.
The core of Morris’ belief comes from the theory of convergent evolution, which claims that, as Science Focus put it, “random effects eventually average out so that evolution converges, tending to produce similar organisms in any given environment.” The magazine used the examples of flight, which “has evolved independently on Earth at least four times — in birds, bats, insects and pterosaurs.”
Arik Kershenbaum, zoologist at the rarefied British institution, has written an entire book on the concept of alien evolution.
“Because evolution is the explanatory mechanism for life everywhere,” Kershenbaum told Quanta magazine earlier this year, “then the principles that we uncover on Earth should be applicable in the rest of the universe.”