Aliens Might Weigh As Much As Polar Bears And Be Taller Than The Tallest Man Who Ever Lived

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.com


No one really knows whether we’re alone or if the universe is

brimming with brainy extraterrestrials. But that hasn’t stopped

scientists from trying to figure out what form intelligent aliens might take. 

And as University of Barcelona cosmologist Dr. Fergus Simpson argues in a new paper, most intelligent alien species would likely exceed 300 kilograms (661 pounds)–with the median body mass “similar to that of a polar bear.”

If such a being had human proportions, Simpson told The Huffington Post in an email, it would be taller than Robert Wadlow, who at 8 feet, 11 inches is believed to have been the tallest human who ever lived.



Robert Wadlow (1918-1940), the tallest man who ever lived.

Simpson’s paper, which is posted on the online research repository arXiv.org, is chockablock with formidable-looking mathematical equations.

But as he explained in the email, his starting point was to consider

the relationship between the number of individuals in a population on

Earth and the body mass of those individuals:

“Ants

easily outnumber us because they are small. Our larger bodies require a

much greater energy supply from the local resources, so it would be

impossible for us to match the ant population. Now apply this concept to

intelligent life across the universe. On average, we should expect

physically larger species to have fewer individuals than the smaller

species. And, just like with countries, we should expect to be in one of

the bigger populations. In other words, we are much more likely to find

ourselves to be the ants among intelligent species.”

Or, as Newsweek explained Simpson’s argument, there are probably more

planets with relatively small animals than planets with relatively large

animals. It makes sense to assume that Earth is in the former category,

so we can assume that humans are probably among the smaller intelligent beings.

What do other scientists make of Simpson’s paper?

“I

think the average size calculation is reasonable,” Dr. Duncan Forgan,

an astrobiologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who

wasn’t involved in the research, told Newsweek.
But to Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., the argument is suspect.

“There

is an assumption here that intelligence can come in all (reasonable)

sizes, and does so with more or less equal likelihood,” Shostak told The

Huffington Post in an email. “That may be true, but on Earth bigger has

not always been better, at least in the brains department. Dolphins

have higher IQs than whales, and crows are smarter than eagles.

Octopuses are cleverer than giant squids, and obviously we’re smarter

than polar bears.”

Ultimately, Shostak said, we can’t know whether “little green men are actually big green men” before we actually make contact.
Until then!

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Aliens Might Weigh As Much As Polar Bears And Be Taller Than The Tallest Man Who Ever Lived