Abstract
As indicated in the last chapter, while many scientists (including the author) know a considerable amount about how nervous systems work on our own planet, none of us has any knowledge of whether or not intelligent life might be able to evolve on other worlds in the universe. Therefore, I will need to “stay the course” once again in the present chapter and begin by providing the reader with a simplified overview of the only example of how biological evolution works anywhere, and that is how our scientists believe it works on Earth (Baross 2007; Charlesworth and Charlesworth 2003; Krukonis and Barr 2008; Futuyma 2005; Scientific American Reader 2006; Schopf 2002). Then, in the second part of the chapter, I will return to the incredibly fun goal of the present book of trying to apply my knowledge of how nervous systems evolved on Earth to speculating about how comparable systems might develop elsewhere in the universe (Benner and Davies 2012; Dreamer 2011).
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Notes
- 1.
Experts in the field, while not agreeing on the exact numbers, have estimated that the total number of living species (whether single-celled or multi-celled) that currently exist on Earth is somewhere between 10 and 100 million. More sobering is the estimate that of all living species that ever lived on Earth, 95–99 % were destroyed when their home planet underwent geological changes that they could not cope with.
- 2.
The observation that many of Earth’s species select the easiest solutions for their survival in “extreme” environments is further proof that evolution tends to choose the least complicated means or solutions whenever a species needs some kind of evolutionary modification in order to cope with its changing environment.
- 3.
Many scientists, believe that if you want to know what living creatures might look like on other exoplanets in which the environments are very different from our own home planet Earth, you must take into account the type of environment the creatures live in. The physiological morphology (both internal and external) of alien life forms on other exoplanets is most likely dependent on and determined by the specific nature of the environmental conditions that they must adjust to in order to survive.
- 4.
However, the author and many other scientists now believe the incredibly slow warming of our sun (plus that of most stars) in their normal lifespans may totally change this scenario in a few billion years. Many stars may exhibit an unbelievably slow evolutionary transition that might allow “warm-blooded” carbon-based life to eventually pop up over time in more distant colder regions of their planetary systems.
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Cranford, J.L. (2015). Evolution of Intelligent Nervous Systems on Other Worlds in the Universe. In: Astrobiological Neurosystems. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10419-5_4
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