What might intelligent aliens look like? The consensus among experts suggests it would be safe to bet they will not look the least bit humanoid.
Of all the vertebrates, only mammals evolved brains big enough for higher intelligence. And of the 24 orders of mammals only one – ours, the primates – has technological intelligence. As the late Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr concluded: “Nothing demonstrates the improbability of the origin of high intelligence better than the millions of phyletic lineages that failed to achieve it.” In fact, Mayr calculated that even though there have evolved perhaps as many as 50 billion species on Earth, “only one of these achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization.”
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