Abstract
This is the problem, met eyeball to eyeball (if, indeed, they have eyeballs at all!). We can easily see what they won’t look like: they won’t look like people, or indeed vertebrates – or insects, or echinoderms, or coelenterates… But I called my early lectures – and my book – “What Does a Martian Look Like?” and that meant that we could cheat: a beginning could be made with Martians… Possibly, on the one hand, they’re bacteria like ours, infected from Earth – or it may be that bacteria from early Mars infected Earth, so that we are the Martians! But that’s a trick, only applicable to Martians. How can we tell what real aliens look like?
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Cohen, J. (2011). What Will They Look Like?. In: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13196-7_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13196-7_24
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