Just Finished Reading: The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy – What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves by Dr Arik Kershenbaum (FP: 2020) [324pp] 

It’s a deceptively simple question: What can we say about life beyond Earth in the rest of the Galaxy? The obvious, maybe even the instinctive, answer is: Nothing. We know of life in only one place, here on Earth. We can say, probably, with a fair degree of confidence that there IS life in the Galaxy but what is it like? With billions of planets orbiting billions of stars there must be countless environments where life could emerge, but how can we confidently extrapolate from a single example? We can’t, right? Or maybe, actually we can. 

Hollywood and Science Fiction authors have tried to envisage aliens for us to either fall in love with or have nightmares about. But even a cursory examination, with any scientific background, shows that most of the well-known aliens are nothing more than human life made either large or particularly malevolent. I mean, concentrated acid for blood? Yeah, right. But moving on from Hollywood is easier than you might expect. Until we actually find any and are able to analyse it, we don’t know if alien life will utilise the DNA we’re so familiar with. What we can be more certain about is that, no matter where life emerges, the environment will no doubt have limited resources. Because of this it follows that alien life will need to compete for those resources and that some alien creatures will be more adept at this competition than others. With those simple facts it appears that Evolutionary principles will operate throughout the Galaxy and, indeed, into other Galaxies too. Evolution is something we have a pretty good understanding of, and we can use that understanding to come to some reasonable conclusions about life elsewhere. 

This is the foundation for this fascinating book – that Evolution, as we know it here, operates in the same way out there no matter if aliens use DNA or if they’re carbon based (they’re highly likely to be!) or if their atmosphere is oxygen, methane or something else. From that baseline we can reasonably expect that aliens will move around – swim, fly, walk – and that they’ll be able to gain information about their environment through eyes, ears, whiskers or more exotic ways through magnetic fields. Likewise, they’ll be about to communicate through sound, light or in other ways in order to attract mates, ward of danger or even to sing. We may not know exactly what an alien creature might LOOK like, but we can expect things like kin bias, social structures, hierarchies and so much more we are already familiar with. There is indeed a great deal we can say about aliens without (at the moment) ever meeting one. 

This was a fun read for me. Most of my Science reading is in the Biology/Evolution sphere, so it's interesting to link that – not just speculatively – to my other long-term interest in alien life in the Galaxy. Hopefully, with the probe on its way to Jupiter’s moons we might get a good idea if life exists outside Earth and yet still inside our own Solar System. If strong indications of life ARE found that’ll be amazing. I’m a firm believer that life does indeed exist ‘out there’ and will not be in the least surprised if bacteria are found on Mars and that fish swim in the seas under the ice on a few of Jupiter's moons. Definitely a recommended read for anyone interesting in the alien life question.  

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