What do Aliens look like?
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Walter
Institute of Astronautics
TU München, Garching
© 2004
Published in
StarObserver Spezial with the title "Sind wir allein im All?", March 1999, p.71-79
Stories happen in your head. When you
read a novel, the story builds up in pictures
right before you eyes. We all do that, and
this is also why somebody might be bitterly
disappointed by a movie based on a novel
he or she had already read. Because your
own phantasy is very often streets ahead
of movie versions. There is a legendary
number of different images in our heads
about what aliens could look like, I daresay
that there are as many different images as
people on the Earth. To put it in a nutshell:
Because nobody knows anything specific,
everybody knows something different. We
want to put an end to this situation, and
from a scientific-biological perspective,
we'll have a look as to what might be
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possible in principle.
An intelligent alien being is characterised
by a large information storage, from a
biological point of view it is called a brain,
and a body, which interacts with the envi-
ronment, i.e. it takes up outside informati-
on (hearing, seeing, feeling …), transmits
it to the brain, and on the other hand trans-
lates brain signals into outside information
(talking, writing, drawing, gesticulating …),
and probably, but not necessarily, also
moves. If you just have a look at the infor-
mation storage, there have been quite
unusual suggestions: the order of particles
because of the interaction between char-
ged particles and magnetic fields; the
order between ortho and para hydrogen in
solid hydrogen at lowest temperatures; or
also polymeric atoms in neutron stars,
which, just like nucleic acid, form long
chains, and can store information. But
there is no possible way that reproducing
intelligent life could have developed natu-
rally from these very exotic foundations.
This is why I would exclude these approa-
ches as being highly improbable.
There are many basic considerations
whether life could e.g. be based on silicon
chemistry or silicon circuits, maybe with
ammonia as a solvent. Life in the form of
highly developed circuits, or a combination
of organic structures and inorganic elect-
ronic structures could be possible. The
precondition for the reproduction of this life
form however would be a kind of self-
organisation and self-repair of the circuits,
and we have not even been able to obser-
ve any attempts of this kind of behaviour.
So it could only be an artificially generated
form of life, not an original form, which only
in evolutionary stages higher than the
known ones would have acquired intrinsic
reproduction mechanisms. No matter from
which angle you approach the problem,
and many scientist have already racked
their brains over it, the only realistic ap-
proach seems to be the variant realised by
the human race: The basis of evolutionary
life has to be carbon chemistry, or organic
chemistry. According to the experience of
carbon chemistry, the most diverse orga-
nic structures were formed out of the four
basic substances carbon, hydrogen, oxy-
gen, and nitrogen. This is why it is very
probable that every form of life is basically
composed of H, C, N and O. So potentially
existing extraterrestrial life cannot be that
much different from earthly life with regard
to its basic substances. How life is indeed
formed right down to the vital complex
molecules, whether e.g. the 24 elements
necessary on the Earth (H, C, N, O, F, Na,
Mg, Si, P, S, Cl, K, Ca, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co,
Cu, Zn, Se, Mo, Sn, I) are also indispen-
sable elsewhere, or whether there are
different atoms or more than 24, might
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vary very much.
And: organic chemistry requires liquid
water as a solvent - as a neutral medium
where the chemical reactions take place.
Water is an indispensable elixir of life, not
only on the Earth, but the liquid state of
water predetermines the consistence of all
forms of life. They are inevitably soft and
vulnerable, as they need to contain a lot of
water (about 60% of the human body
consists of water). The firmness of the
outer skin is no longer sufficient when the
body has reached a certain size; then a
body-bearing skeleton is necessary.
So the question is what aliens could look
like with a soft carbon-based body. How
big or how small can an intelligent being
be? Are there any bodily features we can
derive from basic considerations? Well,
that is indeed possible. The scientific field
of allometry (allo... = other, metry = mea-
sure) deals with the issue of how the cha-
racteristics of objects with substantially
different dimensions behave. One typical
example are model aeroplanes. Although
they have been reduced according to
scale, their behaviour in the air is totally
different from that of their originals. Most of
them are not able to fly at all. So model
aeroplanes have to be constructed totally
differently from their originals, and of cour-
se, on the other hand no large aeroplane
constructed according to the well-known
paper models used at school during the
breaks, would be able to fly at all. The
reason is that the relationship between the
size of the flying object and the air viscosi-
ty, the so-called Reynolds' number, which
determines the flight behaviour, drastically
changes with different aeroplane scales.
Smaller aeroplane models model their
large originals realistically in special wind
tunnels only because there, the air viscosi-
ty can be cooled down to the temperature
near liquid nitrogen, about -200°C, and so
you receive the same Reynolds' number,
and with it the same flight behaviour, as
the original aeroplane at room temperatu-
re.
Every body usually has special and adap-
ted characteristics with regard to its envi-
ronment. And it is the same with beings
and their different sizes. For the dimensi-
ons of highly developed beings the gravi-
tational force they are submitted to, has a
fundamental influence. In 1979, M.H.Hart
found out with computer simulations, that a
planet may have a mass of no less than
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85% and no more than 133% of the Earth
to be able to have moderate surface tem-
peratures over a period of two billion
years, which seems to be necessary for
the evolution of an intelligent being. With
these very Earth-like gravitational conditi-
ons intelligent beings cannot have consi-
derably different characteristics compared
to the human being. Just an example to
illustrate this for bodily size. Let's assume
an alien is a huge being, ten times bigger
than humans, but with an identical compo-
sition; in that case its weight would be one
thousand times more, about 80t. The cross
section of its bones, because it is two-
dimensional, would only be one hundred
times bigger, i.e. the strain on the bones
would be ten times higher compared to our
bones. Such a strain on the bones of our
giant alien would inevitably break its thigh-
bones already after the first step. A giant
could form superproportionally large bones
such as an elephant or the dinosaurs, but
this is also limited, as at a certain stage, a
body would be only composed of bones,
and they would just be able support them-
selves.
On the other hand, it is also not possible
that beings have an infinitely small size.
The smallest conceivable storage and
information unit is the base as such, a
2
complex organic molecule with its cor-
responding "infrastructure". A highly deve-
loped intelligent being such as the human
being needs a system of about 100 billion
basic elements (i.e. the human nerve
cells), which are linked with each other
and constitute the "intelligence". This
seems to be a minimum size. Skilful mon-
keys with the same stereoscopic vision
and the same hand-eye coordination as
humans despite their long evolution time of
about 25 million years have not managed
to produce a higher intelligence. Their
absolute brain mass of less than 100
grams with just some kg bodily weight, and
the considerably smaller amount of links is
apparently not sufficient. Only with its 400
grams of brain mass, the human being
seems to have overcome the critical thres-
hold to higher intelligence. As molecules
have a naturally determined size, the
control centre (brain) of an intelligent being
also needs to have a certain minimum
size. Information on bodily functi-
ons and intelligence could theore-
tically be optimised to a volume of
maybe some cubic centimetres,
and then the complete being
would have a size of at least
10cm.
The complete being would also
include an energy supply system.
If our alien is a being which lives
on land, and metabolises by
means of oxygen in the air, just
like we do, then it will need a lung.
Because only small insects with a
diameter of less than 1 cm are
able to directly transfer oxygen
into their cells by means of diffu-
sion on their body surface. With
larger animals, whose majority of
cells is more than some milli-
metres below the surface, this
simply does not work anymore, or
else, you would have a being with
a thickness of just 1cm, but a very
extensive size, which is obviously
not very practical. Only a lung like
our lung with an internal surface
of 100 m2, and a very branched
blood vessel system is able to
provide enough oxygen for all the
cells of a being with a size of
more than 10 cm. Insects may be very
successful in the geological evolution as
the most numerous species, but they form
a kind of physiological dead end in the
development of intelligent life. Without the
slightest signs of a lung or bone system
they just do not have the chance to increa-
se their size sufficiently to build up a brain
size that would be able to produce intelli-
gence.
And the same is true for food intake (me-
tabolism). This is why larger beings cannot
simply metabolise via their body surface,
just as the small beings do, but they have
to "eat"; in order to do that, they have
some kind of food inlet (mouth), an exten-
sive digestive tract (the intestine with many
villi), which transmits the nutrients into the
body, and last but not least, they also have
an outlet (...). We can summarise that
aliens would, just like us, not be larger
than the more primitive beings because
they are more complicated, but they would
be more complicated, because they had to
be larger.
The eyes are the most important organ for
orientation in the environment when vital
sunlight is around. So in the geological
course of history, the eye has been rein-
vented about 40 times (wings only three or
maybe four times), and it seems obvious
that organic aliens would also have eyes
(although not necessarily wings). As the
eyes are so important for orientation, most
higher beings have two eyes. The opti-
mum eyes however would need to have a
size similar to the human eye. With the
resolution and visual field necessary for
our bodily size, our light-sensitive retinal
rods have a certain minimum number and
dimensions which correspond more or less
exactly with the wavelength of light. The
vision of smaller eyes is much more blur-
red, and larger eyes do not make any
sense for these reasons. And indeed there
is no other being on the Earth with consi-
derably larger eyes. Even an elephant has
relatively small eyes, which looks a bit
strange compared to the huge size of its
body. There are mammals with smaller
eyes such as mice, but because of the bad
resolution they are not able to distinguish a
human face from another at a distance of
2 metres, although for these animals this
would not be relevant at all.
If you sum up all the different characte-
ristics, aliens who originated from natural
evolution, would, just like us, be composed
of "flesh" (agglomerate of reproducing
aqueous cells) and "blood" (a liquid which
transports oxygen and nutrients to all the
body cells), their size would be between
0.1 and 10m, they would probably have a
size of about one metre, and they would
have a properly dimensioned skeleton to
bear the body, probably they would also
have eyes, a lung, a mouth and its functio-
nal counterpart. The only question that
remains is how these parts are to be loca-
ted. And this is something, the only thing,
we leave to the imagination of Science
Fiction authors and fantasy painters.