[_Eris_]

Wow, everyone has an interesting point in this thread. All I could add is that I'd
like to think that other life out there exists in a similar form, seeing as, standing
upright or whatever is kinda convenient, also as one of you stated, having opposable
thumbs.
I just would like to think that, instead of apes, they had evolved from some other
form of animal, such as lizards...Especially if that planet's climate were warmer
than ours. Then maybe they'd look like Cardassians.

[MissionTrek08]

While I think there's an excellent chance of life existing elsewhere in the universe (even a slim chance it exists elsewhere in our own solar system in some form), without some common genetic ancestry I'd expect it to look and live quite differently than us. Excellent reasons already given above: environment, adaptation, etc.

One other reason why I'd expect vast differences if you suddently gathered 25 'alien' lifeforms in one room today is the vast timescales involved in universal development. Hopping through Earth's lifecycle history alone, you would meet a wide variety of 'dominant' lifeforms at any given visit: microbes, amoeba, dinosaurs, modern humans... all within a fraction of our planet's total time of existence.

I think generally life may go through similar patterns in evolution (basic locomotion, brain evolution, etc.) but the start times for these runs would vary by millions if not billions of years. Who can predict what humans might evolve into a million years from now, given how we've changed in the last two million? It's not only where and how we might discover alien lifeforms, but when we discover them in their own history of being.

[NCC-73515]

Remember the bad story in VOY's Threshold? They said we'd see the future evolution of humans - instead the two ended up as something similar to Ichthyostega.

[_Eris_]

Originally Posted by NCC-73515

Remember the bad story in VOY's Threshold? They said we'd see the future evolution of humans - instead the two ended up as something similar to Ichthyostega.

I've never seen that, but it sounds like a Babylon 5 episode. I think it's
season 5 somewhere, maybe the end of season 4, where we see what
humans evolve into billions of years later. We become like the Vorlon,
beings of light.

[KiraTroi87]

Actually I have thought about that and of all the species in Trek there has to be a resemblance from one species to any actual aliens out there. And they ARE out there!