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Well. Here’s something you weren’t previously worrying about, but now should be.
On the very realistically possible chance we encounter alien life, they are most likely going to be bigger than us. Much bigger.
How much bigger? How about the size of bears.
But how would we know this? We ain’t never seen no alien. But us humans can use the predictive power of MATH. MATH is able to predict lots of cool shit. We’ve used it to determine planetary orbits and the lengths of triangle sides and now, the size of aliens. From Business Insider:
Fergus Simpson, of the University of Barcelona, outlines his statistical argument on the prepublished site arXiv. The finding is based on a model called Bayes’ theorem and a branch of mathematics called Bayesian statistics.
Guh duh huh what?
Simpson started his calculation with the number of individuals who would most likely live in a given alien civilization, and came up with about 50 million or fewer individuals. He posited that there are many civilizations in the galaxy and that any individual alien would be more likely than not to be from a highly populated civilization.
Simpson wrote that the size of the planet supporting extraterrestrial life is likely to be smaller than Earth, at least most of the time. In his model, he assumed that about 50 percent of Earth’s diameter is at the lower limit, because if it were any smaller, it would be difficult for the planet to retain an atmosphere or water.
The last part of Simpson’s analysis focused on the size of other life forms. Earth animals have a widely known relation between size and the number of individuals — the smaller the species is, the more individuals of that species tend to exist. For example, an alien seeking life on Earth would be far likelier to run into a mosquito than a blue whale.
However, the relation between size and population can also be plotted on a curve against probability, which predicts that the median weight of an alien would be about 692 lbs. (314 kg) — about the size of a bear or an elk.
Yea okay. MAKES PERFECT SENSE TO ME. Not really, but whatever. I’m in vacation mode. Can’t be worrying about giant sentient math alien bears at a time like this. There’s beers to be dranking.
Plus, it’s not like these bearaliens have mastered intergalactic space travel. … That we know of.