Have you noticed how the popular conception of an extraterrestrial usually involves something vaguely human in overall desigh: Upright, two arms, bipedal, a head with eyes and mouth arranged like ours perched on top of a trunk.

Its easy to see why Hollywood would favor this arrangement, its a lot easier to pay an actor to get in a funny suit than to do the SFX to generate something that looks like a cross between a tarantula and a jellyfish–wearing a spacesuit.

But the aliens in our novels and stories, the UFO drivers in our anomalistic myths, the LGMs that were captured and autopsied at Roswell all look basically human. The excuse given for this by people when pressed usually involves some nonsense about “convergent evolution”, or how we have a useful all-purpose configuration that will probably arise independently on other planets, too.

Nonsense. We look the way we do because we were a tree-living species that adapted to life in a savanna, and our former layout could easily be modified to that new environment. That specific evolutionary path is unlikely to be duplicated anywhere else. Real aliens might look like centaurs, insectoid, cephalopods, any of a variety of body plans capable of locomotion and manipulation of objects. Other than a few very general features, we have absolutely no idea how they’ll look.

I bring this up on SF because whenever I see an alien represented as journalism (as opposed to fiction) I refuse to accept it if it is even remotely humanoid. It’s why you don’t need to be an expert in biology or geology to know there is no Face on Mars. If there ever were Martians, there is no reason to believe they had faces.