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214 Nonetheless, there will be an irresistible human tendency to imagine what they look like. As none of us actually know, the fictional images we carry around in our heads could influence our reaction to first contact. Our images of extraterrestrials have evolved over the centuries. Early descriptions of interplanetary travel found worlds resembling the Earth, inhabited by pseudo-humans. Even in the first half of the twentieth century, many depictions of intelligent aliens, observed Darling, were little more than extravagantly dressed humans and chimerical animals cobbled together from terrestrial body parts.” Lasswitz, in 1897, envisioned Mar- tians so much like us as to allow an interplanetary love affair. Anthropomorphic assumptions remain powerful. Many commentators expect extraterrestrials to bear some resemblance to humans, justifying this reasoning by an appeal to convergent evolution. The humanoid design may be what we wish to see, for its reassuring familiarity and its confirma- tion of our unique qualities. According to this stereotype, intelligent aliens would be bilaterally sym- metrical. They would have some means of locomotion; they might walk on two legs because the biped form frees upper limbs for other uses. They would have to have some way of manipulating their environment, such as hands. To be intelligent, they would need some system for processing and storing information; mass media aliens often have larger skulls than humans to suggest bigger brains. Sensors, especially for sight, may be located high on the body of a land animal to improve range and may be close to the brain to shorten reaction time. Extraterrestrials might have features similar to eyes and ears.” Humans who claim to have seen extraterrestrials have described a wide variety of faces and body types, but most are humanoid. Drake extended the human analogy to the point of saying: “They won’t be too much dif- ferent from us. If you saw them from a distance of a hundred yards in the twilight you might think they were human.” Clarke was more skeptical: Nowhere in the galaxy will there be creatures that we could mistake for human beings, except on a very dark night. Others believe that the probability of encountering humanoids is vanish- ingly small. Even if we find intelligent beings with physiques analogous to our own, their internal structures and chemistries, their genetic materials, and their perceptions of their surroundings may be very different from ours. There would be variations in their living and nonliving environments and the directions taken at the myriad branching points of their evolution. Aliens would be shaped by separate histories. Anthropologist Loren Eisely expressed this eloquently. “Nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom, there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments . . . may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the The Consequences of Contact