Philip Ball

Doing something? Not a chance. The likelihood that we understand the universe well enough to know how, or if, it will end, is very close to zero. Until we know what dark energy is (and probably dark matter), we’re not going to be able to say very much about the End of Days. And this is fantastic. The fact that we don’t understand the composition of 96% of our own universe, let alone whether there are others, is a wonderful thing for cosmology, and for science as a whole. It means there are very exciting times to come. Will the end be a Big Crunch, or a Big Rip, or just a sad, bleak Heat Death? Or (my guess) none of the above? We just don’t know. It is exhilarating that we can even imagine...

Just to throw a cat among the pigeons, one scientist who has thought a fair bit about this and who has a very different take on what aliens might look like is Simon Conway Morris. He believes that under anything close to Earth-like conditions, convergent evolution will produce beings very similar to us - see for example here. I’m not at all persuaded that evolution is this convergent, especially if we have no good reason to believe it must have the same biochemical basis as o...