There's a Good Chance Real Aliens Look Like Crabs

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Whatever happened to the "green little men" idea?

Crustaceans' overall demeanour doesn't exactly scream "Intergalactic race of superintelligent beings,” I’ll give you that. If there's any crab-like creature being held at Area 51, then it's probably in the kitchen—but listen; I didn't just probe this theory out of my ass whilst falling asleep to History Channel. At least one thing I learned from my research (apart from the fact that you can only google "alien crabs" so many times before being showered with weird seafood ads) and it's that alien life might not look so alien after all.

But of all familiar shapes, why crabs?

First, meet carcinization: the bizarre event by which Earth’s natural selection takes a crustacean that was comfortable in its body and turns it into a crab anyway. This has happened 5 separate times throughout history, so you know nature means fucking business. It’s almost like religious people were right and God exists, but he loves crabs 5 times more than he loves us.

But why would this be happening on other planets?

Let's see, what's the recipe for life? Because we now know that if a cell with a talent for self-replication finds a way to spring to life, there's a good chance it will wind up looking like the manager of Krusty Krab. So, for that to happen, we'd first need a rocky planet in the habitable zone, just like our Earth. Then, a bunch of atoms chemically reacting with each other in a hot, bubbling, primordial jacuzzi. And then wait. Give or take a billion years. It sounds intricate, but by virtue of being alive myself, let me tell you: I've found harder recipes in Gordon Ramsay's Quick & Delicious cookbook (whatever the fuck is mangetout, Gordon?)

Hard to argue with this: there are a lot of elements out there, but scientists have proven there’s nothing, nothing better to shape life than the carbon atom, so there’s a good chance alien life is carbon-based like us. Besides, nothing in this universe is good enough to uphold that hot piece of quantum entanglement that you call “your body” but the absolute best.

If only aliens had a planet like ours, am I right?

And have they do. We didn’t know this just mere decades ago, apparently. Our telescopes sucked. But now, to the delight of astronomers and voyeurs alike, modern telescopes can better peek into distant corners (even into the depths of that last line in an eye chart, I figure) and it turns out the galaxy is full of exoplanets. There are literally billions of them; rocky like Earth, similarly sized to Earth, orbiting a Sun-like star just like Earth. All waiting to be claimed by whichever child of Elon Musk shows the most potential.

Jump to this conclusion: Rocky planets don’t look alien at all. Have you seen the last pics of Mars we got? It’s like staring into Burning Man’s vision board. Nothing David Attenborough would have trouble describing.

And on the off-chance alien life springs there, what then?

Now you'd think that the universe, in its boundless creativity, would start spawning life forms so formidably strange they would make Jabba the Hutt look like a regular Walmart customer. And yes, perhaps some design duds are bound to happen—look at the local blobfish, the aye-aye, or the naked mole rat and tell me your mind's eye is not immediately ravished with enough nightmare-fueling ideas to fill up a Star Wars cantine—but it’s more likely that alien life will face the same kind of universal challenges local life had to overcome here and converge into a handful of functional designs.

In the know:

• Birds and mammals are both warmed-blooded, but they evolved the ability independently. You could say they’re hot in their own ways.

• Birds, bats, and flies developed mechanical wings, each on their own, without sharing notes on a Slack group, and some 320 million years before the Wright brothers shamelessly took credit for the invention.

• Yet another example of parallel evolution: mammals and marsupials. Fortunately, we didn’t share notes either. Imagine what it would be like to have the filth of a belly button turned into a whole baby sack. Gross.

• Bats and whales both evolved echolocation. And unless you’re ready to believe some weird sex stuff had been going on between the two, then go ahead and accept that they evolved it independently.

• Time and time again, natural selection converges into the same ideas and designs, simply because they are the best ways to get around on a planet like ours. Being shaped like a crab happens to be one of the best.

God sakes—are we turning into crabs?

An understandable concern, but no. It has to do with some dense science stuff about genome building blocks, the inability for mutations to go backwards, blah blah... bottom line, it’s not happening without the Infinity Stones. The best we could do is evolve a crab-like shape built upon our existing ape traits, but something tells me we'll end up looking more like a Mutant Ninja Turtle than a crab. I rather keep this shape and all the back pains that come with it.

So, technically...

There's a good chance real aliens look like crabs. That is, if the laws of nature are the same across the universe (they are), if the conditions for how life spawned on Earth can be replicated in similar worlds (they can), and if life goes through a similar process of natural selection and adaptation to the challenges of its environment (it does), then alien life will probably figure out, just as life here did, that being crabby is the best way to make it in this unforgiving universe.