We always seem to end up back to basically us, with something
a little bit different, Spock for example.
-Did he always have a bowl cut?
Think he always had a bit of a bowl.
Leonard Nimoy's bowl.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Predator is a guy in a suit, Spock, a guy with false ears.
Then of course we've got the archetypal alien.
-In every case it's basically a humanoid body shape.
-All of these seem to lack a bit of imagination to me,
looking at them from an evolutionary perspective.
There's going to be some rules.
I think it's going to be carbon based,
microbes are going to be important.
We're going to see natural selection and evolution.
If I could make one bet about alien life, it would be on that
it would evolve and I don’t think I would lose this bet.
A very great thickness of ice, about 10 miles I think, and underneath
we've seemingly got good evidence that there is liquid water.
I think it's all heated by these volcanic vents.
Which is looking a little bit similar
to the sorts of things that we find
in the deep ocean here on Earth.
We know there's going to be no sunlight getting down.
So they're going to have to be chemosynthetic.
Bacteria would maybe, at some point, start to form symbiosis, larger cells
and then you would have maybe the beginnings of multicellular life.
Because this is an unstable planet, any kind of life around these vents
needs to have a mobile form.
It has to be able to abandon ship and find new vents to live on.
-I mean let's imagine we find something like this tadpole creature.
It doesn't have eyes because it's dark.
-Yeah it's dark down there.
-But he does have some way of sensing heat.
Let's imagine this guy is actually
the first morph of a more complex organism.
Maybe you would see him metamorphosing.
He is now turning into his real form, a kind of chemosynthetic large worm.
He takes root actually.
-So he's attaching just like the larvae of a sea squirt
that we find here on Earth.
-Yeah, yeah.
-These mobile forms that can find new habitat and then start
the whole thing all over again.
He's using his tentacles as gardens to cultivate these bacteria and to
charge his metabolism.
When this probe lands in 15 years, we might be proven right,
something like this might be down there.
When Trappist is orbiting its sun, it stays tidally locked, which means
the same face is always facing the sun. One side is getting absolutely
baked whilst the other side gets no light at all and is very cold.
And that line where sun meets shade, this terminator as it's called,
is the zone where life might just about be able to exist on Trappist,
like a long thin island of life.
-One side is always sunny, and one side is always dark.
So that would imply constant winds, flowing one direction.
What pass off as trees could be like weather veins.
You can see this effect on Earth actually,
if you go to the edges of cliffs.
You know with that strong wind blowing, it's going to be quite
difficult for these animals to make themselves heard.
I think we're going to see animals displaying.
-Maybe among the trees you see something red fluttering about,
like a kite. This quasi-bird-like animal,
with a very long snout and he uses it to hold onto the tree.
And what he then does is, open up his cape like wings...
He's trying to attract a mate?
Yeah he's trying to impress his potential girlfriend here.
-Very colourful world.
-Yeah, yeah.
But a very focused and intense world.
So imagine a line of predators that always stalk from the
direction of the sun.
Maybe he would have six limbs, rather than four.
-Which gives you a huge advantage for hanging on and for
clambering around.
There's no reason at all why this animal couldn't have an extra joint,
giving it a little bit more range of movement, more flexibility because
with that lower gravity it's not taking such a strain.
Raptorial legs, legs that can grab and hold.
It gives it a huge reach!
Watch your back...
Yes!
Very high gravity is going to be a big issue.
-Everything is kind of flattened out, maybe one form
could be like this flattened slug creature.
-Flat worm sort of creature?
You could have a huge variety of these guys.
Given that the planet has been around for two billion years longer
than Earth has, might we find the evolution of intelligent life?
Because of the size constraints, I think intelligent life would begin
from a colonial perspective, just like a group of ants
collaborating together.
If you were to see these guys, they would look like very
intelligently guided swarm of little shapes, moving across the floor
and coming towards you.
Maybe they would form different shapes or letters,
trying to communicate.
-The idea of all these subunits, these little individual things coming
together and creating not just a colony but something that’s got
intelligence and can travel across space, really appeals to me.
Certainly the whole issue of contamination by alien bacteria.
I think it's the one thing we can't protect against.
It's what we saw in the history, the recent history, of humans.
As we've gone across through the world spreading things like smallpox,
so in a way that's a study in miniature of what would happen
perhaps if an alien culture were to come here.
We're going to need some sort of galactic quarantine.
Yeah, or a galactic hospital!