Advanced aliens, if they exist, may have no physical bodies at all and could be built from materials nothing like human flesh, according to a new theory put forward by scientists in California and Portugal in 2024. Philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California, Riverside, and Jeremy Pober of the University of Lisbon argue that truly advanced aliens might be conscious beings without bodies in any recognisable sense, challenging long‑held assumptions about what we should even be looking for in the cosmos.
Most popular images of extraterrestrials, from glossy Hollywood franchises to grainy UFO reports on social media, lean heavily on one basic idea, that if intelligent life is out there, it probably looks vaguely like us. Two arms, two legs, a head, a face, perhaps green skin for flair, but always some kind of body. Schwitzgebel and Pober think that confidence is badly misplaced and have now tried to give that intuition a more formal backbone.
