“Will E.T. Look Like Us?”

It’s a good question, and one that we simply don’t have the information to answer yet. We can’t even prove that there are E.T.s at this point.

From the science that I’ve read, it’s likely that life is fairly common in the universe. And once you have life, you have a biological arms race to develop ever-improved versions of it as that life competes with itself for resources. But I can’t see that humanoid life is anywhere near inevitable. It’s nearly ideal for us, but I can imagine lots of paths to a stable long-term ecology where other body forms would be better suited.

(And don’t even get me started on intelligence… the odds against that may be truly astronomical.)