Most stars EVERYWHERE (sorta) are mundane red dwarves... however, when you actually extend out to the reach of our radio waves, there are hundreds of G types, many of which are still related to us enough to have been around long enough and have had enough of the right masses and metallicity consistencies. To be fair, actually, if you disrelate from us and notch down a bit to K classers, your odds of life go up (not only because they are calmer, but they have much longer lifespans.)
True that, but then we get into the territory of what you might call "traverse-ability", i.e. how far is too far when it comes to traversing the distances between stars? Sure, we can start saying that said alien race is capable of faster-than-light or near-light travel, but if we take Occam's razor to it then the most likely scenario is that
if there's other life out there in the "local" vicinity, and
if that life is "intelligent", then the odds are likely to be very low that said life would have technology that advanced.
Sounds like you've found the same ones, albeit are taking them differently.
Not really sure how else to take them, numerically toddlers don't make up the majority of students. =/
Yep, the eyeball has done just that, and look at how many bizarre varieties of them there are. Further, look at how many millions of ways this one earth's biota has adapted to said challenges.
There are a lot of relatively cosmetic variations between eyes, but when you get down to it there are a number of basic commonalties.
For example, only complexly developed life-forms have eyes (no bacteria or viruses), out of those species it seems that only animals have eyes (we haven't found any plants or fungi yet that have them), the vast majority of those animals that do have eyes only have two of them, and those two eyes are
usually forward-facing in animals that are predominately predatory, and side-facing in animals that are predominately herbivorous. Additionally (excluding the multi-faceted eyes of insects), eyes are usually round with a pupil in the middle. We have the round pupils of mammals, birds and many (if not most) fish, the slit pupils of reptiles, and some niche pupils (like those wierdy hourglass shaped pupils some crustaceans have).
What we can take from this as far as alien evolution goes is that the kind of "intelligent" aliens we've been talking about are likely to be animals (or an animal equivalent), have two eyes (which are likely to be either forward or side-facing), and those eyes are likely to be either multi-faceted or round with a shaped pupil in the middle. And obviously this process can be applied to the rest of the body too, to varying degrees. Which means that "Intelligent" aliens are
likely to look fairly similar to us (though probably not in the Star Trek "Oh hi, I'm a human with a funny shaped nose!" sense).
