Humans may not be from earth- an ecologist defends his controversial claim

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If we evolved on this planet, why does just standing up on it hurt us?

Silver argues that the gravity on our home planet must've been stronger, and so we're progressively growing taller and taller with each generation, causing us to have bad backs.

It is thought, in the wider scientific community, that on planets with stronger gravity, human-like life forms would evolve to be much shorter and stockier to deal with the extra gravity bringing them down.

When that gravity isn't there, we apparently start to grow like forced rhubarb, ending up so tall and willowy that our own skeletons can't support us very well.

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In further expanding his argument, Silver points to the excessive nutrition on earth and a possible cause for the difficulties of human childbirth.

The fact that humans have to spend hours screaming in pain to bring new life into the world, whereas the rest of the animal kingdom can drop a sprog in their sleep, has long puzzled anthropologists. Why is it such an ordeal for us to have kiddies when it's literally our only biological purpose?

Silver thinks that the high levels of nutrition that we get could cause our babies to grow far bigger in utero than our bodies are designed to cope with.

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This is one of Ellis Silver's arguments for our alien origins. Humans will easily burn through sun exposure, whereas many creatures won't.

Humans, in contrast with other species, cannot sunbathe for more than short periods at a time without getting sunburned. This indicates that the human body is not effectively adapted to constant exposure to our sun, which is a funny thing for a species that have no protective layer of fur.
Silver thinks that this is because we evolved with a much weaker sun, or perhaps we originated on a planet with lots of cloud cover.

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volution generally means that a species adapts to its environment, but we don't seem to want to play that game.

A big part of the theory comes down to the fact that we have altered the planet to fit us, rather than the other way around; we just can't seem to bear living in the natural world. The fact that we have altered our environment so drastically makes it seem as though we're just not suited to living in earth's natural habitat.

In fact, what we're doing appears not to be evolving, so much as terraforming.

Another of Silver's arguments is that we're seemingly terrible at reading our own planet. Many animals have built-in sensors for natural phenomena such as earthquakes, tsunamis and even just the ability to predict the weather, whereas we have had to intervene with our technology in order to keep up with them.

It could be that we came from a planet that is not so geologically active, meaning that there would be no benefit for us to be able to predict earthquakes.

Then, we have the fact that we can't eat most of the food on this planet without altering it in some way. Whether it's by cooking it, or through selective breeding, most of the food that we eat is not as nature intended it.

We're not saying that our home planet had hamburger trees and rivers of lemonade (if it does then book us a one-way ticket to Alpha Centauri), but that fact that most animals, apart from us, are perfectly fine eating grass and raw zebra is a bit weird.

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