Stephen Hawking recently warned that contact with a highly advanced extraterrestrial civilization could have dire consequences for the human race. Arthur Clarke once made his famous observation that sufficiently advanced technology for the observer would be indistinguishable from magic.
In the Strugatskys' story "The Kid", the starship pilots first took the planet occupied by a different mind for an empty one, and after that they could not understand by what laws intelligent life exists there.
Following in their footsteps, renowned world experts from the physicist Sir Martin Rees of Cambridge University to astrobiologist Paul Davis of the University of Arizona wondered - if we encounter alien technology that is far superior to ours, will we be able to recognize it? A technology that is perhaps a million years or more ahead of ours is likely to look like a miracle.
In fact, as Paul Davis writes in his book, such an advanced technology may not even be based on matter. It may not have a fixed size or shape; have no well-defined boundaries. It can be dynamic in all dimensions of space and time. Or vice versa - do nothing outwardly that we could recognize. Not to be composed of discrete discrete elements, but rather to be a system or subtle high-level correlation of components.
“Does the world really consist only of matter and information?” Asks Davis. Five hundred years ago, he writes, “the very concept of an information manipulation device, or software, would have been inconceivable. Could it be that even now there is some higher level beyond all human experience, which, for example, organizes electrons? If this is so, then we will never be able to notice this “third level” with the help of observations at the informational level, even less at the material level”.
We must be open to the possibility that advanced alien technology millions of years old can operate on a third, or even fourth or fifth level - which are absolutely unimaginable to the human mind at its current stage of evolution.