In our search for extraterrestrial intelligence, we often look for signs of intelligence, technology, and communication similar to our own. But, as astronomer Jill Tarter notes, this approach means looking for detectable technosignatures, such as radio broadcasts, not intelligence. Now scientists are thinking about whether artificial intelligence can help us in the search for alien intelligence.
"Decoding" intelligence
When thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence, it is helpful to remember that humans are not the only intelligent life on Earth. Chimpanzees have culture and tools, spiders process information from cobwebs, cetaceans communicate in dialects, crows understand analogies, and beavers are great engineers. Intellect (not human), language, culture, and technology are all around us.
Alien intelligence could be like an octopus, an ant, a dolphin, or a car - or it could be radically different from anything on Earth.
We often imagine extraterrestrial life in relation to our ideas about differences, but these ideas are not universal even on Earth and are unlikely to be universal in interstellar space. And if some of us have only recently realized that there is intelligence on Earth besides human, what are we missing out on when we imagine extraterrestrial life?
In early 2018, astronomers, neuroscientists, anthropologists, AI researchers, historians, and others gathered for a Seminar on Deciphering Alien Intelligence at the SETI Institute in Silicon Valley. Astrobiologist Natalie Cabrol organized the workshop as part of her 2016 work Alien Forms, in which she called on SETI to create a new roadmap and presented a long-term vision for “finding life we don’t know”.
In his article, Cabrol asks how SETI can move away from “looking for other versions of itself” and think “beyond our own brains” to imagine a completely different extraterrestrial intelligence.
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Think differently
Silicon Valley is notorious for going against popular belief, and this culture intersects with SETI research. Since the US government stopped funding SETI in the mid-1990s, ideas, technology, and funding from Silicon Valley have grown in importance.
For example, the SETI Allen Telescope Array is named after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who contributed more than $ 25 million to the project. In 2015, investor Yuri Milner announced Breakthrough Listen, a ten-year initiative to search for extraterrestrial life.
Now SETI, NASA, Intel, IBM and other partners are trying to solve space science challenges with artificial intelligence and a program called the Frontier Development Lab.
Lucian Valkovic, chair of the Library of Congress for astrobiologists, describes one of the AI-based methods as "agnostic signal search." This means using machine learning methods to search any dataset without predefined categories, which allows you to sort the data into its “natural categories”. The software then gives us an idea of what the separation is based on and what data might be of interest for further study.
It turned out that the SETI researchers believe that artificial intelligence will help in their work, because machine learning is good at detecting differences. However, its success depends on how we define the very idea, the very concept of "difference".
Smarter than slime
Thinking outside of our brains also means thinking outside of our scientific, social and cultural systems. How can this be achieved?
AI has been used to search for analogues of possible alien radio broadcasts, but now scientists plan to use it to search for things that we have not yet looked for.
Graham McIntosh, an AI consultant at the SETI seminar, said aliens can do things we can't imagine, use technologies we never thought of. AI, in his opinion, could think for us in this direction.
We may not be able to get smarter, Macintosh suggests, but we can make cars that are smarter than us. Astrophysicist Martin Rees expressed a similar hope that AI could lead to "intelligence that outperforms humans in the same way that we intellectually transcend mucus."
First contact
If we were to encounter extraterrestrial slime, what would we assume about its intelligence? One of the problems in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that we do not know the boundaries of life or intelligence, so we must be open to all possible differences.
We might find intelligence in forms that our science has historically ignored: microbial colonies, insects, or other complex systems such as the symbiotic relationship of plants and fungi in mycorrhizal networks.
Intelligence can manifest itself in the atmosphere or geology on a planetary scale or in astrophysical phenomena. What appears to be a background process in the universe or part of nature may turn out to be reasonable.
The largest living object on Earth may be the mushroom Armilaria ostoyae in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon: it extends over 10 square kilometers and is from 2 to 9 thousand years old.
Although mushrooms are usually not associated with intelligence, they remind us that we should expect everyone when looking for life and intelligence in the universe and that life can be right under our feet, in the form of the same fungus or microbes.
And if you think that intelligence can represent anything, then the first contact can push us against anything: be it general artificial intelligence, intelligent machines, or something else. Perhaps artificial intelligence, free of human prejudice at least to some extent, can help us.
Ilya Khel