The search for extraterrestrial life so far has assumed that our space neighbors are organic beings. What if we are dealing with artificial intelligence?
Whom do we expect to find
For more than a century, we have been looking for traces of the existence of intelligent beings in space. But why haven't we managed to find anyone? There are many obvious answers. Maybe there are no intelligent space aliens within reach. They may not have been able to get past the mindless microbial slime stage. Or perhaps they still exist, but have come to the conclusion that it is safer to stay away from us. There is, however, another explanation: the aliens are not at all like us.
If we ever receive a signal from space, we shouldn't expect to see some soft, swampy alien protoplasm on the other side of the microphone.
SETI (Organization for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been actively looking for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life for more than half a century. Despite the tantalizing signals that come to us from space, so far it has not been possible to find evidence of the existence of aliens. But some experts suggest that we should consider what our future will be like before figuring out who to look for in space.
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Artificial Intelligence
Perhaps the most important thing to do is improve our receivers. If we can develop artificial intelligence hundreds of years after radio was invented, then aliens could do something similar as well. In other words, it's worth assuming that much of the intelligence in space is synthetic, although that might disappoint moviegoers hoping to meet little gray men with big eyes, no hair, no clothes, and no sense of humor.
Of course, aliens may well be that way. But if only they could develop artificial intelligence, then they could use it to develop the next generation of thinking and so on. Within 50 years, thus, it is possible to obtain a technique that is smarter than not only all previous models, but all people combined.
The question is whether one day artificial intelligence will be able to become conscious enough to determine its own goals and decide that it no longer needs the biological beings that created it.
What our future will be
Science fiction writers and screenwriters have warned more than once that AI will one day decide to take over and destroy its inferior biological creators. However, this does not mean that such a path is inevitable for all advanced technological civilizations. Artificial intelligence - that is, thinking machines with synthetic super-brains - may well never appear.
There is no evidence that this will inevitably happen. But the key point here is that we are looking for aliens who would be somewhat similar to us, and thus limit the search.
Where to look for extraterrestrial intelligence?
SETI uses a huge number of radio telescopes located in California to search for signals. Their receivers are aimed at stellar systems in which planets have been detected using ground-based or space telescopes, such as NASA's Kepler Observatory. These planets may well have liquid oceans and an atmosphere capable of supporting life. It was this habitat that made human evolution possible. However, artificial intelligence can exist anywhere.
This is a big enough problem. Not only can the aliens be anywhere in this case, it makes sense for them to find places in the Universe where there are sufficiently large sources of energy. If so, then SETI is looking for extraterrestrial intelligence in the wrong place. Perhaps you should study each received signal from space and look for repeating patterns. But this requires that a SETI sensor is located in each observatory. Whether scientists from these observatories will agree to this is still a matter of debate. In the short term, SETI is likely to continue to search for extraterrestrial life on distant planets. But over time, new ideas may appear where to look for artificial intelligence, as a result of which experiments will be carried out aimed at solving this issue.
Anna Pismenna