Any kind of alien that humans can come into contact with most likely will not look like you or me or the seven-legged creatures from the recently shown Arrival movie. If an extraterrestrial species becomes mature enough to send signals that can be picked up by earthlings, it is likely that it will already shed its biological clothing and become a form of machine intelligence. So says Seth Shostak, the famous "hunter on aliens".
In confirmation of his words, Shostak points to the path of humanity. Humans invented the radio in the 1900s and the computer in 1945, and today they are making relatively cheap devices that have more processing power than the brain can do. The emergence of real, strong artificial intelligence is not far off, experts say. Renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil, for example, is betting on 2045.
“It might be 2100 or 2150 or 2250. It doesn't matter,”Shostak said in September at the presentation of the Dent: Space conference in San Francisco. “The point is, we can hear any society that invents radio for centuries and then it invents something else. And this is important because the cars go further."
AI will communicate with human bodies for a while, but eventually people will get rid of their meatbags and become fully digital, Shostak said.
“Imagine you are building a four-cylinder engine. You put it on a horse and you get the horse faster. But pretty soon you come to the idea: let's get rid of the horse part and just make a Maserati, Shostak says. "Most likely it will."
Machine people will get smarter and more capable, faster and faster, he adds. At present, the intelligence of humanity is the result of four billion years of Darwinian evolution, which uses random variations as raw materials and does not set any particular goal. But the evolution of machine intelligence will be planned and efficient, Shostak says.
“As soon as you invent a thinking machine, you say, invent something better than yourself, and you get it. Then tell this new creation: do something better than yourself and so on."
This thought has serious implications in the light of the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. Unlike terrestrial organisms, super-evolved extraterrestrial machines may not require water or other chemicals to survive, so they won't be too closely tied to their ancestors' home. And traveling giant distances will not be a problem for them, provided they have access to enough raw materials and energy to support repairs for millennia.
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“We continue to look in the direction of stellar systems, in which there may be habitable worlds, in our opinion, in which biology can gather into smart guys like us. But I don't think it will be that way."
Shostak says he is not suggesting that his SETI colleagues stop exploring potentially habitable terrestrial planets like the recently discovered Proxima b, which is just 4.2 light years away. And simple life forms could well inhabit such worlds, even if their main digital inhabitants left them long ago. But it might make sense to expand the search to regions of space that might be more attractive to digital life forms - somewhere where energy is plentiful, in the centers of galaxies.
"Perhaps this is where intelligent beings live," says the scientist. “Perhaps we should look for places in the sky that connect two places with an excess of energy and try to find traces of communication between them. We are looking for those who are similar to ourselves, but hardly much of the intelligence in the Universe is similar to us. I would bet that it is not."
ILYA KHEL
