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Researchers working on extraterrestrial intelligence research efforts (SETI) are looking for the same thing as their predecessors for decades – a sign that life has popped up, as Carl Sagan would say, on another commonplace planet. something technologically advanced.
This could happen on any day. A strange radio signal. A strange and brief flash in the night sky. A star that behaves curiously without natural explanation.
That could be anything, so the SETI researchers cast a wide net, tracking as many promising leads as possible. But one thing they've started to realize is that if a civilization from another world follows a path similar to ours, then we might be dealing with an entirely different form of brain. Not a little green person, Vulcan, or a strange organism we do not know yet, but an artificial intelligence.
To understand why the first intelligence we encounter could be artificial, we must return to the first efforts to seek life. around other stars. SETI researchers began to listen to the cosmos, assuming that extraterrestrials could begin radio transmissions as a first advanced technological step if they are like us. There is reason to believe that, as our own way, going from the era of radio to the era of computing is a small leap.
"In 1900, you had the radio; in 1945, you had computers, "says Seth Shostak, senior scientist at the SETI Institute. "It seems to me that it's a difficult bow to avoid."
And from there, it may be just a matter of making these computers smaller and smaller as they become smarter and smarter. Automated processes learn to adapt on their own, and one day, rudimentary intelligence arrives, as here.
"There is currently an AI revolution, and we see artificial intelligence becoming smarter and smarter by the day." Associate Professor of Cognitive Science and Philosophy at the University of Connecticut who wrote about the intersection of SETI and AI, said. "It suggests something similar can happen at other points in the universe."
So what will it look like from our point of view here on Earth?
Worlds of Algorithms
The artificial intelligence on Earth not quite at the level where we have to worry about it. Again. Although a series of artificial intelligence algorithms can rule the world on a daily basis, they recommend Netflix broadcasts or determine what appears in your Facebook feed or even sort out treasures of data scientists, it is difficult to say that Matrix scenario where intelligent robots are trapping and enslaving humanity will occur in the next 20 years.
But the initial development of AI was incredibly fast. The first artificial intelligence experiments came soon after the first (or one of the first) digital computers, ENIAC, was put online in 1946. In 1948, researchers were trying to make Turing-type machines. , computers that can solve problems dynamically. In 1954, the first network of neurons, an artificial brain mimicking the structure of human neurons and the decision-making process, was online. This could mean that in other civilizations – not just ours – artificial intelligence comes soon after digital computing, even if it is primitive.
So, why have not we heard of other civilizations yet? Of course, time and space are vast, and relatively speaking we have just started to look. But there are also other limits to life. There is an idea in the SETI circles known as the Fermi paradox: if there are technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, why did not we hear about it? A solution often proposed is the big filter.
The big filter is the idea that technological progress creates as many problems as it solves. As the company progresses to a certain point, these threats can outweigh the benefits, resulting in the total destruction of a civilization. It is possible that we have already taken a step towards the big filter; The first digital computer was built between 1939 and 1946 – the same period as the development of the first nuclear weapons.
In simple terms, some civilizations, whether through global climate change, nuclear war, or famine, can kill themselves before they can become truly advanced. Artificial intelligence has even been added to the list of potential threats – Skynet's solution to the Fermi paradox.
Our current artificial intelligence is not too sophisticated. He can do a very good job of recognizing and filtering forms, but it's after a lot of training, and he's not currently experiencing Darwinian evolution. Unless it is programmed for, it does not happen again, and it's not necessarily sentient – it looks more like an animal running on instinct than an entity. autonomous fully aware of his conscience
. "I pushed agnosticism about the consciousness of the machine.We have no idea if the consciousness could be non-biological."
But non-biological components could be added to conscious beings. Companies that survive the big filter can do it next to machines, says Schneider.
"I am really concerned that technological civilizations do not last long, but if they do, there is plenty of reason to believe that they will be post-biological," says Schneider. "They will improve their brains towards synthetic intelligence."
In other words … cyborg companies. And techno-enhanced, you could start to get the kind of sci-fi dreams – sensitive robots. Perhaps they are computer-augmented beings who download or reproduce their consciousness, for example, a few episodes of Black Mirror . Or maybe it's the AI that has reached the singularity.
But as Shostak points out, planets are volatile, prone to eruptions and earthquakes and the effects of an aging star. "Machines will not necessarily stay on a planet," he says. "Planets are dangerous for machines."
Instead, they will probably do what we continually want to do, and go to the stars.
Points beyond
The popular image of SETI is, for many, Jodi Foster in Contact with a headset listening to the Very Large Array in New Mexico picking up a deliberate signal of some extraterrestrials to a outpost around the Vega star. But SETI researchers not only listen to the aliens, they search for them too – sweeping the sky for flashing light beacons, shadows crossing stars or, in the coming decades, strange signals in the atmospheres of the outer planets to our solar system.
"I try to keep a very open mind about what we are looking for, when SETI will succeed, it will not be like science fiction where we will find something like ourselves," says Jason Wright, associate professor at Penn State.
The first SETI detections, if they ever occurred, could be difficult to analyze, just like the star of Tabby, the star sifted by the dust that, at one point, Wright and D & # 39; Others envisaged a possible candidate for extraterrestrial megastructure (but unlikely). If the first signal of an extraterrestrial civilization is like Contact, the signal can be designed to be captured. "If that's true, then there will probably be information about who sent the signal," says Wright. But otherwise, Wright says, "When we finally find something, we will not really understand what we are looking at."
But given that compared to advanced civilizations our cosmic footprint may be low, it is unlikely that any one we know we are here, so we are much more likely to catch a passive kernel rather than active, information from the planet. There are still ways to tell what's going on. An idea advanced in the SETI literature is the idea that we could find extraterrestrials by their air pollution or, with even larger telescopes, by the reflection of artificial objects on the planet – like to catch the spectra of a large photovoltaic silicon structure intended to harvest a lot of energy from a star. "If you see a molecule that needs to be synthetic, it does not arise in nature, so it's pretty definitive," Wright says.
Even then, we will not necessarily know whether the society we detect is made up of organic or synthetic life. And since SETI's efforts only escape a data point – we – we really do not know what an advanced artificial intelligence might look like with extraterrestrials with strangers … everything. A radio signal will probably come from an extraterrestrial machine, but that does not tell us anything about the operator.
"There is no particular SETI effort to find the machines because no one really knows how to find that", Shostak says:
These machines could be foreign technologies that have advanced with some degree of artificial intelligence but that is not necessarily a sensible artificial intelligence. Perhaps we could rather watch something like an advanced extraterrestrial space probe – a Voyager on Steroids
Exploratory Questions
Last year, a piece of cigar-shaped rock passed through our solar system – but only drop for a quick visit before returning to unknown parts. Called "Oumuamua, it was the first interstellar asteroid confirmed, although recently published research suggests that it could be a comet's action." As often happens with something weird, the issue of aliens was at least briefly raised, if not taken seriously.
& # 39; Oumuamua was tumbling end to end over and over again. While some people called it "Rama", comparing it to an extraterrestrial space probe in an Arthur C. Clarke novel, Wright says the tumbling probably indicated that it was all too natural. Comets and asteroids almost always rotate, and 'Oumuamua was certainly not an exception. This was certainly not a "Bracewell probe", a hypothetical type of spacecraft designed for the express purpose of serving as an interspecific interplanetary link.
We usually know what a comet or asteroid is by looking at it. We have identified most of the types of space rocks that we expect to see. Something else can have a different composition or color depending on where it comes from. If we had had the opportunity to study in more detail – Oumuamua, we could have compared it to the asteroid families of our own solar system.
There are ways to tell if an interstellar object is natural or not. Let's say something coming through is a strange color. And not only is it a strange color, but it's not turning or tumbling, but staying in place. If it is an extraterrestrial probe, "you might expect to have an attitude control, so it will not turn." According to Wright,
Given the great distances between the stars, it is possible that A foreign civilization does not send its own individuals here, but that it sends a robot in its own way.We have already done it five times with the Pioneers 10 and 11, the Travelers 1 and 2 and the New Horizons, all on trajectories of the solar system, and the first four have Earth-ready messages for the aliens to find.
In addition to a strange color and a stable path, there might be a real moment of light bulb too. "They" might have lights, "says Wright." It's something that has been proposed in an article published in 2011 by Avi Loeb, a Harvard researcher We could also look for a robotic probe entering and exiting certain areas of the solar system, or moving its flight path in our neighborhood.
"If she is active then she will probably change her orbit to see something," says Wright. 19659002] The idea of finding something in our own solar system is strange and weird, but also, waiting for a radio signal or watching large dimming events – which does not want say that something is not there, as improbable
While our research continues (for the moment) to be unsuccessful, we end up with one last deadly answer to the Fermi paradox: perhaps have we not heard of extraterrestrials because they do not care about us. re here, they even bothered to notice us. And this can particularly apply to robots
What is it, a planet for ants?
Maybe the big filter comes. The aliens survive. Then, their offspring AI takes the wheel. Is a group of monkeys with noisy radio signals and the weird act of nuclear war really appealing to them – are they actively looking for something like us?
When it comes to this idea, Shostak says, "It's not even dangerous (for strangers) .It's uninteresting .It's like I'm putting a inscription in my yard saying "pay attention to all the ants."
In this case we are the ants. We may not have the resources of a foreign company, and if artificial intelligence is supposed to look for distant and far advanced technology signs, we are barely a point on their radar.
Schneider says: young planet, so some astrobiologists think that if there are civilizations out there, they can be much more advanced than us. "
Sure, we got the radio, then we got computers, and then Moore's law turned digital computers into more and more efficient machines year after year." The machines have improved a lot. quickly – much, much faster than Darwin, "says Shostak.
Meanwhile, the aliens of the ancient planets become more advanced.So does their AI.Maybe it becomes the most dominant life form of the planet, taking charge of his planet, then his star, flying into the universe in general – or just staying home for whatever reason, abundant and abundant and very advanced , and when it crosses the Earth, it sees nothing particularly special.An alien AI may have only a few thousand years of technological advance, but it can be advanced enough to become selfless to find ants. "We could be like cats or goldfish compared to humans and not want Schneider said.
Our goldfish status could put us in a strange place. We can be just as likely to encounter biological life on a scale unimaginable for us right now, or we can get in touch with their probes before we find them. We can find a semi-intelligent Bracewell beacon from afar, or we can cross our backyard, his AI training at home on the fingerprints of our civilization. We can find robots sent by the extraterrestrials, or we can discover that the robots are the extraterrestrials.
At the basic level, it is possible to imagine that our first encounter with intelligent life beyond Earth with another type of explorer companion – which could well be a machine.
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