Advanced alien life in the Universe most likely mechanical, not biological

Monday, December 29, 2014, 2:28 PM - Science fiction stories over the decades have been presenting alien life as a dizzying array of biological diversity, but some philosophers and astrobiologists think we should be focusing more on the mechanical.

It's understandable that we've been focusing on the biological, at least so far, when thinking about alien life. After all, we're biological, as is all life on this planet. So, it stands to reason that life elsewhere certainly starts out this way, and this is probably the case on every planet out in the universe where life develops.

Life, however, doesn't necessarily stay biological.

Already, here on Earth, there is a growing 'transhumanist' movement, which seeks to alter the human condition by merging us with technology. The ultimate plan for this is to enhance and elevate what it means to be human, physically and mentally, to the point where we are post-human - so far beyond what we are now that, if presented with a view of that from the here and now, we'd barely recognize ourselves (if at all).

If that all seems far-fetched, you'd be right - at least for the moment. Noone is going to be reaching this post-human state just yet. However, with how quickly technology is advancing, such a thing may not be too far down the road for us.

This is the thinking of Seth Shostak, the director of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program at NASA.

"As soon as a civilization invents radio, they're within fifty years of computers, then, probably, only another fifty to a hundred years from inventing AI," he said in an interview with Motherboard. "At that point, soft, squishy brains become an outdated model."

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Along Shostak's timeline, humanity is currently very close to inventing true AI. So close, in fact, that some of the premier thinkers on the planet - Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk - have been warning us to be very careful when delving into that field, as it could become our downfall. Their warnings are along the lines where the AIs violently displace humans as the dominant form of life on this planet, a la the worlds of The Matrix and The Terminator. However, this transition wouldn't necessarily involve the violent extinction of the human race.

Instead, it could very well be a situation where humanity creates artificial intelligence in much the same way as parents conceive children, raise them, nurture them and then send them out into the world to take over as the parents age and then pass away. In this way, humanity could ultimately achieve immortality, but rather than living on biologically, or by producing biological offspring, our mechanical 'offspring' (possibly even with our uploaded personalities) would carry on in our stead.

This is the future seen by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov, who wants to put our human brains into robot bodies by 2025 (voluntarily, of course), advance us up to fully mechanical beings by 2035 through a process of uploading our personality to a computer brain, and finally, by 2045, turn us into stationary mechanical brains that interact with the universe through projected holograms. He's quite serious about this, in fact, and started the 2045 Initiative to promote the idea and work towards that goal.

With these thoughts in mind, looking out into the universe for alien life, we have to consider the idea that any intelligent, advanced form of life we meet will very likely have developed along these same lines. They undoubtedly would have started out as biological, but then advanced to the point where they created artificial intelligence to replace them (one way or another).

"The way you reach this conclusion is very straightforward," Shostak told Motherboard. "Consider the fact that any signal we pick up has to come from a civilization at least as advanced as we are. Now, let's say, conservatively, the average civilization will use radio for 10,000 years. From a purely probabilistic point of view, the chance of encountering a society far older than ourselves is quite high."

The potentially-habitable planets we've already discovered around other stars range from a dozen light years away to several thousand light years away from us. If an advanced civilization arose on the closest of those, the technological advancements they'd go through in the time it takes for their first radio signals emitted to reach us would be primitive by our standards, but still big for that civilization. For example, the first radio signals we sent out (that probably could have survived to propagate through space) were in 1901 and 1902, just after the zeppelin was invented. A dozen years later and we already had airplanes. For a more distant alien race, the 3,000 year trip for their radio signals to reach us would produce incredible advances, en par with comparing current human technology to that of the late bronze age.

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University of Connecticut philosophy professor Susan Schneider has been giving this idea a lot of thought as well. She recently addressed it in a paper titled Alien Minds, which she discussed at the joint NASA-Library of Congress Astrobiology Symposium in September of this year (click here to view her 21 minute presentation). She goes beyond just 'artificial intelligence' though, to present the idea that these aliens would more likely be super-intelligent.

"There’s an important distinction here from just 'artificial intelligence'," Schneider said, according to Motherboard. "I'm not saying that we’re going to be running into IBM processors in outer space. In all likelihood, this intelligence will be way more sophisticated than anything humans can understand."

What if these aliens find us? Would we be in danger? Not according to Shostak and Schneider. As Shostak told Motherboard, these are aliens who would be interested in resources, but it'd be energy - drawn from a star or perhaps even Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole. It seems that, being artificial, they'd have moved beyond the needs we usually assign to interstellar travellers (thus, eliminating the need to come down here to steal our oceans or pack us away as consumables).

Schneider even goes one step further beyond that, to say that these being would be so different, with goals so divergent from our own, that there would be no interest in us or anything we're up to.

"If they were interested in us, we probably wouldn't be here," she said.