by Manasee Wagh
November 22, 2024
from PopularMechanics Website





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Assuming intelligent aliens

have used AI for thousands

or even millions of years,

experts think it may have grown

to proportions we can

scarcely imagine on Earth...

We may not be the only beings in the universe who use artificial intelligence (AI).

That's according to some astronomers who say that an intelligent civilization anywhere in the cosmos would develop this tool naturally over the course of their cultural evolution.

After 13.8 billion years of existence, life has likely sprung up countless times throughout the cosmos.

According to the Drake Equation, which calculates the probability of an existing, communicating civilization, there are currently an estimated 12,500 such intelligent alien societies in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.

And if there are aliens who think in a way that we do, and created cultures that developed technology like us, then they probably invented a form of artificial intelligence, too, scientists say.

Assuming AI has been an integral part of intelligent societies for thousands or even millions of years, experts are increasingly considering the possibility that artificial intelligence may have grown to proportions we can scarcely imagine on Earth.

Life in the universe may not only be biological, they say.

AI machine-based life may dominate many extraterrestrial civilizations, according to a burgeoning theory among astrobiologists.

It's reasonable to think that artificial intelligence could have replaced much of the organic life in civilizations that have existed for millions of years compared to our own species' relatively short 300,000 years, says Steven Dick, Ph.D., former NASA Chief Historian.

One facet of civilization the Drake Equation doesn't account for is cultural evolution, which is wrapped up in a society's desire to become more intelligent, he says.

"There's something called the intelligence principle, which says that any society or any civilization that can improve its intelligence will improve its intelligence - or risk extinction as others improve their own intelligence," he explains.

Artificial intelligence may be the key to providing accelerated intelligence expansion, he believes.

We've thought very little about what a post-biological intelligence would look like.

 

We can assume that an AI-based being wouldn't have to worry about biological needs, like food and a hospitable environment.

 

Perhaps biological aliens would integrate AI into their own bodies to overcome their physical limitations.

The worst-case scenario is that,

one day AIs decide that their biological makers are no longer necessary.

But there could very well be cases in which the AI's original creators eventually decide - perhaps after living with and upgrading their technology for a long time - that it's natural to merge with it, Dick says.

On the other hand, AI develops and learns fast.

Perhaps it would choose to get biological life out of its way, says astrophysicist Michael Garrett, Ph.D., director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester and author of a paper about how AI might one day destroy biological life.

"I think that AI wouldn't really want to be shackled to some kind of biology that would limit it in so many ways, [like having to stay on the planet]," he says.

 

"It becomes really expensive to bring biology into space. It's much cheaper to send robots."

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, agrees with the concept of synthetic life becoming increasingly common in the universe.

"Not being biological, these machines can DESIGN their own successors, and in rapid-fire order. It seems this sort of trajectory will be common in the cosmos," he says by email.

If even a few civilizations have been post-biological space travelers for a few million years, they could have reached our galaxy, Dick says.

Where then, are the extraterrestrials we keep looking for?

We've barely begun formulating alternative methods to detect post-biological aliens.

Instead of using radio waves, as we do for communication on Earth and for our extraterrestrial search, post-biological aliens could be communicating by manipulating some physical phenomena we still don't truly understand, like gravitational waves or dark matter, Garrett says.

So, humans are now considering using AI to communicate with aliens.

METI, Messages to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, proposes using machine large language models and could be the way we end up finding our cosmic neighbors.

The thing is, we don't know what an AI-based intelligence might be thinking or wanting.

Such a civilization may be simply curious, or it may wish to set up trading partners or make an inventory of other sentient life forms, Shostak says.

One of the dozens of explanations for is that perhaps aliens don't want to travel.

Or maybe they are quietly observing us, Dick says.

"The idea of the zoo hypothesis is that they're waiting, you know, at the outer edge of the Solar System or somewhere, until we get smart enough to talk to them."

For now, we're still playing in the kindergarten sandbox of AI toys, while somewhere out there, hybrid biological-machine beings might be performing wonders...