What if the aliens we are seeking are AI?
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My take...
1) Over the span of our development, our technology development would look like uncomprehensable magic to someone 1000 years ago. Our ancestors from 100,000 years ago would find us uncomprehensible. Galactic time horizons are billions of years. The odds of our finding life who could comprehend us (and us them) is miniscule.
2) It's hard to fathom the listening not being automated, and using AI. There's just too much space to listen to.
Is a turtle artificially intelligent? What if a Chimp had titanium atoms instead of carbon? Would that make it AI?
Overall I think it's an absurd question because right now the definition of "AI" is something that we/humans have created. Everything else is natural intelligence.
A question of vernacular.
Exactly! I've always wondered; If we made advanced enough robots, why would they not count as life?
If they could think, feel, explore, protect themselves, teach each other, affect their environment, process raw materials, build things, if they could make more robots like themselves, all without needing us — fast forward a few hundred years and they had a spacefaring civilization of their own — by WHAT criteria would they NOT classify as "life" in the grand scheme of the Universe?
Just because they won't be made out of organic "cells?"
> ... "They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
> "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
> "They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
> "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat." ...
> "Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"
> "First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."
> "We're supposed to talk to meat." ...
> ... Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
> "I was hoping you would say that."
> "It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
> "I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' ...
Don't butcher the title/refrain.
A fun mental activity: you could posit that life as we know is a von Neumann probe, with simple life supporting each more complex level (from the microbes that made a young Earth's toxic atmosphere oxygen-rich, multicellular machines etc) until you reach the human who, by being able to engineer their local environment, shifts intelligence from biology to machines that are able to coordinate solar-scale engineering, i.e. Dyson swarms, which can power mass-drivers that send out more von Neumann probes lined with organic terraforming seeds thus creating a forever repeating process until the universe sinks into darkness.
Consider everything less intelligent than us on our planet... If anything tried to communicate with us, would we even bother trying to figure out what it was trying to say? Would we try to communicate back?
Suppose an octopus stacked rocks in piles of prime numbers (not including unity). Would we care beyond possibly putting it on display in an aquarium?
Prime numbers are a consequential concept. Maybe that octopus knows about another consequential concept that we haven't been thinking about for many hundreds of years.
Also, maybe the smartest thing to do if an unknown entity tries to contact you, is to play dumb.
Sure, I mean intelligent life is interesting to us because it's novel. If there is other intelligent life in the galaxy (universe), it probably implies that intelligent life is relatively common. So, more (less) intelligent life would be extremely inconsequential to them. Why waste resources studying something already well understood?
My point is that intelligent life may have discovered something we don't know already, even if it's dumber than us.
I suspect that if life is common enough that we're boring to most other forms of intelligent life, we'd probably find at least one or two other species that are interested in us, and if it's rare enough that there's only one or two other species out there, then chances are we're interesting enough that some of their folks would want to visit us and find out our deal.
Obviously I think there's a point to us trying to communicate with whatever is out there, I just think we shouldn't be surprised by the lack of response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus
Paul aside, we've been ignoring evidence that animals are sentient for centuries now.
So yes - as a general principle, there's a term missing from the Drake equation to cover recognisable similarity, technological equivalence, and mutual interest.
Two civs probably need to be within half a millennium or so of technological development (human time) to have any possibility of communicating.
Considering how old the universe is, it's quite likely civs pass each other by all the time, because larger development differentials aren't visible - literally in one direction, and because of perceived triviality in the other.
Imagine an ant colony in a city, looking for other ant nests, while the city, all the other cities, and the rest of the civ that built the cities can't be imagined by the ants. So even though they're in the middle of a busy civilisation, it's invisible to them.
Intelligence seems to expand polynomially or exponentially by a lot of measures though (e.g. technology). The closest analogy for us compared to another civilization that could actually receive our radio communication I think would be chimpanzees using sticks to eat termites.
If I had to guess, I'd guess there's probably some kind of technological asymptote, but considering the scale of the universe (more importantly its complexity) I think we are probably nowhere near it.
Ant 2: "Who knows? That's just the way the universe is."
Man 1: "Man, how do we have all these strange gravity deposits without matter?"
Considering that a lot of research is done on animal communication, I think that's a poor example.
Then we'd start studying its anatomy for its prime calculator.
Well, that explains all the stories about people being anally probed during alien abductions.
My point is still that life less intelligent than us has nothing to communicate to us that we would care to respond to.
However, once their AI deciphers what we're saying to them, they'll probably just get annoyed like the FCC and HAM radio operators get annoyed with people mucking around with radio transmissions before knowing the rules.
We are the only known species to propagate out of balance within our local environment. Our brain has this concept of "infinity", which shows up everywhere in our society. Unconstrained growth is in our DNA.
That animal is eating it's environment and we might consider that irrational and unsustainable -- right up until the moment where it emerges from a cocoon and flies away to a new world.
So any intelligent life-form would have to survive this period where they have the technical intelligence to create damaging things such as cars, coal-fired power plants, nuclear bombs, etc but lack the maturity and will to manage the bad issues resulting from that technology.
And I can't see how we will create the solutions on a global scale within such a divisive world society. It just won't happen. And any life-form would go thru the same phase. So life will flourish until technology enters the picture, and then the issues of technology (pollution, over-population, resource depletion, etc.) will happen very quickly and destructively since any life-form would be emotionally ill-equipped to handle them. I mean, how can we construct global solutions when the majority of people still believe in a 'god'. We are still immature apes yet with nuclear bombs.
It would be a rare civilisation that would be able to survive this period. And hence that's why intelligent life-forms would continually rise and fall, but never progressing past a certain level of intelligence.
—Michio Kaku. "Will Mankind Destroy Itself?", 2010
Sadly, you've also described an increasing number of western political conservatives.
https://m.mic.com/articles/95234/psychologists-discover-the-...
As far as nuclear bombs, we don't really seem to be using them much anymore. They are just trump cards in the mutual assured destruction game.
Somebody could come up with something tomorrow. Maybe a bacteria that can populate the ocean, which precipitates carbon from CO2 in the air, and drops little pellets to the bottom. Probably not a real practical solution, or even a good idea, but it shows how things could rapidly change if the right tech comes along. They wouldn't need to get everyone together - just a petri dish thrown into the ocean.
We are still thinking of solving today's problems with today's technology, which I agree is futile to get everyone on the same page.
On the contrary, I think 'we' (the US) use them every day as leverage and a deterrent. We just don't need to detonate them anymore. I think there is more to it than them being just a trump card. You only get to use a trump card once.
For the few entities with nuclear weapons, it's MAD. We would only play the card once, since it would be the final round of the game with that entity.
Life emerging on a planet is like a bomb's fuse getting lit. The bomb in this case being earth itself with its unique chemical composition. It is only a question of time when this bomb goes off and destroys all life in the process. Maybe the purpose of life is to accelerate and magnify that explosion to achieve the highest possible cosmic reduction of entropy.
Some people argue against this by citing how earth has become relatively peaceful over the last century. I think this is a false belief - earth is in a local minima of violence bought about by the emergence of nation states and nuclear weapons.
The next level of evolution of intelligent life, which will most likely be AI, will bring with it a new wave of violence. First, when AI takes over and fights the humans for dominance, and next if there are multiple AI which emerge and fight over the resources of this solar system.
Or it only affects the planet enough to destroy civilization, and not all life. Or only all high-order life, leaving insects and fish behind. Etc, etc.
When man dropped the bomb on another city, there was no consideration given for the other life forms which died as a result. This consideration has never been given in any wars man has fought till now, and will not be given when we loose against AI.
However, I think it would be significantly harder for us to wipe out all life on the planet earth. I'm hard pressed to think of anything besides blowing up the planet, or grey goo (and arguably grey goo would just be another form of life).
This war will be fundamentally a pursuit of energy and resources, as it has always been. And this pursuit of energy and resources has always been detrimental at an exponentially increasing scale to other life forms which depend on the same.
As an example, if there is a nuclear war in the Indian subcontinent, the countries there will only be acting out of their need to guarantee their survival. However, the resulting fallout will have extinguished life forms at a pace that doesnt have any bearing in history.
What mechanism would define that purpose? Earth harboring life for a few billion years, and then snuffing itself out, seems completely irrelevant on the scale of cosmic entropy.
Your argument might have merit if intelligent life tends to perform crazy Physics experiments that spawn new universes. Then you'd have an evolutionary feedback loop where universes become tuned for intelligent life.
In that sense it is perhaps similar to a volcano that erupt. Both are emergent from the same forces of entropy, but life just takes a non obvious path. Life seeks to burn itself out, the same way a volcano seeks to cool itself.
(Rather than AI just being our servant)
This phrase should defeat them: "Hi, welcome to undefined"
>Humans figure out this brain and AI thing sometime in the next 200 years. So, now 'you' don't need a body or any of that jazz anymore. Brain uploads, that whole shebang, fun times ensue, maybe
>Great, now we start ctrl+C and ctrl+V'ing ourselves a lot, we start getting into the real nitty gritty of physics, chem, bio, math, etc. We get limited by the amount of computers, matter, and energy we can muster. The Earth turns to computronium and heat.
>You know how this ends: We deconstruct the Earth and solar system, send the sun into brown dwarf state and 'colonize' other systems to do the same. The issue is still light speed. More computation is great, but it is the flops that matter. This means that other systems are effectively useless and on their own as it still takes centuries to distribute the computations. You need more plain-jane matter and energy. Bigger systems are primo then. If we go to interstellar war, it will be over very large systems. Still, it's unlikely because...
>Black holes. You fall into one, and time slows down. Boom! You have more flops for no effort. All you have to do is fall into one and have your 'puters on the outside do all the work faster. We super-engineer some craziness and make tiny ones to orbit about. (Note: Now things REALLY fall off into dust hippie-land).
>Cosmic eggs. The black hole is the egg and we are the sperm (yes, this is nutto but fun). We all merge our individual black holes and then we make the 'great journey' to the center of galaxy to all merge with all the other AIs out there. He said it was the only real option. The horizon of the super massive one in the center is the 'flattest' and therefore easiest to orbit and 'choose your time dilation' (I think he meant that it had the smoothest gradient as it was the biggest).
>We are then the first to be intelligent. Dust Hippie then said something that, by this super crazy funland logic, was pretty good. Assuming these time dilation and systems turned into computronium ideas kinda hold water, then we know there are no other super-AIs in the galactic core. This is because we can see many massive suns in very odd orbits about the galactic super black hole. If they were there, went his thinking, then they would set them in better orbits with a constant 'power feed' into the AIs orbiting closely to the black-hole, also they would not be visible to us as they would be enshrouded themselves by computronium, with no radiation wasted on the way out. Not a bad extension of crazy logic, I'd say.
Now, these are all predicated on our current physics know-how and that light speed is as slow as it is. We have great suspicions that this is not true, as our form of matter is ~5% of the total mass-energy budget of the universe and it seems most of the universe is not 'positive' energy (the universe is accelerating in its expansion). Still, its a fun, if likely LSD fueled, theory.
If the AIs have interstellar war, they won't be bogged down in slowtime around a black hole. The ones in fasttime have more chances to control the computronium, and a faster response time to take advantage of whatever those compute cycles are being use for.