Dirk Schulze-Makuch - Why Aliens Are Likely To Be AI?

Perhaps we should be searching for “other Mercurys” rather than “other Earths.”

Key Takeaways

• Fundamental biological limitations will make long-distance space travel all but impossible for organisms. AI is more suitable.
• In fact, it is just about inconceivable for any advanced civilization, particularly a spacefaring one, to exist without AI.
• Therefore, we should expect more planets in the Universe to be populated by AI than by Little Green Men.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Why aliens are likely to be.With powerful new chatbots and AI powered apps
and search engines released practically every day, concern about the rapid advance of artificial
intelligence has heated up recently to nearobsession, and with good reason. The
risk of humans losing control over AIsmarter or at the very least faster than

(00:23):
us has been recognized for quite awhile, notably in science fiction films like
The Terminator. As with all newtechnologies, AI has its pluses and minuses,
but for space exploration, meaning explorationbeyond our immediate cosmic neighborhood, it
is probably essential. In fact,an advanced space program without AI is difficult

(00:48):
to envision. Advanced civilizations will requireAI that goes not just for us,
but for anyone out there who islikely to visit us. Even though most
movies about aliens depict biological creatures arrivingon Earth, this is unlikely to happen.
Crossing interstellar space would take them avery long time, so much time

(01:11):
that it makes little sense to sendshort lived, perishable organic bodies. Let's
look at the life spans of somespecies on Earth. Humans live about eighty
years on average, which is muchlonger than most animals. Dogs have a
life span of only ten to thirteenyears, parrots about fifty years. Even

(01:32):
the African elephant lives only sixty toseventy years. Some animals, like turtles,
whales, or certain fish, reachtwo hundred years of age or more,
but these are exceptions. Life expectancyfor merely all species on our planet
is under one hundred years, andit's not like our bodies perform at peak

(01:53):
capacity for that entire span. Inthe case of humans, we should probably
discount the first twenty years or soduring which our capabilities are still developing,
and the last twenty years of agingprime time for humans is no more than
forty or sixty years, even inthe best case scenario. Now, consider

(02:15):
the realities of interstellar travel to reachother solar systems. Current thinking is that
we'll need to build light sales thatcan reach maybe ten percent of the speed
of light that gets us to AlphaCentauri in forty years or so, an
entire adult human lifespan, and that'sjust one way. Most astronauts would want

(02:37):
to return home after visiting another solarsystem, but without some kind of time
dilation or other exotic physics that wouldbe out of the question. Even if
we could reach eighty percent of lightvelocity with some advanced propulsion system, round
trips within a single adult lifetime wouldbe possible only for planets a mere twenty

(02:57):
four light years away, not accountingfor any time spent exploring the planet.
Speculative faster than light travel would helpsome, but not as much as you
might think. Any way you sliceit, travel through interstellar space would still
be extremely long, dangerous asteroids,radiation, and exceedingly boring for any biological

(03:20):
organism, even if some freezing technologycould be invented to stop aging during the
trip. The same logic applies toany intelligent aliens wanting to visit us AI
astronauts. The likely solution, then, is artificial intelligence and artificial bodies that
could better withstand the rigors of spacetravel. For that reason, we shouldn't

(03:44):
expect visiting aliens to be organic creatures. There is, of course, some
middle ground between all natural and allartificial bodies, and twenty first century technology
has already arrived at that point.In Andy Clark words, we are naturally
born cyborgs. More and more technologicallyadvanced body parts are invented every day from

(04:08):
titanium plates to pacemakers. No question, this trend will keep on going,
but our organic bodies are still fragileand limited. We may extend our natural
lifespans by several tens of percent,but eventually critical parts will break down.
With that in mind, some futuristspicture uploading our brains to computers. Ander

(04:31):
Sandberg and Nick Bostrom from the Futureof Humanity Institute outlined some of the challenges
in reaching that goal and even provideda roadmap. Another pair of futurists,
Alexei Turchin and Maxim Cherniakov, wenta step further and envisioned an immortality roadmap
using AI to digitally reconstruct people.The AI would take DNA and other information

(04:56):
from a recently deceased person and reconstructthem in a umulated world. Of course,
whether that simulation is really you asa question we probably can't answer until
we try it out. Robots notlittle green men. Given its fast growing
capabilities, the ubiquitous presence of AIin all aspects of human activity appears to

(05:18):
be unstoppable. Even so, somealien civilizations farther ahead of us on the
evolutionary curve already may have decided toput a stop to it. Accepting their
own mortality instead. But surely notall of them, and for that reason
we should expect more planets in theuniverse to be populated by AIS than by

(05:40):
the Little Green men of nineteen fiftiesscience fiction. This could lead to a
fundamental shift in our approach to searchingfor intelligent extraterrestrial life. Rather than look
for signs of biology, we mightbe on the lookout for planets more suitable
to AI. Seth Shostick of theSetty Institute is among the those who has
advocated for this strategy. Instead ofsearching for worlds exactly like our own,

(06:05):
we might identify planets that receive amuch higher amount of solar energy and are
rich in silicon and certain trace metals. Maybe it's other mercuries we really should
be looking for, not other earths.