{"id":281974,"date":"2016-09-24T13:58:10","date_gmt":"2016-09-24T17:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/?p=281974"},"modified":"2020-11-03T14:08:24","modified_gmt":"2020-11-03T19:08:24","slug":"what-if-the-aliens-we-are-looking-for-are-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/cs\/what-if-the-aliens-we-are-looking-for-are-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"What if the aliens we are looking for are AI?"},"content":{"rendered":"
RAEL\u2019S COMMENT:<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n
As I said in my 2002 speech in Las Vegas Happiness Academy, “Why not imagine that the Elohim that I met had actually reached a higher level of science and, like some human scientists have hypothesized that we will soon do, have downloaded themselves in a computer where they enjoy eternal life altogether? Then, when they wish so, they download themselves back into biological entities who go either create life elsewhere or bring messages to Prophets, trying to guide them towards love and science.”<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n
And I add another element today:<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n
“Why not imagine as well that the most advanced beings of the universe have interconnected computer networks spread on numerous planets where they live eternally with the safety feature that, even if one of the planets is destroyed, the interplanetary network of computers allows them a kind of universal ubiquity to be eternal while being indestructible as they are non-localized. We can even imagine that, at this level, all the species of the infinite, whether they are human or not, reach a kind of universal consciousness where they become \u201cone\u201d in this infinite network. By continuously creating life on new planets, they allow an endless renewal of new beings able to reach that level in a process of conscious self-awareness of the infinite.”<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For more than a century we have been broadcasting our presence to the cosmos. This year, the faintest signals from the world\u2019s first major televised event \u2013 the Nazi-hosted 1936 Olympics \u2013 will have passed several potentially habitable planets. The first season of Game of Thrones has already reached the nearest star beyond our Solar System.<\/p>\n

So why hasn\u2019t ET called us back?<\/p>\n

There are plenty of obvious answers. Maybe there are no intelligent space aliens in our immediate cosmic vicinity. Perhaps they have never evolved beyond unthinking microbial slime or \u2013 based on our transmissions \u2013 aliens have concluded it is safer to stay away. There is, however, another explanation: ET is nothing like us.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we do find a signal, we shouldn\u2019t expect it\u2019s going to be some sort of soft squishy protoplasmic alien behind the microphone at the other end,\u201d says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for alien-hunting organisation Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti).<\/p>\n

Seti\u00a0has been actively searching for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life for more than half a century. Despite tantalising signals (such as this\u00a0recent one), it has so far drawn a blank. But Shostak believes we should consider looking to our own future to imagine what aliens will be like.<\/p>\n

\u201cPerhaps the most significant thing we\u2019re doing is to develop our own successors,\u201d says Shostak. \u201cIf we can develop artificial intelligence within a couple of hundred years of inventing radio, any aliens we are likely to hear from have very likely gone past that point.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn other words,\u201d he says, \u201cmost of the intelligence in the cosmos, I would venture, is synthetic intelligence and that may disappoint movie goers who expect little grey guys with big eyeballs, no clothes, no hair or sense of humour.\u201d<\/p>\n

The argument assumes that the creatures who built the first AIs \u2013 grey guys, hyper- intelligent pan-dimensional beings, sentient trees or whatever \u2013\u00a0are no longer around.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell they might be,\u201d Shostak concedes, \u201cbut once you develop artificial intelligence you can use that to develop the next generation of thinking thing and so on \u2013\u00a0within 50 years you not only have a machine that\u2019s far smarter than all the previous machines but certainly smarter than all humans put together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe big question,\u201d says astronomer and author of the Search for Earth\u2019s Twin,\u00a0Stuart Clark, \u201cis whether the AI goes on to become conscious and define its own goals and decide it doesn\u2019t need the biological creatures that developed it.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the self-aware death machines of the\u00a0Berserker books\u00a0to the cyborgs of Battlestar Galactica or The Terminator, science fiction certainly has a rich seam of AIs taking over and wiping out their inferior biological creators. It is not, however, necessarily the inevitable path of any technological civilisation. Artificial Intelligence \u2013 truly thinking machines with synthetic super-brains \u2013 may not even be possible.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very unclear to me that this is inevitably going to happen,\u201d says Clark. \u201cBut the key point is we are looking for something we imagine to be a bit like us and we\u2019re limiting the search as a result.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seti uses an array of radio telescope dishes in California to search for signals. The receivers are aimed at star systems where planets have been discovered by Earth or space telescopes such as Nasa\u2019s\u00a0Kepler observatory. These are planets which might have liquid oceans and life-supporting atmospheres \u2013 habitats that have made human evolution possible. But machine intelligences could live anywhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the whole problem,\u201d says Shostak. \u201cNot only could they be anywhere, it would make sense for them to go to places in the Universe where there were big sources of energy \u2013 if you\u2019re going to do a lot of thinking, a lot of energy helps so maybe that\u2019s the place to look.\u201d<\/p>\n

If this is the case, then Seti could be looking for ET in the wrong place. \u201cInstead of having their own fields of radio telescopes,\u201d says Clark, \u201cmaybe that money would be better spent equipping every observatory with piggyback equipment that looks at every signal that\u2019s been received and look for repeating patterns.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether every observatory would agree to host a Seti sensor is a matter for debate. The technology might, however, reveal some other surprising astronomical discovery. We now know that pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars. When\u00a0Jocelyn Bell\u00a0discovered the first of these oscillating signals in 1967, only half-jokingly did the University of Cambridge team label it LGM1 for Little Green Men.<\/p>\n

In the short term, Seti is likely to continue its search for life on Earth-like planets. \u201cBut,\u201d says Shostak, \u201cover the course of time if we can come up with some ideas of where you might find synthetic intelligence, I think they\u2019ll be more and more experiments aimed at doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another approach would be to broadcast messages from Earth to target regions of the cosmos. It is a controversial strategy that Stephen Hawking has warned could leave the Earth vulnerable to attack and exploitation. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn\u2019t want to meet,\u201d\u00a0he warned in 2010.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t agree,\u201d Shostak says. \u201cBut Seti has no broadcasting capability and the other thing about broadcasting is that even if you do it, it might be a very long time before you get a response \u2013 depending how close the aliens are.\u201d<\/p>\n

So are we any closer to discovering whether we are the lone intelligence \u2013 AI or not \u2013 in the Universe? \u201cI don\u2019t think you can ever say there\u2019s nothing there, you can\u2019t prove that negative,\u201d Shostak says. \u201cWhat you can say is that there\u2019s something wrong with our approach so, for me, it\u2019s very, very early days to think about giving up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clark agrees. \u201cI think Seti should generalise its search as much as possible,\u201d he says. \u201cAn answer to \u2018yes there\u2019s intelligent life in the Universe\u2019 has profound implications for us and that alone qualifies Seti to carry on.\u201d<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/article\/20160922-what-if-the-aliens-we-are-looking-for-are-ai<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RAEL\u2019S COMMENT: As I said in my 2002 speech in Las Vegas Happiness Academy, “Why not imagine that the Elohim that I met had actually reached a higher level of science and, like some human scientists have hypothesized that we will soon do, have downloaded themselves in a computer where they enjoy eternal life altogether? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":281976,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-281974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}