Alien hunters 'should look for artificial intelligence' - BBC

stinkfisting

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11041449

Alien hunters 'should look for artificial intelligence'

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

A senior astronomer has said that the hunt for alien life should take into account alien "sentient machines".
Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has until now sought radio signals from worlds like Earth.
But Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that the time between aliens developing radio technology and artificial intelligence (AI) would be short.
Writing in Acta Astronautica, he says that the odds favour detecting such alien AI rather than "biological" life.
Many involved in Seti have long argued that nature may have solved the problem of life using different designs or chemicals, suggesting extraterrestrials would not only not look like us, but that they would not at a biological level even work like us.
However, Seti searchers have mostly still worked under the assumption - as a starting point for a search of the entire cosmos - that ETs would be "alive" in the sense that we know.


That has led to a hunt for life that is bound to follow at least some rules of biochemistry, live for a finite period of time, procreate, and above all be subject to the processes of evolution.
But Dr Shostak makes the point that while evolution can take a large amount of time to develop beings capable of communicating beyond their own planet, technology would already be advancing fast enough to eclipse the species that wrought it.
"If you look at the timescales for the development of technology, at some point you invent radio and then you go on the air and then we have a chance of finding you," he told BBC News.
"But within a few hundred years of inventing radio - at least if we're any example - you invent thinking machines; we're probably going to do that in this century.
"So you've invented your successors and only for a few hundred years are you... a 'biological' intelligence."
From a probability point of view, if such thinking machines ever evolved, we would be more likely to spot signals from them than from the "biological" life that invented them.
'Moving target' John Elliott, a Seti research veteran based at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, says that Dr Shostak is putting on a firmer footing a feeling that is not uncommon in the Seti community.
"You have to start somewhere, and there's nothing wrong with that," Dr Elliott told BBC News.

"But having now looked for signals for 50 years, Seti is going through a process of realising the way our technology is advancing is probably a good indicator of how other civilisations - if they're out there - would've progressed.
"Certainly what we're looking at out there is an evolutionary moving target."
Both Dr Shostak and Dr Elliott concede that finding and decoding any eventual message from such alien thinking machines may prove more difficult than in the "biological" case, but the idea does provide new directions to look.
Dr Shostak says that artificially intelligent alien life would be likely to migrate to places where both matter and energy - the only things he says would be of interest to the machines - would be in plentiful supply. That means the Seti hunt may need to focus its attentions near hot, young stars or even near the centres of galaxies.
"I think we could spend at least a few percent of our time... looking in the directions that are maybe not the most attractive in terms of biological intelligence but maybe where sentient machines are hanging out."

I wouldn't follow space science or astronomy news too much, but I came cross this article this morning and found it very interesting. Really gave me a sense of scale concerning how long we've been a technologically capable race. I find it really amazing that for billions of years we've been bound to this tiny rock floating in space, yet in the past 100 years or so, only a minscule fraction of our time here, we've managed to explore and expand our horizons so far.

One thing that struck me reading this (and I'm the kind of person who would just watch the odd space science programme when it's on TV, so I could be compeltely mistaken!)...why is our hunt for alien life almost completely based on such life sharing the same basic biological needs as us ie. water? Ice worlds...planets with lakes, seas, atmosphere...planets of similar distance to a sun. That's what I hear all the time.

What's to say that alien life is completely different to us? Doesn't require water, doesn't require sunlight...doesn't even exist in a form we can sense! I could be mistaken and programmes like SETI just use the existance of water on a planet as a basic starting point to narrow their search for what we percieve as planets having the highest chance of life, but is it possible that they are also not thinking outside the box enough? I know how ironic that may sound, a random internet forum user asking are NASA boffin scientists thinking outside the box enough... :P But maybe some of you can set me straight!

Rubecula

Carbon based lifeforms are supposedly in need of liquid water in order for basic metabolic processes to be carried out.

But your argument is sound. Silicon based lifeforms are theoretically possible and we may not recognise them as life forms if we came across them.

It is a big universe out there and as yet we have no evidence that we would come across a lifeform we would know is alive.

Anyway there may be other things life could survive as.

I once read a sci-fi story about a lifeform from the sun. Nobody knew it was alive and it didn't know we were a life form.

A bit far fetched but "there are more things in Heaven than are dreamt of in your philosophy Horatio".

We simply do not know. Nor have we any evidence to base a real opinion on.

rccaulfield

Astrology-surely astronomy lol! Interesting read thanks! Carl sagans idea of beings who could live in the clouds of jupiter opened my eyes to what your saying, who knows maybe reproduction is unique to earth who knows?

stinkfisting

rccaulfield wrote: »

Astrology-surely astronomy lol! Interesting read thanks! Carl sagans idea of beings who could live in the clouds of jupiter opened my eyes to what your saying, who knows maybe reproduction is unique to earth who knows?

Haha, yes well spotted, fixed!

I didn't realise maninasia posted a video link of the above report in another thread, so for anybody who didn't see that here it is:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11043922

maninasia

Cheers for the cross-link, that's very old fashioned politeness for you!
I just commented that it's interesting that scientists are being pushed/pulled into considering more radical ideas of life now. It's the normal progression of science really.
We are really making an enormous assumption thinking that life will be like life on our own planet. Some might be, a lot might not.

Life is simply self-replicating entities (molecules/cells/information), intelligent life self-replicating entities, so it could take a huge variety of different forms. Carbon based life may be one of the more common ones of course, given the ability to make a wide range of organic molecules.

But life evolves and it almost certainly jumps from biological into more purely informational life forms with the capacity to be immortal.

Kidchameleon

Its just so big out there, there's probably life very very different to our own. Then again there's probably life similar in many ways...