[ExI] cool article by shostak

spike spike66 at att.net
Wed Nov 16 18:20:45 UTC 2016


 

Interesting commentary by SETI's Seth Shostak:

 

 

http://www.space.com/34713-intelligent-aliens-machines-seti-search.html

 

 


Electronic ET: Intelligent aliens are likely machines


 <http://www.space.com/> 

By Mike Wall Space.com Senior Writer

 Published November 15, 2016

 
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Any intelligent aliens that humans manage to contact probably won't look
much like you or me, or the squid-like creatures in the new film "
<http://www.space.com/34694-arrival-movie-alien-contact-philosophy.html>
Arrival."

 

If an  <http://www.space.com/search-for-life> extraterrestrial species
becomes advanced enough to send signals Earthlings can pick up, it will
likely shed its traditional biological trappings and become a form of
machine intelligence in rather short order, said veteran alien hunter Seth
Shostak.

 

To make his case, Shostak pointed to the path that humanity appears to be
on. The human species invented the radio around 1900 and the computer in
1945, and it's already manufacturing relatively cheap devices with greater
computing power than the human brain.

 

The development of true, strong
<http://www.livescience.com/55089-artificial-intelligence.html> artificial
intelligence (AI) is therefore not too far off, experts have said. The
famous futurist Ray Kurzweil, for example, has pegged 2045 as the year this
world-changing "singularity" will hit.

 

"But maybe it takes to 2100, or 2150, or 2250. It doesn't matter," Shostak
said in September during a presentation at the Dent:Space conference in San
Francisco. "The point is, any society that invents radio, so we can hear
them, within a few centuries, they've invented their successors. And I think
that's important, because the successors are machines."

AI will interface with people's bodies for a while, but eventually humans
will abandon the wetware and go fully digital, Shostak predicted. 

 "It'll be like - you build a four-cylinder engine. You put it in a horse to
get a faster horse. And pretty soon you say, 'Look, let's get rid of the
horse part and just build a Maserati,'" said Shostak, an astronomer at the
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View,
California. "So that's probably what's going to happen."

Humans' machine selves will get smarter and more capable incredibly quickly,
he added. Humanity's present intelligence is the result of 4 billion years
of Darwinian evolution, which uses random variation as its raw material and
is not directed toward any particular goal. But the evolution of machine
intelligence will be engineered and efficient, Shostak said.

"Once you invent a thinking machine, you say, 'Invent something better than
you are,' and you build that. 'Design something better than you are,' and
you build that, and so forth," he said.

This idea has serious implications for the search for
<http://www.space.com/33626-search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence.html>
intelligent alien life. Unlike Earth organisms, super-advanced
extraterrestrial machines would not require water or other chemicals to
survive, so they would not be tied to their ancestors' home worlds tightly
at all, Shostak said. And journeying tremendous distances would not be a big
deal to these machines, provided they could access enough energy and raw
materials to keep repairing themselves over the millennia, he said.

"We continue to look in the directions of star systems that we think have
habitable words, that have planets where biology could cook up and
eventually turn into something clever like you guys," he told the Dent:Space
audience. "But I don't think it's going to be that way."

Shostak said he isn't counseling his fellow SETI astronomers to stop
investigating potentially Earth-like planets such as
<http://www.space.com/33825-earthlike-planet-proxima-b-discovery-in-pictures
.html> Proxima b, a recently discovered world that lies just 4.2 light-years
away. (And simple life-forms could still inhabit such worlds even if their
most intelligent inhabitants went digital and departed long ago, Shostak
said.) But it may be a good idea to expand the search to regions of space
that would seemingly be attractive to digital life-forms, he said - for
example, places with lots of available energy, such as the centers of
galaxies. 

 

"That may be where the really clever beings are," Shostak said.  "Maybe what
we ought to do is look at places on the sky that connect two places where
there is a lot of energy," in an attempt to intercept communications between
alien machines, Shostak added.

"This is my message to you: We're looking for analogues of ourselves, but I
don't know that that's the majority of the intelligence in the universe,"
Shostak concluded. "I'm willing to bet it's not."

 

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