Is biological life common in the universeor should we look for artificial, robotic intelligence in the search for extraterrestrial life?
An increasing number of scientists suspect that if we ever make contact with extraterrestrial life, we will communicate with a computer.
This thinking revolves around an event called the singularity. This term, borrowed from mathematics, indicates a point at which our knowledge of mathematics and physics falls short and we can no longer accurately characterize what we are trying to describe. a black hole singularity is a good example of this.
Related: Could AI find alien life faster than humans, and would that tell us?
In computer science and technology, the singularity describes the moment when artificial intelligence develops so quickly that it results in a superintelligence – an artificial general intelligence, as opposed to the very specific machine learning algorithms we have today – that has enormous experiences growth in computing power. and intellectual ability. This superintelligence would grow so far ahead of us, so quickly, that we would lose the ability to understand or explain it.
Computer scientists have speculated that the singularity could come soon; most predictions seem to agree on the period between 2030 and 2045. What happens outside the singularity is anyone’s guess.
There is no guarantee that the singularity will happen; many academics remain skeptical. However, if this were the case, the time scales would be remarkable, as this is predicted to occur only 250 years after the Industrial Revolution, 130 to 140 years after World War II. Wright brothers‘ first powered flight, a century after the atom was first split and 50 years after the invention of the World Wide Web. If we are a typical civilization in the Galaxy, the singularity seems to happen early in the life of a technological species.
Now consider the age of the universe: 13.8 billion years. Assuming that life has theoretically been able to develop and evolve for the vast majority of that history, alien species could be billions of years older than ours. solar system and many billions of years older than Homo sapiens. They would have had plenty of time to get through the technological singularity, which is why so many researchers are using the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) are convinced that technological aliens will be artificial intelligences.
“This is at the forefront of thinking in some parts of the SETI community,” Eamonn Kerins, an astrophysicist and SETI researcher at the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, told Space. com. “We ourselves are very close to realizing artificial general intelligence (AGI), and there is an expectation that once you get to that point, it can then accelerate at a very rapid pace and quickly surpass ourselves in intelligence.”
In search of super intelligences
Suppose alien life was a form of superintelligence that had gone far beyond the singularity. What would it mean for SETI?
SETI focuses on looking for radio signals, the same kind that humans emit. There are still very good reasons to search the radio spectrum: radio waves can penetrate the radio spectrum galaxythey are a relatively simple means of signaling, and aliens would suspect that our astronomers were already studying the universe with radio waves and would therefore be more likely to detect a radio signal.
However, a superintelligence billions of years older than us could have long since surpassed radio and communications systems might not even care enough to try to make contact with primitive life forms Soil.
In addition to looking for signals, recent SETI efforts have also addressed the broader concept of technosignatures – evidence for alien technology or engineering – possibly on a massive scale so that it is noticeable to us. This could be a way to detect artificial superintelligence, as the search for technosignatures is agnostic as to why the aliens do what they do. Besides the singularity, such reasons can be difficult for us to discern.
“Some of this [discussion about superintelligences] from a search perspective, it almost doesn’t matter, as long as you build a good enough anomaly detector,” says Steve Croft, a radio astronomer who works on the Breakthrough Listen project for the University of California’s Berkeley SETI Research Center .Berkeley, said in an interview with Space.com: “We may find out after the fact what they are up to – we may never understand what they are up to.”
All that matters is that we may be able to detect the activities of these intelligent life forms even if we don’t fully understand what they are doing. However, in some cases we may be able to understand it.
A superintelligence would require a lot of energy to facilitate the CPU’s calculations. In 1964, Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev proposed what would become known as the Kardashev scalein which more and more technologically advanced civilizations utilize the total energy of first a planet (Level I), then a star (Level II) and then a whole universe (Level III).
In principle, the last two levels would be achievable via Dyson swarms of solar energy collectors around a civilization’s home star, and then around every star and black hole in their galaxy. According to the Kardashev scale, a Type II civilization could utilize 4 x 10^26 watts; a Type III civilization could reach 4 x 10^37 watts.
A superintelligence could even choose to live in a Dyson swarm – for example in a ‘Matrioshka brain’, a series of nested shells of Dyson swarms in which the inner shell absorbs sunlight, uses the energy for processing and then the waste heat -gives off energy. until the next grenade is picked up, and so on.
What do super intelligences do in their spare time?
What would a superintelligence do with all that energy? “Maybe they just smash neutron stars together for fun, and that’s the… fast radio burstsCroft said half-jokingly. “If you have ridiculous amounts of energy, if you’ve reached a Kardashev Type II or III level, what could you do with your free time? One thing that we’ve seen in human societies over the last millennia is art, and it drives a lot of our efforts, creating beautiful things, and I wonder if a superintelligence could create art and if that’s something that we would can discover.
Spotting alien art may not be that easy; art is cultural, so we wouldn’t know what is beautiful for them. However, the size of the potential art projects we were able to detect could make life easier. For example, a superintelligence could push stars around. One theoretical way to do this is via a Shkadov thruster, which is essentially a giant concave mirror that looks at a star at a distance where the force of gravity that the star’s mirror feels is offset by gravity. star wind trying to push the mirror out. The mirror would reflect the stellar wind and light from the star itself back to the star. And because photons and particles can have momentum, the reflected radiation would push the star in the opposite direction. In theory, it could move the star many times over millions of years light years.
If an alien superintelligence has an artistic bent, it might want to compose geometric shapes from stars, such as a Klemperer rosette. This is a gravitationally stable system of six objects – in this case stars – perhaps alternating in mass between large and small, all moving around a common point on the same orbit. Such a galaxy could not have formed naturally, and if we found one it would be evidence of a powerful extraterrestrial intelligence. An alternative concept would be to place all planets in a system in the same orbit around their star; a recent one study showed how it might be possible to put 24 planets in the same orbit without them colliding.
However, these are all brute-force projects. Superintelligence may focus more on the loftier goal of just thinking, or running virtual reality programs. Processing information requires a lot of energy, and the more a superintelligence thinks, the more energy it will require. And the less ambient heat there is, the more efficient the calculations are.
The interior of the Milky Way Galaxy is a warm place, so superintelligences can move to the outskirts of the galaxy, where ambient temperatures drop, allowing for more efficient information processing. Some researchers have even done that suggested that superintelligences could go into hibernation for tens of billions of years while the universe around them cools to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, which would allow for more efficient calculations. (Currently, the universe – or, more specifically, the cosmic microwave backgroundthe leftover radiation from the Big bang – is 2.73 Kelvin above absolute zero.).
What would they think and calculate? That’s not a question we can answer, but we don’t have to. All we have to do is find evidence for their presence – whether it’s a Dyson shower, a Shkadov thruster, a Klemperer rosette or activity at the edge of the Milky Way. And perhaps, if our own AIs also make it to the singularity, that could give us some insight into what the great intelligences of the universe spend their time on.
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