Any kind of aliens with which people can come into contact will most likely not be like you or me or seven-legged creatures from the recently shown movie "Arrival". If the extraterrestrial species becomes sufficiently developed to send signals that humans can catch, it is more likely that it will already throw off its biological vestment and become a form of machine intelligence. So says Seth Shostak, the famous "hunter of aliens."
In confirmation of his words, Shostak points to the path of humanity. People invented radio in the 1900s and computer in 1945, and today they produce relatively cheap devices, whose computing power exceeds the capabilities of the brain. Not far off and the emergence of this, a strong artificial intelligence, experts say. Well-known futurologist Ray Kurzweil, for example, is banking on the year 2045.
“Perhaps it will be 2100, or 2150, or 2250. It doesn't matter, ”Shostak said in September at the presentation of the Dent: Space conference in San Francisco. “The fact is that we can hear any society that invents radio for several centuries, and then it invents something else. And this is important because the cars go further. ”
Some time AI will communicate with the body of people, but ultimately people will get rid of their bags of meat and become completely digital, said Shostak.
“Imagine that you are creating a four-cylinder engine. You install it in a horse and get a horse quickly. But pretty soon you come to the idea: let's get rid of a part of the horse and just do the “Maserati,” Shostak says. "Most likely, it will be so."
People-machines will become smarter and more capable, faster and faster, he adds. At present, the intelligence of mankind is the result of four billion years of Darwinian evolution, which uses random variations as raw materials and does not set any specific goal. But the evolution of machine intelligence will be planned and effective, Shostak says.
“As soon as you invent a thinking machine, you say: invent something better than yourself, and get it. Then say to this new creation: do something better than yourself and so on. ”
This thought has serious consequences in the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. Unlike terrestrial organisms, overdeveloped extraterrestrial machines may not require water or other chemicals to survive, so they will not be too closely tied to their ancestral home. And traveling for gigantic distances will not be a problem for them, provided that they have access to a sufficient amount of raw materials and energy to maintain the repair for thousands of years.
“We continue to look in the directions of stellar systems, which can be inhabited worlds, in our opinion, in which biology can gather in smart guys like us. But I don’t think it will be that way. ”
Shostak says he is not suggesting to his SETI colleagues to stop exploring potentially habitable Earth-like planets like the recently discovered Proxima b, which is only 4.2 light years away. And simple life forms could well inhabit such worlds, even if their main digital inhabitants left them long ago. But perhaps it makes sense to expand the search for regions of space that may be more attractive for digital life forms - somewhere where energy is abundant, in the centers of galaxies.
“Perhaps this is where intelligent creatures live,” says the scientist. “Perhaps we should look for places in the sky that connect two places with excess energy and try to find traces of communications between them. We are looking for people like ourselves, but most of the intelligence in the Universe is hardly like us. I would argue that this is not the case. ”
The article is based on materials .
Comments
Post a Comment