AS WE discover planets across our galaxy 鈥� and perhaps beyond 鈥� it is right that the search for alien entities should be stepped up. Breakthrough Listen, a $100-million project led by the Russian billionaire and venture capitalist Yuri Milner, is set to reinvigorate the hunt for ET.
The search for planets orbiting other stars usually focuses on finding and scrutinising those that resemble Earth. And while it would be fascinating to find evidence for a biosphere on such a world, we should be open-minded about advanced entities existing in very different environments.
Why? Many people now believe that machine intelligence will eventually surpass human capabilities. Even if this is centuries away on Earth, it is clear that technology advances in an instant compared with the Darwinian selection that led to us.
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We should accept that the era of organic intelligence is relatively short, and will be followed by a much longer era dominated by inorganic intelligences. Humans and our intellectual achievements will be a mere precursor to the deeper cogitations of a machine-dominated culture.
Moreover, advanced AI would not be confined to Earth-like biospheres. Indeed, they are far from optimal. Interplanetary and interstellar space is where robotic fabricators will have the grandest scope for construction, and where non-biological 鈥渂rains鈥� may have insights as incomprehensible to us as string theory is to a mouse.
Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned all culture and science on Earth. But this activity, spanning tens of millennia at most, will be a brief prelude to the more powerful intellects of the inorganic, post-human era. Evolution on other worlds orbiting stars older than the sun could have had a head start. If so, then ET is likely to have long ago transitioned beyond the organic stage. So it won鈥檛 be human-like minds that we are most likely to encounter, but machine intelligences.
鈥淏iological brains will be a brief prelude to the more powerful intellects of the inorganic, post-human era鈥�
Therefore, if extraterrestrial intelligence exists, it will most probably be non-human-like, and we ought to be looking for it in a non-Earthlike environment.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淰ery alien intelligence鈥�