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Intelligence In The Cosmos: Flesh or Machine?
A reader wrote "SPACE.com published a pretty comprehensive feature called Intelligence in the Cosmos: Flesh or Machine?
It explores the likely nature of extraterrestrial intelligence, asking whether it's artificial or biological.
Featured experts range from SETI and UCLA astronomers to NASA AI specialists and physicists Michio Kaku (string field theory), and Frank Tipler (anthropic principle). Other interesting characters appear, including a statement from Arthur C. Clarke.
Lots of fun thoughts to play with."
It's called They're Made Out of Meat by Terry Bisson.
Well, I suppose it's up to the reader to decide whether it's a utopia or not. Iain describes it as a utopia, so I'm going by his view :)
;-) He uses Iain M. Banks for the scifi stuff presumably so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of people who liked the Wasp Factory or Song of Stone.
What he said to me, when I asked if he liked the Culture was "It's a fucking utopia. Of course I like it".
Oh yeah and it's Iain, not Ian. He publishes sci-fi under Iain and his other novels under Ian. For no particular reason apparently.
It's Iain in both cases, because he's Scots, and the Scots can't spell
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E_NOSIG
Suggested reading:
We of Earth certainly are facinating. So facinating that any other citizens of our galaxy would be dying to meet us, so we think.
After all, there is probably a shortage of overweight, bearded, red suspender wearing, Star-Trek watching, condecending, IRC users in the universe.
There are so many galactic denizens whose lives are meaningless without Captain Crunch, Jolt Cola, Babylon 5 episodes, issues of The Onion, and numerous Linux distros.
And not to mention the shortage of stinky, anti-social, monitor tanned, science fiction reading dweebs amongst the stars that causes so many hot, horny, lonely, interstellar babes to wet themselves waiting for Earth to hurry up and start star travlin'. ("Look Zappo, I have found you a husband! He hates Windows, contributes regularly to SlashDot, has the largest Flash comic book collect in Michigan and has only been on three dates in his life! What a catch!").
Please. Whether it be the UFO nuts who insist that thousands of flying saucers visit our planet every year, or the sad people who insist they have been kidnapped or studied by little gray aliens numerous times or the Star Wars/Star Trek/ET crowd who cannot wait to graduate from Star Fleet and travel to Alpha Centauri and greet the first Centaurian , give it a break.
There is nothing of interest here on Earth to any sophisticated, interstellar, advanced civilization. And we are arrogant as hell to think we are.
Out only hope lies in an advanced race stumbling upon us and converting our planet to a new housing subdivision and allowing us to stay on as housekeepers, gardeners and nail stylists.
That begs the question, what is "natural" and what is "mechanical"/"artificial". I mean, us biological organisms use chemical mechanisms. Perhaps then we want to define "artificial" as created by a "natural" life form. What then if a robot creates a novel biological life form? Is that life form natural/biological, or artificial? It obviously didn't come into existence itself, yet it is not impossible that it would naturally.
Metal robots are just the very first very crude step in "artificial" life. I imagine a much more advanced civilization wouldn't be making metal toys and calling them life. It would probably really be creating new biological lifeforms ad-hoc, to suit the circumstances, e.g., that bacteria that eats oil spills. I'd guess any artificial life that survives its creator will probably be biological.
And on another, totally different topic, I don't exactly buy that whole Tipler/transhumanist thing. We supposedly will send out self-replicating machines that will colonize every planet and then as the universe collapses on itself, supposedly some benevolent super-entity (God) will form from the chaos and allow us to relive billions of lives and scenarios before the universe ends? The first part is a little too Borg-like for me, and the last part is just fruity (and I reserve a good amount of skepticism for most theories that claim to derive the existence of some benevolent God from physics and mathematics).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
You know, this is probably somewhat offtopic, but whenever I see these stories on AI and nanotech, interesting as they are, I have to laugh.
Scientists, even if they are more rational than the average person, need to make money, some want to make a lot, and getting people's attention is a good way to do it.
Tell people they are going to be replaced by machines, that will get their attention. And perhaps some of their money will be spent on the books written about the subject.
The American public is a good target. America doesn't have much to worry about, not the majority in the suburbs, anyway (or at least nothing anyone cares to see, in reality we have plenty of problems). The Russians are no longer a threat. We have all the material goods we need. There isn't much to worry about in day to day life. So we need to come up with some sci-fi scenario to scare the masses. Realistically, at this point these theories hold no more water than UFO's abducting women and impregnating them. Interesting to read and think about, but come on, we've hardly got even the basic building blocks of nanotech, same goes for AI.
This wasn't the point of the article, but come on, we have bigger things to worry about if we're even going to live long enough to invent our
"evolutionary successors".
The biological vs mechanical/electronic question just doesn't make any sense -- it's a foregone conclusion.
The human race is undergoing a process of mechanisation right now, and it'll only accelerate as the technology allows it. In addition to the tech with which we adorn our bodies (and this is gradually integrating into us), we currently also implant a large variety of mechanical items to replace our worn out biological bits, and the trend is unstoppable: nobody wants to die because of a worn out body part, so as people live longer and as more components become available, it's quite clear where this is leading.
But this process will really take off when it comes to mental and perceptive facilities, because here we have no choice: as machine intelligence starts to rival ours and then begins to surpass it, either we integrate this capability into our own bodies or else we will no longer be the dominant intelligence on this planet. And that we cannot possibly countenance.
The future of our species is a mechanical/electronic one. Except maybe for those who want to be mere biological retro pets in the menagerie of machine intelligences.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
We already have hybrid creatures. The Democrats just nominated one.
`
Warning: It is a federal offense to impersonate The President.
Maybe they will inhabit various physical machines (depending on how much truck they want to have with the "physical" world) but they won't be limited to a single robotic or biological body. They could choose any physical manifestation they needed for a given experience. They would be platform independent.
I didn't get the movie Contact (I didn't read the book). It would not make sense for SETI to pick up plans for a transportation device for a single person. If SETI were to pick up signal from a truly advanced civilization, I would expect the message to be a self-extracting archive of some sort. The message, encoded as a Turing machine in XML, could extract itself, request a connection to it's origin signal source, and download a full-fledged ET for us to chat with.
That's a lot more efficient than trying to push atoms all over the galaxy. Well, it could happen.
Ok, obligatory link: http://www.theonion.com/onion3522/robots_are_the_f uture.html
But seriously though. I think we're at a very childish stage in AI at this point. We're dreaming up all these wonderful things: hey, we can make these metal things and put some silicon in them and make them act like us and they can colonize the universe! Whoopee! I think the distinction between biological systems and "machines" will blur. We are chemical and biological machines after all.
But most important in this big game is to keep the correct perspective. If we keep thinking in generations of 20 years, we *will* become extinct with only fragile tinny machines to replace us. I believe in order to really play the universal game we have to start thinking long term, *really* long term. We have to stop thinking about what we can accomplish this *week*, and think instead what can we accomplish this *life time*. The pyramids where created in *hundreds* of years (if not more). These weren't a bunch of guys thinking day by day. They were thinking *century by century*. And we're still not even sure how they did it. Same for huge stone cities found on the peaks of mountains, and geological clocks which could only be so accurate due to eons of observation and fine tuning. These people had common goals...these people realized that they could still be fulfilled even if they gave their lives to make tiny incremental improvements. Nowadays we are hard-pressed to be fulfilled in any three hour period. Everything is now now now. I think these guys have the right idea: http://www.longnow.org. Unless we are able to communicate with other civilizations with a round trip of decades and centuries, we'll never make it. We just have to shift our perspective of time. Our lifetimes could be as short compared to ET as flies to us. Flies don't accomplish much. I think as a species, we are acquiring a case of geological-timescale ADD.
Anyway, rant over...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I completely agree with you that the chances are absurd. Thas said let me tell you what I heard from the project director of SETI@home.
Basically, they are going on the assumption that any inteligent life that they detect will be *actively* trying to be heard. That means detectable non-natural patterns that are transmitted at regular intervals for extended periods of time. This also assumes that these intelligent beings known that at some point radio waves are the simplest(I think) means of broadcasting long range space communication. This is why the project attempts to scan as much of the sky as possible at least 3 times. This ensures 'good enough' coverage of the sky in regards to area and time (based on their assumptions). This is a very brute force method of scanning. Other SETI projects try to focus on cantidate areas and scan those actively for more minute detail.
The chances are remote and everyone has conceded that. Many of us think the probability is zero of finding _intelligent_ life. However, for some the shot in the dark chance of us finding just one source of extraterrestial intelligence in motivation enough. No one is actually planning on immediately communicating with any contacts.
Me? I run rc5.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
The prospect of sending AI machines into outer space to possibly discover an alien species (and vice-versa) seems to eliminate the thrill of discovery. I think the human curiosity doesn't really want to _know_ if intelligent life exists outside of earth; but want's to meet and interact with the theoretical species. Sending an AI probe to do this accomplishes nothing: Many people will not accept the validity of a machines discovery; just like they believe that the moon landing was a hoax. I believe the real technological goal should be sending people (that is; humans _our race_) to search for; report; interact; etc. with an extra-terrestial being.
M period. Fresh, comma
One thing I never see discussed in regards to SETI is that searching for aliens by scanning for RADIO WAVES is kind of like the indigenous people of North America searching for aliens across the Atlantic Ocean by looking for SMOKE SIGNALS.
I mean, consider the practicality of using LIGHT SPEED TRANSMISSION to communicate at interstellar distances. Round-trip-times to our NEAREST star are over EIGHT YEARS and that's an awfully long time to wait for a ping.
But we're scanning star systems much further away than that, hundreds and thousands of times further, in hopes of finding some sign of life.
Pretty absurd if you ask me. Assuming we actually got a signal, and tried to send a reply, we would then have to wait longer than the time it's been since radio communication was invented!
Doesn't it seem self-evident that any spacefaring civilization (assuming their existence) would need a better means of communication than this? Granted, we don't have the technology to do this now, but it is entirely reasonable to imagine that quantum non-locality may be exploited for informational purposes.
Peace and love, y'all
The setting is deep space, just beyond the range of Earth's best telescopes. The leader of the Fifth Explorer Force is speaking to the Commander in Chief...
They're made out of meat.
Meat?
Meat. They're made out of meat.
Just Meat?
There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat.
That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars.
They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines.
So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact.
They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.
That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat.
I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in this sector and they're made out of meat.
Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.
Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?
Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.
Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through.
No brain?
Oh, there is a brain alright. It's just that the brain is made out of meat also.
So... what does the thinking?
You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat.
Thinking meat??? You're asking me to believe in thinking meat???
Yes, thinking meat ! Conscious meat ! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal ! Are you getting the picture?
Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat.
Finally ! Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years.
So what does the meat have in mind?
First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual.
We're supposed to talk to meat?
That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing.
They actually do talk then. They use words, ideas, concepts?
Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat.
I thought you just told me they used radio.
They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping a small opening of their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.
Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?
Officially or unofficially?
Both.
Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we delete the records and forget the whole damn thing.
I was hoping you would say that.
It seems harsh, but there is a limit. I mean, do we really want to make contact with meat?
I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?
Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.
So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe?
That's it.
Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?
They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them.
A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream.
And we can mark this sector unoccupied.
Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?
Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again.
They always come around.
And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone. What's say we get going.
If it's mechanical that means there must be biological life.
Whooooo-oooo... the mournful whistle of the departing cluetrain echoes across the 'net... (-:
It is much more reasonable to suppose that electronic "life" arose spontaneously than biological life. For example, given a universe in which every single atom represented a useful amino acid, and havin them all recombine a billion times a second (never mind the effects of distance/separation, decay, radiation, gravity, temperature...), you still require a universe nearly three powers of magnitude older than anyone has dared postulate just to bring the odds down to even of life having ever happened once, anywhere.
Note that I said "powers", not "orders" of magnitude! Yes, we're talking factors like 10E100 here. We have whistled so far past impossible that neither the VLT nor Hubble could see it. Do you feel special yet? I do! (-:
Laid down beside odds like this, the idea of a sentient quartz formation overlying a natural nuke reactor (see Rum Jungle in Australia's Northern Territory for an example of one of those) seems positively inevitable.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If it's mechanical that means there must be biological life. Even if a piece of steel grew a brain, it would become biological, would it not? If its a sentient computer, like AI or something, then what the hell made it? If humans, then its not extraterrestrial.
You're missing the point. Just because we meet mechanical life doesn't mean there is some biological life back home using/creating them. They may have self-evolved from a biological form to a mechanical form, and their biological form may be extinct because it was useless in comparison.
Though I think it's just as likely that they would use technology in ways that their form wouldn't really classify as mechanical, nor as biological as we would think of it.
I think the general suggestion is that if we were to meet another form of life, by then they'd have enough technology that they'd be creating a "body" to fit their task, instead of just accepting what they started off with as what they're supposed to have. Being able to do that myself is one reason I'm hoping nanotech shows up here soon...
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Iain and Ian are totally different names, with different roots (though I've forgotten what these are). Ian is Anglo-Saxon, Iain is Gaelic.
I believe Iain Banks uses Iain M Banks for the SF novels for two reasons: his publisher wanted him to use a different name for the SF so as not to spoil his reputation as a serious author, and his family was offended by the fact he missed the M out when he was first published.
Certainly no intelligent species would want to replace itself with machines,
It depends on what you mean by "replace" here. If you mean be wiped out/be made extinct by their own creation, then quite likely no, because it contradicts the inherent survival instinct that it seems a life form would need to be successful. Though if you eliminate that, it still might make sense in the long run.
If you mean make themselves into machines, talking about "uploading" and all that, then it's a very smart thing to do - of course, we're assuming that the machines they would become would be less fragile then their bodies.
But then again, by the time a species gets to a point where they can inhabit mechanical bodies, it seems like they'd be able to manipulate the biological ones just about as well (because when you look at it at the lowest level, they're also just machines).
Biological fundamentalism isn't the best way to look at it. Think of the body as a vehicle for the consciousness, and decide what you'd want to do that way.
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
(Oh dearie me, will anyone see me way down here? :)
I'm quite skeptical about the existence of ET life. (I also have issues with naturalistic evolution, but that's another issue). For the sake of argument, I'll concede both for now.
Evolution is kinda like an unguided maximum-descent optimizer. A system exists. It is perturbed randomly. If the change improves the merit function, it stays, otherwise it is tossed. Wash, rinse, repeat for 5 billion years.
This kind of optimization finds local minima (best solution compared to "nearby" options) but can't guarantee global minima (absolute best result). Sharks illustrate this. The great white shark is unchanged from 100 million years ago. Why? Its construction is a "local minima." No random mutation imparts sufficient benefit to get it onto a new optimization track. The shark is stuck, as perfect as it can be without a huge mutation or catastrophic change in its environment (which would as likely destroy it, as move it further along).
Life may never become intelligent. It may get stuck in one of the great many non-sentient local minima.
Dinosaurs also show this. They ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years, but never progressed past dumber-than-a-box-of-rocks. It took a catastrophe for mammals to get a chance to succeed the reptiles, and then develop intelligence. And so far, there's only been one type of intelligent mammal; slim pickin's from the great bio-diversity here. It seems to have beat the odds in not settling into a non-sentient adaptation.
What about communication? We can't even communicate with ants. They share our planet, our history, our fundamental biology. What if someplace developed intelligent jellyfish. Could we talk with it? What hope is there we can do it with some other entity that may be radically different?
Just some random thoughts. I may be totally off base.
ShoutingMan.com
True, there are an infinite number of paths evolution can take that don't involve intellegence. But there are also an infinite number of paths that evolve toward intellegence.
For example, lions could have become more and more intellegent as their prey did and become intellegent communicating (if not building) animals. If you disagree with lions, perhaps dinosaurs, who had more than enough impetus to evolve intellegence could have, and so forth. Heck, it's possible (though unlikely) we'll find a creature in space that isn't intellegent, but emits radio signals for another reason than communication!
Still, as long as there's a possibility of something or someplace useful out there, we should think and explore. Especially in light of the new meteorite and extrasolar planet evidence.
-Ben
...or else we will no longer be the dominant intelligence on this planet. And that we cannot possibly countenance.
Why not? It depends on whether you consider the goals of the human race to be self-advancement or individual happiness. Iain M Banks explores this quite well in his Culture novels; if you live in a utopia, why try to emulate machines that can think better than you can?
The future of our species is a mechanical/electronic one. Except maybe for those who want to be mere biological retro pets in the menagerie of machine intelligences.
I imagine a future where, rather than enhancing our minds (wouldn't that make us machines anyway? human vs machine intelligence, hmm), we would simply be able to integrate our minds with machine intelligence. You don't have enough computing power to come up with the optimum coding solution to a problem? Simply access the computer with your mind and initialise a process with defined parameters to solve it. The distinction would be blurred.
I'm sorry, I appear to be drunk.
Certainly no intelligent species would want to replace itself with machines,...
Hans Moravec of CMU makes an interesting argument as to why an intelligent species would want to do just that, replace bioware and wetware with hardware and software.
See his books Mind Children and Robot.
The main thrust of his argument seems to be that current bodies are way too fragile and wear out much to fast. A robot body would be much more robust and upgradable as well. And the ability to do mind backups could be quite useful.
Moravec argues that as a robot he would be effectively immortal.
The main trade off being no sex.
Would you trade sex for immortallity? Well, maybe not today, but in fifty years when your body starts to wear out maybe you'll change your mind (literally).
Of course, in fifty years we may be able to do bioware upgrades.
The point is that an intelligent species, or a significant portion there of, may decide that becoming machines is the way to go.
Steve M
Articles like this one make me think God is an inferior intelligence that created us as his own attempt at "artificial intelligence", and that one day, we'll do like our creator and create an artificial intelligence that's more intelligent than it's creator.
This would also explain why metaphysics are unbelievable to us. "God" or "the gods" created us with limited perception (only 5 senses and 3 dimensions) because their priority was making something smarter than them. In the same way, when we develop artificial intelligence, we don't give them perception of the 3 dimensions we know and of all of the 5 senses, we give them only what they need to be intelligent. So it's possible that once we develop an intelligence that's superior to us, it may not be able to understand our 3 dimensions and may think that our world is totally unbelivable when we'll tell them about our world. Just like humans think the god's worlds are unbelievable
Personally, I found the AI aspect of the article the most interesting. I am a fan of Douglas Hofstadter. His books Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies and Le Ton Beau de Marot are incredibly beautiful and insightful. I strongly recommend them to anyone who is interested in AI, philosophy of knowledge, psychology etc. etc.
Now, in an attempt to stay on-topic, I will come back to the article. Hofstadter's basic message seems to be that intelligence is a matter of degree more than anything else. Things such as medium (biological, mechanical, electrical etc.) are irrelevant to the basic question. If he is right, then I can see intelligent beings being much more likely.
As a strongly religious person, I believe that there is some "soul" which imparts to us an aspect that makes us (the human species) unique on the planet (please moderators - that's just an opinion :). But the teachings of my faith seem to be quite clear that every planet has its creatures (not necessarily intelligent) (Unfortunately I don't have a good reference to this specific aspect of my faith).
But in another way, I have to admit that I feel very threatened by the possibility of other intelligence. As an individual I like the fact that I am a member of a species which has done absolutely incredible things. Humanity has created intended beauty in a way that so far seems completely unique in the world. I believe strongly that we can overcome our multitude of problems, and when we do, we will do more that is completely unimaginable at this time. If AI or ET's were to usurp that position of beauty-creators, it would be very very damaging to humanities self-concept. That said, I am fascinated by AI, and I would love to do work in the field (after I make my startup millions :).
As a final comment in this decidedly rambling post: get SETI@home !
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Read it. Prepare for a little bit of going too far out... but also prepare for a *really* well thought out what-if on evolution into machine and virtual (software only) sapience. "I'm just an electronic ghost of a long dead man." ...
Also in the same vein, Charles Sheffield's earlier "Tomorrow and Tomorrow". I've seen similar themes in a half dozen other books, including Asimov's Empire novels (peripherally... in his world, most humans chose to remain 99% flesh) way back when.
It's a common theme in SF for a reason. It's a very plausible outcome.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
I would say rather that in the future people might use genetics to modify the human body in order to make it more long-lived, quicker-thinking etc. etc.
There's a reason that genetic engineering of future generations isn't going to be the biggest part of human enhancement. Selfishness. As in people would rather give themselves the longer lifespan, the higher intelligence, then just give it to future generations. I will admit, I have the same feeling. Sure, it would be nice to change the DNA so children born would live for 200 years easily. But I'd rather they work on ways to do it to people alive today - because that can also be applied to the people born in the future.
I want to see what happens in the future so badly... I don't want to die, because I'd miss it. That's one of the biggest reasons I want to keep living longer, and why I hope they put the effort into technologies that can be applied to those of us alive today.
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Soon we'll evolve a machine intelligence (if we haven't already) and shortly thereafter humanity will disappear. We won't be killed off or anything, we'll just no longer be relevant. Once the planet is comprised of one gigantic machine intelligence, contacting the other extraterrestrial life that's already been through this phase should be pretty straight forward. I'm sure they don't want to play with a bunch of meat monkeys.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Simply access the computer with your mind and initialise a process with defined parameters to solve it.
Perhaps that would work in the initial stages, but it seems to me that if you keep your body unenhanced then pretty soon it'll the weak link in the chain and it'll be holding back the mechanical/electronic components of the overall system. At that point comes the choice: stay retro and unavoidably retarded, or continue the process of gradual drift away from protoplasmic dependency.
Re Ian M Banks, I have all his novels including the Culture series, and I think they're great. However, why do you call that a utopia? In many ways, Mankind there is a pet of the machines, well looked after but largely ignored.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Search for Other Terrestrial Intelligence?
If we do see an alien intelligence, or it sees us, I'm not so sure that we (or they) would easily determine that intelligence exists.
For example, it seems that apes have a rudimentary (or better) intelligence, and dolphins even more so. It also seems they have their own rudimentary languages. We may have taught Washoe and Koko (anyone know any talking dolphins?) to sign, but we haven't learned their language (correct me if I'm wrong), at least not well enough to lay to rest any doubts of their intelligence.
Why? Perhaps we just are too arrogant to spend the effort necessary to think at their level. Perhaps we're not so smart ourselves. Perhaps it's just damn nigh impossible. Perhaps there is some unknown trait they don't possess that makes their intelligence inherently inadequate (so far the differences all seem to be a matter of degree). Perhaps the sensory experiences are just too different to cross the gap.
Virtually any human group can figure out how to communicate with virtually any other human group, and usually fairly quickly, but here we don't really communicate with any of several species that appear capable. I wonder if we can ever figure out how to speak dolphin -- an alien that finds us might wonder the same.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
It seems that if the speed of light *is* an absolute limit, that the contact between galactic species would have to be done by 'machines' first (if not wholly) - whether by a completely artificial intelligence or a human consciousness 'downloaded' onto silicon for the extraterrestrial trip.
Unless we're able to achieve near-relativistic speeds in future space exploration, there's almost no way for biological organisms to make the trip to anything but the closest star systems (Alpha Centauri, etc.) within a decent time period. However, if you use a mechanism, it's possible to send it off somewhere (at a much higher speed than a biological construct could survive) and have it still fully functional whenever and wherever it arrives.
I can't find it now, but I read a few months ago about a strategy for 'human' colonization of the galaxy - assuming that the speed of light is unbreakable and that human consciousness could be able to be 'digitized' and sent as part of a machine. We start here on Terra, and send probes to our nearest neighbors... the probes arrive and explore, then start on building the capability to reproduce and send their _own_ probes out further within a hundred years or so of their arrival... so on and so forth. The calculation worked out that by using this method "we" would explore/colonize the entire galaxy within a million years. (With the poor biological 'Human Classic' organisms to follow on much later, perhaps in cryo-sleep ships or such.)
In any case, it seems to make sense to send the exploration/construction probes/mechanisms first to establish the beginnings of infrastructure, so the biological colonizers (us) already have a basic life support and technological system set up when they arrive at their New World.
Gregory Benford speculated alond these lines years and years ago in his Galactic Center series of books. Piers Anthony wrote about the only possible means of multi-lightyear communication in his book Macroscope. Isacc Asimov (post humously thanks to Brin, Benford and Bear) shows how AI prepared the galaxy for human colonization.
In the 1st example it's flesh struggling against an obviously superior machine intelligence. Next comes flesh using machines to communicate with other flesh hundreds, thousands and even millions of years distant. The only concivable way possible until we break the light speed barrier. And last comes flesh inadvertantly using machine to destroy every other form of intelligent life in the galaxy for the further good itself.
THIS ISN'T NEWS! Why does it take someone from NASA or SETI to start serious discussion along these topics when the ideas have been around for years and years and years!!!
Pick up a book you bunch of slack jawed yokels. Science fiction ISN'T FUCKING FANTASY.
-Sandman
Now, isn't that interesting? Kind of tells us why all those stories of the Aliens 'wiping us out' are probably wrong:-).
And BTW, I care about this. The concept of other life in the universe, in whatever form it takes, is intriguing to me. If you don't agree, why did you read the story?
Bite my yammer.
I'm probably way too late for anybody to be reading this, but I feel that I need to point out this simple little fact:
Flesh IS a machine
To put it in techno-hype terms, "flesh" is self-organizing carbon based nanotechnology that uses starlight, thermal plumes, or other "flesh" as it's enery source, and water in its liquid form as it's chief organizational transport mechanism.
Even our most sophisticated machinery is at a bare minimum - four orders of magnitude - less complicated than "flesh" (or "wood", or "algae"). Despite the fantasy predictions of popular science-fiction authors, such structures are probably at least several centuries away. And in fact, we may never develop a technology that is as robust over the long haul as life has been this last 4.5 Billion years.
I think that if any aliens were aware of our existence, they would stay well clear of us until they recognised a world government in operation. This is the sign of a civilisation mature enough to contact. When we can do that right, I think we can expect the visits to begin. Think of the shit-fight that would happen at the moment if an alien landed in Austrlia (being a better place and all...) and said to me "Take me to your leader" and I took him to John Howard. All the Aussie labor supporters would start bitching that the liberals are selling the underclass to the aliens. The Americans would be bitching because obviously an American should represent the world (them having more people and bigger weapons and all...). The communist world would bitch that it's a capitalist conspiracy to..... you get the point (and sorry to anyone I offended - hey - take it easy). No-one's coming until we can all agree to go forward together.
Let me say that this is indicitive of the entire problem that the space programs of the world face. Why go into space in the first place?
To:
Well, if there is any credence the first item then our economic system will naturally find it and exploit it. The type of mission will determine the most economic.
If all we're interested in is number two then go ahead and send all the unmanned probes you feel like. That however does not provide communication with whatever intelligence you may find. You just find out they exist and maybe some pictures of them on vacation. Once you decide you want to talk to them then it isn't space travel at all. It may the transport medium, but it has nothing with space travel.
Now number three is the KEY point here! It's different and has a completely different purpose from number two! Human beings like to travel to different places. Just because television allowed people to view far-off lands didn't change the fact that people still want to go to those far off lands. It's more than idle entertainment. It's a basic driving force in our race. The exploration instinct can be very powerful.
The exploration instinct that makes us travel to far-off places is the same one that makes us do research. Research may provide benefits to humanity in some cases. The fact is that humans do research because we WANT to. And there is nothing wrong with that. And in the same way, the reason that humans want to travel to the stars themselves is because they WANT to. It's exactly the same thing.
Have we become so selfish that we only do things when they provide some tangible benefit. What ever happened to the mountain climbers creed?
"I climb it because it is there."
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
The paradox also applies in an analogous way to time travel - if time travel is possible, where are "they"?
I always figured there was no time travel because a universe with time travel is unstable--the past keeps changing as future events go backwards in time. And that instability persists until one time traveler goes back and *poof*! undoes whatever event that caused the invention of time travel in the first place.
I seem to recall reading a science fiction short story that used this, but it was so long ago I don't really recall.
There is a chance of course that we will only encounter the machine and never its creators, although that is unlikely. For example, by the time our probes have become so distant from us that they are found and cannot be traced down to the source, we should have better means of transportation and communication. Unless we're really not that intelligent at all, or have been extinct for a long time.
Has it occurred to anyone that maybe we are being quaranteened so that dumb ideas like car insurance, lawyers, taxes, god, and Microsoft Bob don't get out?
I mean think about it: You pull into orbit over this rock and you see a bunch of hairless apes stuck in traffic, or shooting at each other, or working, or downloading pictures of other hairless apes having the kind of fabulous sex you wish your girlfriend and her sister would give you!
We hairless apes are the only species on the planet stupid enough to have contorted all of the fun stuff into crimes and left debt peonage slavery as the rule instead of making IT an actionable crime!
If the poles are correct half of Americans believe in Angels and most of the other half think that the X-Files is a documentary series. Just for grins you try to talk to us. But not being human you don't care what happened yesterday on the Young and Restless, or what the score was, or what Jesus said. And then you stumble across a country music station...
So you give up on the apes and you zoom in a little closer to the ants. The ants don't have religion but they do have warfare, slavery, sanitation, agriculture, animal husbandry, and central heating and air conditioning {Discovery channel rules}. Scaled to size they have the most advanced physical infrastructure on the planet. They grow specific flowers just so they can get high off of the smell. They hunt in an organized military fashion and take extreme measures NOT to over hunt or over pollute their territory. They DO strictly control there population growth. These guys are light years ahead of the apes but they aren't very conversational and they are obsessed with the crumbs under the dashboard of your Sport Model {slick name given to the recovered Roswell craft}.
So you look to the water. The dolphins are the smartest. They have devoted their entire existence to living it up. They average up to 36 sex acts per day with as many different partners and spend the rest of the time doing back flips and killing other fish for sport. So you open a dialog with them and learn that they are perfectly happy swimming around on earth and they don't need a lift to another planet's ocean.
So you move on...
I'm quite sure any race of alien life more intelligent than us would see us coming a few light years away and hide like hell.
They probably have a special moon camoflague store where they all buy stick-on craters, and moon dust to throw around
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PROUD to be GEEK
When we create a technology advanced enough to fit the definition of a life form, it will be the first time that life on our planet evolved by our own design, rather than by chance or by external design. This life form will be more flexible in terms of it's environmental requirements, and will eventually be able to be modified to be self-sustaining even in the vacuum of space. This species that we create will be able to explore space far more efficiently than we can, and if it is conscious, who's to say that it can't enjoy it's existence there. We should be fortunate to be the creators or "parents" of this species, and although we can't experience it's degree of freedom in space exploration, we can benefit by knowing that a piece of us lives on, as our ecosystem expands outside our planet, ensuring that our present existence still has an impact on the universe even billions of years from now.
It's somewhat frightening to think that a species could be more evolved than us, but it is inevitable if we don't nuke ourselves first, and it should be exciting that we will be the creators of the next level of our evolution instead of leaving it to chance.
For those sentient technological beings which decended from our creation, who are now looking back on this Slashdot discussion in some ancient archive, I extend my greetings!
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
A. Bad idea: humanity has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to use new wepons on other humans cf. Hiroshima.
B. Bad idea: daughter civilizations are real likey to come back and haunt you. There may be resouce contention and so war at some point in the future. Again humans will kill humans for trivial things, like blankets, or bits of shiny rock
C. I am ok with this so long as passive methods only are used. Infact I think that a major "turn off the radars and radios" effort should be undertaken, possibly in conjunction with some extensive cable laying.
The little child wanders through the woods, calling for friends, and crying at the sheer enormity of the world... all the while the wolves come ever closer.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
If this logic applies to extra-terrestials, it applies to terrestials. We need to get over our protoplasm fixation, scrap manned space travel, and get serious about going to the stars
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
The phrase "Life as we know it" poses several difficulties when pondering contact with alien species. To this point in history, "Life" and "Life as we know it" have identical meaning. They mean anything organic. Few people will agree that computers are alive, and even less that clouds are alive.
Dictionary.com defines life as "The property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter, manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organism." This definition loosely defines anything more complex than a thunderstorm as "alive".
Today's scientists have equal chances of correctly speculating the most common form of life in the universe as I do of beating Mr. woods at golf.
Contacting a machine could prove more exciting than biological life. Think about it, which is more exciting to you: the average life form or the average machine?
A machine will engender insight into the intellect and wits of the creators (which is what we really care about when it comes to extraterrestrial life anyway).
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Okay, after I read the article, this made more sense. I went into it thinking that the author was trying to say that extraterrestrial life would likely be machine, but in reality it appears that he's saying that we're likely to encounter robotic probes or the like before we meet an actual ET. This just makes sense...
On the other hand, I wouldn't imagine that any intelligent race would replace themselves with machines, so the thought that any ETs we might meet would be machines seems rather far fetched.
You're right. In the book, the blueprints were designed for a group of 6 to 8 people, which requires not much more space than a single person transport but is obviously more useful.
Of course, the entire crew selection was shiny happy SETI-loving scientists who were roundly disbelieved by the rest of the world when they told their tales. Also, they were allowed to pack their own supplies for the mission, and none of them thought to bring durable recording equipment (such as instant cameras, CD-R, or sterile containers). Easily the lowest point of the novel for me. It was one of very few instances where I liked the movie adaptation more than the original.
Personally, I worry that C is an absolute speed limit, and humanity ends up stuck in this solar system until we die when the Sun burns out. Billions of years of work all erased -- that would suck.
This is how you get a 5. The only 5.
Umkay. Log Out, come back in a year.
We can only detect this sort of 'halo' when it's radiation reaches us. Our halo would only be visible to those observing from within 50 light years away. The original poster's point holds.
:)
The light by which we know the stars are there left those stars tens, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years ago. Many of those stars may not even be there now. The point of the propagation delay is still there, wether we're looking for a directed beam transmission (which implies that they know we're here, and they're aiming at us) or an onmi-directional 'halo'.
What we call it, and how we imagine it, makes little difference. In fact, the fact that it's a 'halo' makes no difference at all. It's a signal which will be coming from a point-source. It will be directional to us, even though it's expanding in all directions from it's transmitter.
We're not looking for a growing beach-ball. We're looking for a wave passing us by. If I speak to you in a large room, does it matter that my voice has also travelled just as far in the opposite direction? All that matters is that it got from me to you - and you can almost immediately home in on the direction from whence it came.
We are unfortunatelly bound by our technology at this time. We're stuck looking for (sub)luminar velocity signals, and the propagation delays suck.
Maybe that's the price of admission into the "Galactic Cafe"?? Once we learn to hear them, they'll start talking to us.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Consider an alien species whose being is based on something fairly ethereal, say, electro-magnetic radiation, observing us, and our digital brethren. To the aliens, the two organisms (carbon and silicon) would be more similar to each other than to the aliens.
In addition, a "mechanical" species, after a few million years of evolution, may be indistinguishable to us from a "biological" one, in terms of the complexity of its systems.
First of all, mechanical life doesn't automatically assume that there remains biological intelligence, not if the mechanical life destroyed/replaced/evolved from biological critters.
Something we should be aware of is the danger of something along the lines of Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers. These are fictional robots that scour the universe for life and remove it whenever they can. If such devices (or belligerant aliens) _do_ exist, we should be spending effort to do the following:
A: Build a military presence in space, or at least develop the technology so it can be activated at short notice.
B: Start colonizing the hell out of the solar system and any other stars nearby. Can't send a starship brimming with humans to Barnards Star? Fine, use whatever technology is current to build as many extrasolar probes with frozen embryos, decanters, and robots programmed to keep looking for habitable planets, and send those out as fast as we can.
C: Ramp up radio detection. All current radio telescopy is done on or in full view of Earth and her millions of transmitters. We need to set up a farside radio observatory on the moon and start scanning very carefully for transmissions of intelligent origin and signs of incoming spacecraft. Anything traveling in our direction at any significant speed would be easy to see in such an environment because of the monatomic hydrogen fusing and expending itself against it while it charged in.
Right now, we're like a blind person with a bag of money standing in the middle of the street. We don't know if the neighborhood is good or bad, but we should be taking steps to find out.