In a WORLD.MINDS discussion moderated by the brilliant Rolf Dobelli, I asked Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis, “In your latest Nature paper you referred to artificial intelligence (AI) bots as servers of humans. This presumes the superiority of humans and treats AI systems as slaves to human ambitions. However, future AI systems might become intellectually superior to humans. In that uncharted territory, the human-machine relations would require mutual respect and equal societal status.” Nicholas noted that these circumstances will not arise any time soon. However, I worry that they might be realized within this century.
Humans tend to believe in their cosmic privileges as a default. The first blow to this notion came from the data that Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei studied half a millennium ago, indicating that we are not at the physical center of the cosmos. But even today, the mainstream of the astronomy community argues that the possible existence of intelligence beyond Earth is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Applying the Copernican Principle to the quarter trillion stars in the Milky-Way galaxy, the trillions of galaxies in the observable universe and the many more galaxies outside our cosmic horizon, implies that considering us as the lone intelligence constitutes a far more extraordinary claim than the alternative.
A rudimentary reading of the daily news from around the world suggests that there is a lot of room for improving human intelligence. Here we are near the threshold of AI exceeding human intelligence, and we tend to focus on scenarios where future AI bots serve humans. Already now, there exists an explosive growth in the number of generative AI tools for writing scholarly papers. This raises concerns about plagiarism and fake scientific results. In the near future, writers may be able to compose full papers by selecting options from a dropdown menu.
Of course, one way to gauge our long-term future is to study what happened to extraterrestrial civilizations that predated us. The star formation history of the Milky-Way galaxy shows a peak ten billion years ago, whereas the Sun formed 4.6 billion years ago. This means that the history of most Sun-like stars preceded the Solar system by billions of years. This lead time is longer than the time it takes our own rockets to traverse the Milky-Way, based on a recent paper that I wrote with my undergraduate student, Shokhruz Kakharov.
The nature of the first interaction between sentient earthlings and extraterrestrials (ETs) is uncertain, as it depends on the timing of the encounter at our terrestrial end. If it happens close to the present time, it will definitely involve humans. However, in the distant future the encounter could involve our AI descendants. In general, there are four possibilities: the encounter could involve humans meeting ET-machines or humans meeting biological-ETs or terrestrial-AI meeting biological-ETs or terrestrial-AI meeting ET-machines. Each of these four encounters will have different characteristics.
Whether the first ET visitors would be biological or technological depends on the technological level of their senders. As of now, our own AI systems are heavy and inefficient compared to biological neural networks, as they require gigawatts of power and orders of magnitude more mass compared to the 12-watts consumed by the kilogram-mass human brain. However, the lifespan and information processing capacity of terrestrial biology might be amplified by our future technologies. The merger of bio-tech and AI could potentially lead to the design of astronauts, optimized for the long journey and harsh physical conditions of interstellar travel.
Over the past year, David Grusch and Lue Elizondo testified that the U.S. government has possession of biologics in crash sites of vehicles manufactured by non-human intelligence. The validity of their testimonies can only be tested through material evidence. It is straightforward to check through isotope analysis whether the age of materials in any wreckage is different from the 4.6 billion years of Solar system materials. If their report is validated by scientific evidence, it would suggest a first encounter that is biological on both sides. This would be a complete surprise, given that it would take our own rockets tens of thousands of years to leave the Oort cloud at the outskirts of the Solar system, a timescale longer than all of recorded human history so far.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
(Image credit: Chris Michel, 2023)
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
