Are we the smartest kids in our cosmic block? Any breaking news on this matter will impact our self-esteem and ego. But will it also be in conflict with the religious belief that humans receive the undivided attention of God?
In a recent online meeting with Professor Brannon Wheeler from the U.S. Naval Academy, I argued that there is no such conflict. Our coexistence with intelligent extraterrestrials resembles multiple children in a family. The experience of discovering extraterrestrials would be similar to finding unfamiliar members of our family. Whether they are our siblings can be deciphered by analyzing their bodies. But suggesting that God can handle only intelligent beings on Earth is as egocentric and diminishing as the argument that our parents are incapable of raising more than one child.
When searching for lost siblings on Earth, we can rest assured that they share our DNA and that once we find them — we will be able to translate their words into our own vocabulary of meanings. There are no such guarantees when dealing with intelligent beings from other stars. Understanding their meaning could be much more challenging than decoding the language of terrestrial animals.
I discussed this challenge during a multi-hour walk in nature with the brilliant computer scientist and physicist, Dr. Stephen Wolfram. On our path through the woods and sprawling greenery, we encountered a shepherd with a dozen goats. The shepherd greeted us and noted that she raised many generations of goats and can recognize their inherited traits based on their ancestry. I asked whether she can communicate with the goats and she answered: “better than with my biological children.” I congratulated her for this feat and added that perhaps the tools of artificial intelligence (AI) would allow her to better understand her goats in the future.
Stephen and I continued along our path and discussed the challenge of assigning meaning to communication signals from brains that are different from ours. This is a far greater challenge than decoding the Enigma Machine used by the Nazis during World War II, because both the Germans and the Brits had human brains. Stephen reasoned: “How could we tell what a signal means? There are physical systems which mechanically produce a signal in response to their immediate environment, like a pulsing radio signal from a neutron star magnetosphere. The pulsar signal carries no meaning beyond the physical circumstances that triggered it.”
This reminded me of sperm whales, which are social mammals that communicate using sequences of clicks called codas. Project CETI aims to understand what whales are saying by decoding their language. A recent research paper titled: “Contextual and Combinatorial Structure in Sperm Whale Vocalisations,” suggested that their communication is much more complicated than previously thought. The authors used statistical models to analyze whale codas and managed to identify a structure to their language that resembles features of the complex vocalizations that humans use. But the fundamental question is whether we can decipher not just the structure but the actual meaning of whale sounds. Gaining an understanding of what animals are saying to each other is the primary motivation behind Project CETI, but it is difficult to demonstrate that a signal actually means to animals what humans think it might mean. If the translation is so challenging for whales, would it be any easier for extraterrestrials?
Part of the challenge is that different biological brains are wired differently and hence respond differently to signals. Smaller brains are easier to understand and model. The larval brain of the fruit fly (Drosophila) has 3,016 neurons and their wiring was completely mapped in 2023. In a new paper published last month, researchers identified a “one-to-one mapping between internal units in a deep neural network and real neurons (in the fruit fly brain) by predicting the behavioral changes that arise from systematic perturbations of more than a dozen neuronal cell types.” Potentially, by modeling the brain of various animals, one could identify the interplay between sensory input and motor control.
Viewed this way, is there any fundamental difference between the behavior of a pulsar and the behavior of the fruit fly brain? Both are physical systems that respond to their environment in a way that could be modeled. With this perspective, there is no extra meaning to communication signals than the effect they trigger in brains with similar wirings. Different television sets are wired differently and respond to different remote controls. We can decipher the functionality of various remote controls by studying the wirings of their television sets or vice versa. An unsuitable remote control will not activate the television set, in the same way that a signal from the brain of a fruit fly will not generate a meaningful response in a whale brain. These can all be viewed as mechanical systems, just like pulsars. They carry no extra meaning beyond the way they function based on their wirings and environment. Should extraterrestrial brains be modeled this way?
Studying the wiring of extraterrestrial brains would require access to their bodies. If extraterrestrials have more than 3,016 neuron-like units, then mapping their brain would be more difficult than modeling the brain of the fruit fly.
As the first step in our journey to decipher advanced alien intelligences, we need to model our own AI systems. They are made of silicon chips and electric wirings, very different from the fat, water, protein, carbohydrates and salts that the human brain is composed of. Given that AI systems are wired differently, it is inevitable that they think differently from us and that they represent an alien intelligence. Of course, we can attempt to train and align AI systems with the way humans think. However, this might be stranger than putting lipstick on a pig or powdering make-up on an extraterrestrial, to make them look familiar.
Before learning new meanings from alien beings, we need to understand how they think. Once we encounter alien brains, we might be filled with awe at their super-human intelligence. In that case, the discovery of our family members from other stars may revive a sense of awe in all of us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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. His new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2023.
