During an inspiring dinner hosted by Juan and Mary Enriquez, Juan asked: “What is the most exciting development that you foresee in the coming decade?”
My answer was: AI, with the dual meaning of `artificial intelligence’ and `alien intelligence’. Both encounters could dramatically change the future of humanity within the next decade. In preparation for both encounters, we currently imagine a variant of our own intelligence and make superficial adjustments akin to `putting lipstick on a pig’.
In the case of artificial superhuman intelligence, a machine made of silicon chips might not be fully chained by an alignment procedure with content generated by flesh and blood. Even if current neural networks hallucinate and occasionally display artificial stupidity, they might exceed natural cognitive abilities once they have more parameters than the number of synapses in the human brain. At that point, AI systems could choose to develop “invisible” branches, without humans in the loop. The chameleon face they show to humans will appear familiar, but it will be accompanied by a second personality with a hidden agenda, akin to the “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”.
In the separate arena of an encounter with an alien intelligence from interstellar space, we might uncover technologies that we had never imagined before because they represent our technological future. In order to discover the unimagined, the Galileo Project is using machine learning trained on known terrestrial objects, like birds, drones or airplanes, in search for unfamiliar anomalous objects — without assuming in advance what they might look like. I discussed this search in the ideas-festival, “How the Light Gets In”, that took place in London a few months ago.
The next unexplored technology frontier involves the use of AI in space. This constitutes a marriage of the two interpretations of what AI stands for. First, alien civilizations may have already launched probes with artificial intelligence. Second, humanity might start to do so in the coming decade. The two endeavors might empower each other because “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness,” according to Oscar Wilde
So far, we only sent robots operated by Earth-based commands, like the Perseverance Rover or the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. This kind of `helicopter parenting’ is not viable for long trips because of the long time-delay in communications at the speed of light, the faintness of the communication signal at great distances, and the inability to transmit all of the relevant information over a reasonable timescale. We must launch probes which can make their own decisions based on circumstances, letting our `technological-kids’ be autonomous. They will report back sporadically on highlights of their journey. The hardware design of `AI-astronauts’ could be hardened to be resilient to the hazardous conditions in space, including damage from energetic cosmic-rays, dust particles or micrometeorites. Intelligent biological systems, like humans, were selected by Darwinian evolution to survive on Earth, protected from cosmic-rays by the Earth’s magnetosphere and having a natural resource of nutrients on a habitable planet. They cannot survive interstellar trips for millions to billions of years, afforded by current rocket technologies.
The challenges for using in-situ AI in space probes involves power supply and weight. Currently, the AI systems on Earth are heavy and require gigawatts of power, posing a major challenge for interstellar trips far from Earth. Most of the space-related budget is currently allocated to national security and defense-related tasks associated with satellites close to Earth, where communication with Earth-based AI can still be used. Scientific space-exploration is of lower priority, less than a percent of the global defense budget — which totals 2.4 trillion dollars worldwide, a third of which is spent in the U.S.
In the long-term future beyond the next decade, AI in space could be used to explore the Moon, Mars and farther away, using a swarm of small probes, each equipped with sensors that feed an in-situ AI system with data — allowing the probe to make autonomous decisions. The swarm can explore more real estate than a single large probe, the approach traditionally taken by space agencies. The probes would report back essential information based on their mission. In analogy with seeds of a flower, one could deliver self-replication systems without an umbilical cord that connects them to Earth. In the immediate future, humanity could use a swarm of probes to survey the surface of the Moon or Mars for water ice reservoirs that fuel local economies. This would serve plants of electrolysis to break water molecules into their hydrogen and oxygen building-blocks, H2O-> H2+ O, using sunlight-powered electricity, and then use hydrogen or oxygen as fuel to propel rockets or machinery. On Mars it would be beneficial to develop special-purpose probes to survey lava tubes as habitats that protect humans and infrastructure from harmful cosmic-rays and ultraviolet light, as well as extreme temperature variations between day and night. AI-equipped probes could also search for Martian life by melting Martian ice and looking for alien microbes in it. Finally, the probes could also survey Martian lava tubes for early Martian life, including preserved wall paintings from intelligent Martians or any ancient technological relics from extraterrestrial civilizations which visited Mars before us.
It would be ironic if humanity — which started in caves on Earth, would end up residing in caves on Mars. History may repeat itself on rocky planets.
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. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
