Would Alien Visitors Possess Intelligence Based on Silicon Chips or Synthetic Biology?
A university student in France asked me the following question:
“If an advanced extraterrestrial civilization were to develop intelligent, self-replicating, and self-repairing autonomous robots (von Neumann probes), the cosmic timeline for its galactic spreading changes drastically. Even under the conservative assumption that these machines travel at 1% of the speed of light, they could theoretically colonize the entire Milky-Way galaxy within a few hundred thousand years.
On a cosmic scale, a few hundred thousand years is a mere blink of an eye. Yet, our current empirical reality presents a stark contradiction: we observe no physical evidence of such automated systems, nor any signs of large-scale galactic engineering.
This leads to a fundamental question: Does the absolute absence of these self-replicating probes strongly imply that no civilization technologically superior to ours currently exists — or has ever existed — within our galaxy? Or are there alternative, overlooked constraints (such as software mutation limits or existential risks) that would prevent a superior civilization from deploying such technology in the first place?”
In reply, I confessed that I interact every day with intelligent, self-replicating and self-repairing autonomous probes. They are called humans. Whether human existence on Earth was a result of alien visitation remains to be explored.
The technologies we developed so far, over one century after the discovery of quantum mechanics, are rather limited. Our crown jewel, artificial intelligence (AI), is based on silicon chips. These are directly derived from soil, specifically utilizing the high-purity quartz/silica sand (SiO₂) found in the earth’s crust. Manufacturers extract this sand from quarries and process it through intense heat and chemical refinement to create flawless, hyper-pure single-crystal silicon wafers.
However, AI systems require gigawatts of power to accomplish cognitive tasks that the biological human brain accomplishes with a power consumption of merely 20 Watts. Imagine a future where our understanding of biology will rise to a level where we can design a synthetic-biology brain inside a body that consumes nutrients from the surface of Earth. A synthetic-biology machine might be far more energy-efficient and environmentally adaptable than a robotic machine with silicon-based AI.
In that future, we could design artificial astronauts with scaled up brains relative to our brains, that are synthetic-biology products. Such machines might live forever if they are properly designed to repair themselves. They would serve as ideal von Neumann probes that we can send on interstellar missions to habitable exoplanets.
Hence, the intelligence of our future astronauts may not be silicon-based but synthetic-biology based. Since most stars formed billions of years before the Sun, other civilizations may have reached our long-term technological future by now.
Given this perspective, is it possible that humans represent intelligent, self-replicating and self-repairing autonomous probes which were constructed thanks to the synthetic biology skills of an alien civilization?
In this context, the looming AI-singularity will be dwarfed relative to the progress delivered by scaled-up brains from synthetic-biology advances in the more distant future. The ability of our civilization to venture into interstellar space would then result from the development of intelligent, self-replicating and self-repairing autonomous von Neumann probes based on synthetic biology.
As chair of the UAP Science Advisory Council for the White House, Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and all Intelligence Community members, I hope we can find out whether we are being visited and if so — what is the nature of the intelligence of our guests.
***
Speaking about the superiority of human intelligence over silicon-based AI, I had received the following uplifting message:
“Subject: OUR FAMILY THANKS YOU
THANK YOU PROFESSOR LOEB!
I copy & paste your posts and papers and email them to my family members, primarily my children, nieces and nephews. Sir, you make science so intriguing and exciting for our family!
Your kind generosity in sharing your vast wealth of scientific knowledge, experience and expertise, highlighted by your unparalleled academic courage, inspires us. My niece, the valedictorian of her Junior High School, and my son (also on the Honor Roll, and valedictorian) about to enter college, now want to be physicists like Dr Loeb!
Your superb and meticulous papers, boldly honest scientific podcasts and papers are tremendously helpful, and is the catalyst which compelled me to purchase college textbooks in Physics, Math, Biology & Chemistry, and studying math and science together as a family. Your work, such as the Galileo project findings and papers on `Oumuamua and 3I/Atlas, is a driving-force pushing us to learn more.
PS: Thank you for ignoring the ungrateful, jealous, and petty detractors, who are not near your level of scientific comprehension, insight, pristine world class credentials and achievements…and yet they choose contradict you publicly for clicks, thus embarrassing themselves (these whiners are not worth your time, nor ours). Thank you for pressing through the adversity, on continuing to educate and encouraging us across the globe, with your new and exciting scientific findings/analysis, and extrapolating your rigorous scientific paradigm/standards/conclusions/new questions.
We, the general public, are very grateful for the access you provide us to a Havard Professors’ level teaching. This treasure was previously only available to Harvard science students and other Ivy League intelligentsia. Thank you for all you do.
Respectfully
Van”
***
In this essay, I featured four amazing watercolors from a series created by the celebrated artist, Greg Wyatt. These watercolors incorporate inspiring statements by Marcilio Ficino and Johannes Kepler. This is the 20th in a sequence of essays, where Greg and I collaborate on the interface between art and science. The first essay in this series, titled “Music of the Cosmic Spheres,” appeared here; the second essay, titled: “Cosmic Waterfalls in Spacetime Cliffs,” appeared here; the third titled “Missing Elements in the Cosmic Jigsaw Puzzle,” appeared here; the fourth essay, titled: “Why Do We Exist?”, appeared here, and the fifth titled “Inspiration from the Stars”, appeared here, the sixth titled: “We Might Understand How the Cosmos Works Before We Understand How Life Works”, appeared here, the seventh titled: “Will the Human Survive for Billions of Years”, appeared here, the eighth titled: “The Butterfly Effect of Intelligence in the Cosmos”, appeared here, the ninth titled: “Benefits of Extraterrestrial Intelligence over AI”, appeared here, the tenth titled: “Übermenschen on Exoplanets” appeared here, the 11th titled: “If You Had an Infinite Research Budget, How Would You Allocate It?” appeared here, the 12th titled: “Are Human-Made Objects Orbiting Earth?” appeared here, the 13th titled: “Lets Send AI Astronauts, Not Humans, to the Moon”, appeared here, the 14th titled: “Our Highest Priority Should be National Innovation Centers to Complement AI Data Centers” appeared here, the 15th titled “The Cosmic Shells That Seeded Life” appeared here, the 16th titled “Chasing Alien Mysteries in the Sky” appeared here, the 18th titled: “The Smartest Investments in Our Future Are in Space” appeared here, and the 19th titled: “The Best and Worst Are Yet to Come”, appeared here.
***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former 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.
Professional website:
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Social media:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb
https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb
