One of the most ancient and perhaps the most enduring questions that humankind has been asking since picking up the first stone and striking fire has been around the topic – are we alone? Why does loneliness bother us is very simple – we evolved as social creatures, comforted in each other’s company and yet prone to slaughter each other if things get too crowded either physically or intellectually…
But the question does keep us engaged – are we alone? And what if we are not, and then what would other intelligent life look like. Would we even recognize it if it was sufficiently advanced? Would it even be biological in nature anymore? What kind of energy would it be harnessing? Oh, there are so many questions and the exciting part is that we are at least now beginning to be able to “speculate” about it. With only a couple of centuries out of savagery (some argue that we are not come out of that even today), we have indeed covered much ground in terms of being at least able to think about it.
Most the general chatter on the net seems to suggest that we would, in all probability, be unable to recognize it for what it was… and that should not come as much of a surprise to many people. Would a bacterium be able to speculate regarding the thought processes of a human? Personally, I doubt it.
Chris Manning opines – “All sorts of things that we assume without even realizing that we are doing so may no longer be true. Civilization may not consist of discrete entities. They may not exist in a well-defined region of space. They may not even be in space as we understand it. In Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Last Question”, the super-computer gets more and more advanced. It reaches a stage at which it is located in hyperspace and made of something which is neither matter nor energy. Perhaps the billion-year-old civilization will be something like this”
SUSAN SCHNEIDER – thinks – “I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological. The most sophisticated civilizations will be postbiological, forms of artificial intelligence or alien superintelligence.” Mysterious universe presents an interesting view based on her work - https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/10/aliens-may-actually-be-billion-year-old-robots/
According to EarthMysteryNews.com – The astrobiologist Paul Davies of Arizona State writes in The Eerie Silence “I think that biological intelligence is a short-lived phenomenon. If we ever face artificial intelligence, I believe it is post-biological in nature”.
With the advances in technology, it seems that most of the thinkers and those who bother to opine on the net seem to be gravitating towards the “beyond biological, immortal, beyond matter” kind of beings so much beyond our comprehension as to be incomprehensible… well almost!
And then there are others who are speculating about a billion-year-old civilization on earth itself although, in my opinion, that is a separate issue altogether. What do you think? Let me know with your comments!
