Looking for Alien Life? Seek Out Alien Tech

Back in 1950, Enrico Fermi posed the question now known as the Fermi Paradox: Given the countless galaxies, stars, and planets out there, the odds are that life exists elsewhere—so why haven’t we found it? And there’s another reason: The search for advanced aliens is constrained by human assumptions, including the idea that advanced ET would be “alive.” Scientists who engage in the search for extraterrestrial life look for what life on Earth needs—carbon and water—as well as for biosignatures: gasses and organic matter, such as methane, that living things exhale, excrete, or secrete. The assumption that biological life on other planets would look or function like biological life on Earth is flawed and constrained by anthropocentrism. The idea that ET intelligence might exist as “super” AI has been proposed by scientists like Susan Schneider, founding director of the Center for the Future Mind; SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak; and others. In an op-ed for The Guardian, Shostak posits that aliens intelligent enough to seek out Earth “will probably have gone beyond biological smarts and, indeed, beyond biology itself.” Caleb Scharf, director of Columbia’s Astrobiology Program, argues that “Just as someone living on the steppe in 12th-century Mongolia would find a self-driving car both magical and meaningless, we might be quite incapable of registering or interpreting the presence of billion-year-old machine savants.” The potential of AI to become super AI and vastly eclipse the limits of human intelligence has long concerned scientists like Nick Bostrom and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, and so the possible existence of super AI aliens raises important considerations about the risks of searching for—and finding—them.