The Fermi Paradox got its name from physicist Enrico Fermi’s visit to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in the 1950s. One day, when Fermi was walking to lunch with his physicist colleagues Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York, one of them said: New Yorker A cartoon about aliens stealing public trash cans from the streets of New York. Later, during dinner, Fermi suddenly returned to the topic of aliens and asked, “Where are they all?”
Not everyone agrees on exactly what Fermi was questioning, but the “paradox” is generally the utter absence of any indication of the existence of other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. is interpreted as expressing surprise. A naive estimate indicated that advanced civilizations could have reached the farthest corners of the galaxy in a time much shorter than the age of the galaxy, leading to the question: why don’t we see them?
In the years since Fermi asked the question, dozens of potential solutions to the “paradox” have been proposed.
In particular, several scientists have argued that the absence of alien signals is the result of a “great filter,” an evolutionary bottleneck impassable to most life forms. If true, this wonderful filter is in our past or future. If that’s what’s behind us, it could have happened, for example, when life arose spontaneously, or when unicellular organisms transitioned to multicellular organisms. Either way, it implies that complex life forms are rare, and that we may even be the only ones in the Milky Way galaxy. On the other hand, if the great filters are ahead of us, the most advanced civilizations may eventually hit the wall and cease to exist. If so, it may be the fate of mankind.
Instead, I would like to propose a new way of thinking about Fermi’s paradox. It is natural that there are chemical and metabolic limits to the size and processing power of the organic brain. In fact, we may already be nearing that limit. But such limits do not constrain electronic computers (and perhaps even less so for quantum computers). Therefore, by any definition of “thinking,” the power and strength of organic human-type brains will eventually be completely overwhelmed by artificial intelligence (AI) brains. We may be nearing the end of Darwinian evolution, but the evolution of technological intelligence is still in its early stages.
Few doubt that machines will gradually surpass or augment the inherent capabilities of humans. The only question is when. Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil and several other futurists believe his AI dominance will arrive within just a few decades. Some assume it will take centuries. However, in any case, the time scale associated with the advancement of technology is a fraction of a second compared to the time scale of evolution that gave birth to mankind. Moreover, the technological timescale is less than a millionth of the vast cosmic time that lies ahead. Therefore, the evolutionary fruits of future technology may surpass humans as much as we surpass comb jellyfish intellectually.
But what about consciousness?
Philosophers and computer scientists debate whether consciousness is a special quality associated only with the moist, organic brains of humans, apes, and dogs. In other words, isn’t electronic intelligence still lacking self-awareness and inner life, even if its abilities seem superhuman? Or does consciousness manifest itself in sufficiently complex networks?
Some say this question is irrelevant and semantic, like asking if a submarine swims. we don’t think so. The answer will have a decisive impact on how we react to the far-future scenarios we envision. If machines are what philosophers call “zombie” then we won’t give their experience the same value as ours, and the post-human future would rather look otherwise. . dark. On the other hand, if they are conscious, we should certainly welcome the prospect of their hegemony in the future.
Now suppose that there are many other planets on which life actually began, some or most of which followed somewhat similar evolutionary trajectories to Earth. But even then, it’s highly unlikely that any key stages of its evolution would be synchronized with those on Earth. If the emergence of intelligence and technology on an exoplanet lags significantly behind what happened on Earth (either because the planet is young or because some “filters” have been negotiating longer), then on that planet Clearly no evidence of intelligent species will emerge. . On the other hand, around stars older than the Sun, life may have had a significant head start for over a billion years.
Organic life requires a planetary surface environment for the chemical reactions leading to the origin of life to occur, but as post-humans transition to full electronic intelligence, neither liquid water nor atmosphere will be needed. Some people prefer weightlessness, especially when building large man-made objects. So it may be in deep space, not on the surface of a planet, that an abiotic ‘brain’ develops powers unimaginable to humans.
Our technological civilization may be (at best) several thousand years old, and it may be another century or two before we are overtaken or surpassed by inorganic intelligence. Inorganic intelligence may persist and continue to evolve at a faster rate. Darwinian timescale, billions of years. So human-level organic intelligence may generally be just a brief step before machines take over. If an alien intelligence were to evolve in the same way, it would be highly unlikely that we would catch it in the short time it is still embodied in organic form. In particular, if we were able to detect ET, it would be much more likely to be electronic, with the dominant organism not in the flesh, perhaps not even on planets, but on stations in deep space. There is likely to be.
The question then becomes whether the fact that electronic civilization can survive for billions of years seriously exacerbates the Fermi paradox. The answer is no. Baffled by the Fermi paradox and lack of alien signs, most of us imagine other civilizations to be expansionist and aggressive, but that’s not always the case. The point is that while Darwinian natural selection at least has some emphasis on survival of the fittest, post-human evolution without natural selection need not be aggressive or expansionist at all. be. The electronic descendants of these physical civilizations he could last a billion years and live a quiet, contemplative life.
So far, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has focused on radio and light signals, but beware of evidence of non-natural construction projects, such as the ‘Dyson sphere’ built to harvest most of it. need to pay Stellar power, and even the possibility of alien artifacts lurking within our solar system.
Even if SETI succeeds, it is unlikely that the observed signal is a simple readable message. It is more likely a by-product (or maybe even an accident or failure) of a super-complex machine far beyond our comprehension. Even if a message is sent, we may not recognize it as artificial because we don’t know how to decipher it. A seasoned radio engineer familiar only with amplitude modulation may have a hard time deciphering modern radio communications. In fact, today’s compression techniques aim to make the signal as close to noise as possible.
In conclusion, speculation about advanced or intelligent life is in a much more precarious position than speculation about simple life. We argue that this suggests three things about the entities that SETI searches can reveal.
They are neither organic nor biological.
They do not remain on the surface of the earth where their biological precursors lived.
We cannot understand their motives or intentions.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. Scientific American.
