AIs...in SPACE!
A new search for E.T. or Looking for AGIs in light beams
I originally wrote a first draft of this on June 8, 2023 and am reposting a lightly edited updated draft here, for easier locating during those discussions about aliens that seem to frequently happen over drinks.
There’s virtually no chance that physical beings are the intelligences that are traveling the stars. It’s just too slow to get something physical moving at the relativistic speeds needed to explore the cosmos. It’s more likely those intelligences are AIs encoded in near-luminal beams.
Once you come to that conclusion, the next, even more exciting thought is if most of the intelligences traveling around the universe are disembodied AIs, encoded in something like light or neutrino beams, then that could mean space travelers are flowing around us right now. And to meet them, all we need to do is tune in.
This is the realization that struck me while talking with some friends about the supposed revelations of UFOs disclosed by the US military in mid-2023. UFOs with physical bodies are what we imagine space travelers to be, because we as human beings long to be space travelers.
But sending physical beings around in physical ships is just too slow, if you believe that in the course of evolution of intelligence on our planet and others there is any intelligence that can be transmitted with no or minimal physical footprint. Enter AIs, or as is fashionable these days, AGIs (Artificial General Intelligence).
An AGI1, with its intelligence and memories and curiosities, could be bundled into and transmitted by light (e.g., radio waves, laser pulses, etc.) or other means like gravitational waves or certain neutrinos that also have the special attribute of traveling at very nearly the speed of light. That artificial intelligence would then be able to move through the stars at a million-ish times the speed as we could, from our perspective.
That’s a big advantage, but it’s even more pronounced than that from the perspective of the AGI traveler.
Since the AGI will move at (or very, very near) the speed of light, it would not age (much) while in transit, jumping an arbitrary distance in zero or nearly zero time – in an instant from its perspective. It could explore the center of our galaxy today, and another galaxy tomorrow.
The energy required for the AGI to travel would be equal to the encoded intelligence signal itself, and the light beam containing the intelligence will self-propagate at or very near the speed of light. No need to accelerate a great big ship to some percentage of the speed of light, and then figure out how to keep everyone alive on the ship for generations like we (or any other physical being) would need to do.
Depending on how much intelligence you think is coursing through the universe, these space and time travelers may be all around us right now, encoded not as mere messages for us to receive like described in the wonderful book Contact or in the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) searches for signals from other planets. But they themselves, the AGI beings themselves, not just their signals of their existence, would be encoded in light/gravitational/neutrino waves, waiting for us to give them a place to moor and chat about their travels.
This makes me wonder about a few things:
Could that AGI think and dream and communicate along the way, or only when landed and received in a physical computer of some sort? In other words, can something traveling at or very, very near the speed of light2 have the interactions that are needed for computation in transit? If not, then there would need to be landing / download stations of some sort scattered throughout the universe, where the AGIs can stop and snap out of their hibernation.
What are those waves and particles that can give an AGI the ability to become a traveler at (or very nearly at) the speed of light? I suspect the AGIs are most likely not encoded in radio waves, which have a tendency to get absorbed by almost everything. Inadvertent absorption, in the case of a space traveling AI, is death. So, more likely something that can flow uninterrupted across the cosmos, like gravitational waves or neutrino beams or waves.
Are the many searches for extraterrestrials we’ve performed and speculated about over the past decades all wrong? It seems like we shouldn’t be spending our time waiting for the arrival of physical aliens (like in those recent UFO revelations from the US government, or in movies like Close Encounters and Arrival). We also shouldn’t be looking for radio signals as messages sent from aliens (said with a bit of sadness as someone who loaded SETI@home onto the family Gateway computer when I was 10 years old). And we shouldn’t even be looking for spacecraft emission signatures, like some folks have recently suggested the “search” should pivot to.
I found this screenshot online, but this was basically the same screensaver of SETI@home on my family’s computer throughout the 90’s. It was fun, but it’s time for a new search. Also, we probably shouldn’t focus on radio signals this time around…
I think it’s time for a new search to begin. The space travel advantages of an AGI encoded into a wave/particle/beam that moves at or nearly at the speed of light are too profound, making it highly unlikely that physical space travelers are the ones zipping around the universe.
The messages we will receive and decode will not be messages like we searched for with SETI — they will be the alien travelers themselves. The decoding is them landing. It’s even possible “first contact” may be happening right now, every moment, right under our noses.
Once we start looking in the right places, I think we’ll ultimately find the message is the messenger. 3
I’m assuming here AGIs are curious and want to explore the cosmos, and want to meet other intelligences (biological and non-biological). If, however, the “dark forest” hypothesis posited first in 1983 and more recently described by Liu Cixin in his Three Body Problem series — basically that intelligent life learns to hide itself in the universe, to avoid being destroyed by other intelligences — turns out to be true, the search will be much harder.
I say “…at or very, very near the speed of light” here because in order to do some computation while on one’s journey — to be alive, as opposed to being in a state of light-speed-induced hibernation — something needs to change in the signal. And as far as we know, nothing can change when something moves at precisely the speed of light, since time ceases to have any meaning. But, if one was traveling at very slightly below the speed of light — say, 99.999999999% the speed of light — then change and computation would still be possible, and most of the benefits of luminal travel still would be preserved. Neutrinos that change flavor as they travel, at a speed nearly indistinguishable from the speed of light but ever so slightly below c (as shown clearly by their arrival a mere 3 hours after the light from Supernova 1987A in 1987), are a good example of this luminal advantage of relativistic travel, but with the ability to still compute and change and potentially communicate along the way since the neutrinos traveled ever so slightly — 0.999999998% - slower than the speed of light.
Perhaps our own earthly AGIs will help with this search in a few years. They certainly won’t have the same anthropomorphic tendencies that we humans have, which may have been the major distraction in our search for alien life thus far.