In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence we often look for signs of intelligence, and communications technology similar to our own. But, as noted by astronomer Jill Tarter, this approach means finding detectable thesignature, such as radio broadcasts, not intelligence. Now scientists have wondered whether artificial intelligence to help us in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The “decoding” of intelligence
Thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence, it is useful to remember that humans are not the only intelligent life on Earth. Chimpanzees have culture and tools, spiders process the information from the web, cetaceans communicate in dialects, crows understand analogies, and beaver — great engineers. Intelligence (not human), language, culture, and technology — all around us.
Alien intelligence may be like an octopus, an ant, a Dolphin or the car — or will be radically different from anything on Earth.
We often imagine extraterrestrial life relative to our ideas about the differences, but these ideas are not universal even on Earth and are unlikely to be universal in interstellar space. And if some of us only recently realized that the Earth has a mind beyond the human, what are we missing, representing the extraterrestrial life?
In the beginning of 2018, astronomers, neuroscientists, anthropologists, researchers of AI, historians and others gathered at the seminar “Decoding of alien intelligence” at the SETI Institute in Silicon valley. Astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol organized this seminar as part of its work in 2016, “Thought forms alien”, in which he called SETI to draw up a new roadmap and introduced a long-term vision of “finding life we don’t know.”
In his article Cabrol asked how SETI can move away from the “other versions” and to think “outside of their own brains” to imagine a totally different extraterrestrial intelligence.
To think otherwise
Silicon valley is famous for the fact that goes against conventional wisdom, and that culture intersects with the research of SETI. Since then, the US government stopped funding SETI in the mid 1990-ies, ideas, technology, and funding from Silicon valley are becoming increasingly important.
For example, an array telescope Allen at the SETI Institute named in honor of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who invested in the project more than $ 25 million. In 2015 investor Yuri Milner has announced a Breakthrough Listen, ten-year initiative to search for extraterrestrial life.
Now the SETI Institute, NASA, Intel, IBM and other partners to try to solve problems of space science and artificial intelligence and development program called the Frontier Development Lab.
Lucian, Walkovich, Chairman of the library of Congress from astrobiologists, describes one of the methods based on AI as “agnostic search signals.” This means the use of machine learning methods to search for any set of data without predetermined categories, which allows to decompose the data according to their “natural categories”. Then the software gives us to understand, which is a division and what data might be of interest for further study.
It turned out that the SETI researchers think that artificial intelligence will help in their work, because machine learning is well detects the differences. However, its success depends on how we define the very idea, the very concept of “difference”.
Smarter mucus
Thinking outside our brain also means thinking beyond our scientific, social and cultural systems. How to achieve this?
AI was used to search for possible counterparts to the radio of aliens, but now scientists are planning to use it to search things that we don’t yet searched.
Graham Mackintosh, consultant AI at the seminar of the SETI Institute, said that the aliens can do what we cannot imagine, using technology that we never even thought of. AI, in his opinion, would think for us in this direction.
We may not be able to be smarter than the Mac, but we can make machines that are smarter than us. Astrophysicist Martin Rees has expressed a similar hope that AI could lead to “the intelligence that surpasses humans just as we are intellectually superior slime”.
First contact
If we met with extraterrestrial goo that we could speculate about her intelligence? One of the problems of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that we don’t know the boundaries of life or intelligence, therefore should be open to all possible differences.
We could find the intelligence in the forms that our science has historically ignored: microbial colonies, insects or other complex systems such as symbiotic relationships of plants and fungi in mycorrhizal networks.
Intelligence can manifest itself in the atmosphere or Geology on a global scale or in astrophysical phenomena. What seems like a background process in the universe or part of nature, may be reasonable.
The largest living object on Earth can be fungus Armilaria ostoyae in the Blue mountains of Eastern Oregon: it stretches for 10 square kilometers and from 2 to 9 thousand years.
Although the mushrooms are usually not associated with intelligence, they remind us that we need to expect all in the search of life and intelligence in the universe and that life may be right under our feet, in the form of the same fungus or germs.
And if you think about what intelligence could represent anything, hence first contact will push us to anything: whether it’s General artificial intelligence, intelligent machines or something. Perhaps, artificial intelligence, free from human prejudice, at least to some extent, can help us.
Can artificial intelligence to find alien?
Ilya Hel