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Extraterrestrial Intelligence Is More Likely To Be Artificial Than Biological

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Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? It’s a question that has been debated for centuries, if not millenia.

But it is only recently that we’ve had an actual chance of finding out, with initiatives such as Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) using radio telescopes to actively listen for radio messages from alien civilisations.

What should we expect to detect if these searches succeed? My suspicion is that it is very unlikely to be little green men – something I speculated about at a talk at a Breakthrough Listen (a Seti project) conference.

Suppose there are other planets where life began and that it followed something like a Darwinian evolution (which needen’t be the case). Even then, it’s highly unlikely that the progression of intelligence and technology would happen at exactly the same pace as on Earth.

If it lagged significantly behind, then that planet would plainly reveal no evidence of extraterrestrial life to our radio telescopes. But around a star older than the Sun, life could have had a head start of a billion years or more.

Human technological civilisation only dates back millennia (at most) – and it may be only one or two more centuries before humans, made up of organic materials such as carbon, are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence, such as AI.

Computer processing power is already increasing exponentially, meaning AI in the future may be able to use vastly more data than it does today. It seems to follow that it could then get exponentially smarter, surpassing human general intelligence.

Perhaps a starting point would be to enhance ourselves with genetic modification in combination with technology – creating cyborgs with partly organic and partly inorganic parts. This could be a transition to fully artificial intelligences.

AI may even be able to evolve, creating better and better versions of itself on a faster-than-Darwinian timescale for billions of years. Organic human-level intelligence would then be just a brief interlude in our “human history” before the machines take over.

So if alien intelligence had evolved similarly, we’d be most unlikely to “catch” it in the brief sliver of time when it was still embodied in biological form. If we were to detect extraterrestrial life, it would be far more likely to be electronic than flesh and blood – and it may not even reside on planets.

We must therefore reinterpret the Drake equation, which was established in 1960 to estimate the number of civilisations in the Milky Way with which we could potentially communicate.

The equation includes various assumptions, such as how many planets there are, but also how long a civilisation is able to release signals into space, estimated to be between 1,000 and 100 million years.

But the lifetime of an organic civilisation may be millennia at most, while its electronic diaspora could continue for billions of years. If we include this in the equation, it seems there may be more civilisations out there than we thought, but that the majority of them would be artificial.

We may even want to rethink the term “alien civilisations”. A “civilisation” connotes a society of individuals. In contrast, extraterrestrials might be a single integrated intelligence.

Decoding messages

If Seti succeeded, it would therefore be unlikely to record decodable messages. Instead, it may spot a byproduct (or even a malfunction) of some super complex machine far beyond our comprehension.

Seti focuses on the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum. But as we have no idea of what’s out there, we should clearly explore all wavebands, including the optical and X-ray parts.

Rather than just listening for radio transmission, we should also be alert to other evidence of non-natural phenomena or activity. These include artificial structures built around stars to absorb their energy (Dyson spheres) or artificially created molecules, such as chlorofluorocarbons – nontoxic, nonflammable chemicals containing carbon, chlorine, and fluorine – in planet atmospheres.

These chemicals are greenhouse gasses that can’t be created by natural processes, meaning they could be a sign of “terraforming” (changing a planet to make it more habitable) or industrial pollution.

Advanced extraterrestrials could build Dyson spheres.

I’d argue it would even be worth looking for traces of aliens in our own solar system. While we can probably rule out visits by human-like species, there are other possibilities. An extraterrestrial civilisation that had mastered nanotechnology may have transferred its intelligence to tiny machines, for example. It could then invade other worlds, or even asteroid belts, with swarms of microscopic probes.

And even if we did receive a decodable radio message, how could we know what the intention of the super-intelligent sender would be? We have absolutely zero idea – think of the variety of bizarre motives (ideological, financial and religious) that have driven human endeavours in the past. They may be peaceful and inquisitive.

Even less obtrusively, they may realise that it’s easier to think at low temperatures – getting far away from any star, or even hibernating for billions of years until it’s cooler. But they could be expansionist – and this seems the expectation of most who’ve thought about the future trajectory of civilisations.

The future of intelligence

As the universe evolves, intelligent species may get unfathomably clever. Just take our own future. Eventually, stellar births and deaths in our galaxy will proceed gradually more slowly, until it gets jolted as the Milky Way crashes with the Andromeda galaxy in about billion years.

The debris of our galaxy, Andromeda and their smaller companions within our local group of galaxies will thereafter clump together into one amorphous galaxy, while distant ones move away from us and eventually disappear.

But our remnant will continue for far longer – time enough, perhaps, for a civilisation to emerge that could be in possession of huge amounts of energy, even harnessing the entire mass of a galaxy.

This may be the culmination of the long-term trend for living systems to gain complexity. At this stage, all the atoms that were once in stars and gas could be transformed into a giant organism of galactic scale.

Some science fiction authors envisage stellar-scale engineering to create black holes and wormholes – bridges connecting different points in spacetime, in theory providing shortcuts for space travellers. These concepts are far beyond any technological capability that we can envisage, but not in violation of basic physical laws.

Are we artificial?

Post-human intelligences may also be able to build computers with enormous processing power. Humans are already able to model some quite complex phenomenon, such as the climate. More intelligent civilisations, however, may be able to simulate living things – with actual consciousnesses – or even entire worlds or universes.

How do we know that we aren’t living in such a simulation created by technologically superior aliens? Maybe we are no more than a bit of entertainment for some supreme being who is running such a model?

Indeed, if life is destined to be able to create technologically advanced civilisations that can make computer programs, there may be more simulated universes our there than real ones out there – making it conceivable that we are in one of them.

This conjecture may sound outlandish, but it is all based on our current understanding of physics and cosmology. We should, however, surely be open-minded about the possibility that there’s much we don’t understand. Perhaps the laws we see and the constants we measure are only “local” and differ in other parts of the universe? That would lead to even more jaw-dropping possibilities.

Ultimately, physical reality could encompass complexities that neither our intellect nor our senses can grasp. Some electronic “brains” may simply have a quite different perception of reality. Nor can we predict or understand their motives. That’s why we can’t assess whether the current radio silence that Seti are experiencing signifies the absence of advanced alien civilisations, or simply their preference.

*This article is partly adapted from a speech given by the author at a Breakthrough Listen conference in 2018

Martin Rees, Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article

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Researcher discovered mysterious structures on the Moon

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Renowned ufologist and virtual archaeologist Scott Waring is back in
the spotlight with his latest discovery: mysterious structures on the
surface of the Moon.

In photographs of the Moon obtained by the American space agency NASA, he discovered something that raises many questions.

Waring’s
discovery became the subject of discussion among lovers of the
mysteries of space. The ufologist said that the photograph was published
by NASA just a few days ago, and immediately after that he began a
detailed analysis of it.

According to Waring, the photograph shows
structures that could not have formed naturally. These unusual objects
could have been built by extraterrestrial civilizations, the researcher
believes.

However,
the most surprising thing is that, according to Waring, NASA is not
even trying to hide this information. Skeptics argue that if evidence of
alien intervention was actually found on the Moon, the agency would try
to hide such facts.

However, Waring believes that the agency is
deliberately disclosing this information to generate public interest and
attention to aliens.

The researcher also calls on NASA to provide
more details about the origin of these mysterious structures and
conduct more research.

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The 1933 UFO Crash in Italy: The First and Forgotten Roswell?

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When we think of UFO crashes, the first thing that comes to mind is
the famous Roswell incident of 1947, when a mysterious object crashed on
a ranch in New Mexico, sparking decades of speculation and controversy.

But
what if Roswell was not the first, nor the only, UFO crash on Earth?
What if there was an earlier and more obscure case that involved a
fascist dictator, a secret department, and a possible cover-up by the US
military?

That is the intriguing story of the 1933 UFO crash in
Italy, which has recently resurfaced thanks to new allegations and
evidence from researchers and former intelligence officials.

According to these sources, a bell-shaped flying saucer crashed near Magenta, a town west of Milan, on June 13, 1933.

The
craft was reportedly recovered by the Italian authorities and taken to a
nearby airfield, where it was examined by a team of experts led by none
other than Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio.

The documents include two June 1933 telegrams in Italian demanding ‘absolute silence’ over an ‘alleged landing on national soil of unknown aircraft’. Credit: dailymail.co.uk

Little is
known about the first “UFO” case in Italy: the fascist regime
immediately secreted the story. It was Roberto Pinotti, founder and
secretary of the National UFO Center, who tried to dissolve the mist of
mystery that surrounds the case.

At the “Ufology” conference,
which was held near Lake Maggiore, in Arona, he explained that “the
remains of the UFO, which in the drawings is described as a cylindrical
aircraft, with a bottleneck at the end, with portholes on the side, from
which white and red lights came out, were taken to the Siai-Marchetti
warehouses in Vergiate, where they remained for 12 years.

The
bodies of the pilots, preserved in formalin, were studied for a long
time. It is known that they were 1.80 tall, had light hair, and
oriental-looking blue eyes.

Another document, dated June 13, threatens the ‘immediate arrest’ and ‘maximum penalties’ for any journalists reporting news of an ‘aircraft of unknown nature and origin’. Credit: dailymail.co.uk

It
is therefore understandable why Mussolini thought they were German
pilots, despite the authoritative contrary opinion of Marconi himself.

The
hypothesis advanced by Pinotti could also redefine the history of the
pre-war period: “The Duce believed, perhaps, that it would be
appropriate to ally himself with a military power like that of Nazi
Germany, capable of producing an aircraft never seen before, rather than
having her as an enemy.”

The craft itself was said to be made of
an unknown metal that was resistant to heat and corrosion, and had a
complex propulsion system and electromagnetic fields.

The Italian
dictator Benito Mussolini, who was fascinated by the phenomenon, ordered
the creation of a secret department called “Gabinetto RS/33” (or RS/33
Cabinet) to study the saucer and its technology. The department was
headed by Marconi and included scientists, engineers, and military
officers. Their goal was to reverse-engineer the alien craft and use it
for military purposes.

However,
their plans were thwarted by the end of World War II, when Italy was
invaded by the Allied forces. According to some accounts, the American
troops seized the saucer and its remains and shipped them to the US,
where they became part of a covert program that collected and studied
multiple “non-human” flying saucers.

This program was allegedly
overseen by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a highly secretive
intelligence agency that operates spy satellites.

The existence
of this program was recently revealed by David Grusch, a former NRO
officer who claims to have firsthand knowledge of it. Grusch says that
he has seen documents and photos that prove that the US government has
obtained several alien crafts over the years, including the one from
Italy in 1933. He also says that he has spoken to other former
intelligence officers who were part of the program and confirmed his
story.

The 1933 UFO crash in Italy may be one of the oldest and
most forgotten cases in UAP history, but it may also be one of the most
important ones. It may hold clues to the origin and purpose of these
mysterious visitors, as well as their impact on human history and
technology.

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