“Living” aliens, according to the expert, will not be able to survive the long journey between star systems.
The head of the SETI Research Center, Seth Shostak, said that humanity would rather meet with an alien artificial intelligence than an extraterrestrial biological organism, reports The Guardian.
He wrote that he is rather skeptical about all the testimonies of people who claim to have encountered UFOs and aliens.
Moreover, he is equally skeptical about the Pentagon’s report on this matter. He is confident that aliens have never been in Earth’s airspace.
Shostak stated that aliens will not look like the “green men” of popular culture. He assumes that they will go beyond the “biological mind.” Thus, they will not be alive in the usual sense.
Shostak is sure that only using artificial intelligence technologies can one overcome giant distances from one star system to another.
“Any aliens that trek to our planet are unlikely to be carbon-based life forms, either hirsute or hairless. Their cognitive abilities will probably not be powered by a spongy mass of cells we’d call a brain. They will probably have gone beyond biological smarts and, indeed, beyond biology itself. They won’t be alive”, he says.
“Artificial intelligence aliens may not be as appealing as those who are warm-blooded and squishy, but we shouldn’t get hung up on an anthropocentric viewpoint.
“Researchers who work in AI estimate that machines able to beat humans on an IQ test will emerge from the labs by mid-century. If we can do it, some extraterrestrials will have already done it”, conclude Shostak.
