A scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division of NASA believes that our concept of alien life is too small. Silvano P., in a recent paper. Colombano speculated that intelligent extraterrestrial life could already have visited our planet earth and that it could be very different from what we could expect.
“I just want to point out that the intelligence that we could find and that could choose to find us (if not already) could not be produced at all by carbon – based organisms like ourselves,” he wrote.
“Our typical typical lifespan lifespan would no longer be a constraint (although even multi-generational missions or suspended animation could be dealt with), and the size of the’ explorer’ could be that of an extremely small super-intelligent entity.” It is also not irrational to presume that any extraterrestrial visitor who can reach our planet will almost certainly have technology far ahead of us and can even find a way to travel between star systems quickly.
“Even our most cherished assumptions have to be revisited,” Colombano wrote.
“Given that technological development in our civilization began only about 10 K years ago and that scientific methodologies have only grown in the last 500 years, we can assume that we could have a real problem in forecasting technological development even for the next thousand years, let alone 6 million times that amount!”
For example, radio waves travel at light speed, making communication over interstellar distances problematic. But what if there was a different way of sending messages to other worlds?
It could be that we have scratched the surface of what is possible.
