Until we actually know technological aliens exist relatively nearby in the galaxy, there
are no guarantees that they do, any attempts at METI or messaging extraterrestrial intelligences
is rendered effectively a token gesture.
A call into the dark.
We occasionally do it simply because we can, a symbolic way to foster thought in ourselves
and what we do rather than seriously expect to contact an alien civilization with it.
The reality is that there is no concerted human effort with any hope of success being
done to act as a beacon to other civilizations on an intentional basis.
Unintentional through our radio leakage, yes, but the voyager records, the pioneer plaques,
even the Arecibo message have very low likelihoods of ever being detected by an extraterrestrial
civilization.
The spacecraft are not just needles in a haystack, they are almost specks of dust in the 100,000
light year expanse that is the milky way.
And while the Arecibo message was strong, it wouldn’t even pass our own filters if
we saw something like it simply because it never repeated.
At best, it’s a wow signal for someone else, but without the virtue of being transmitted
at a frequency near any scientific signposts, such as the hydrogen line.
In this regard, it was lesser than the wow signal, even though it was sent by a technological
civilization.
Ultimately, it’s an uphill battle.
Aliens would not only need to know we’re here, they would need to know when to look,
where to look, and on top of that guess the frequency, all while having no way to pick
the signal up a second time for confirmation.
SETI is hard.
Even our radio leakage is not likely to ever be seen, the further out you go, the weaker
our signals get, above and beyond the time they need to propagate.
So 100 light years out, they may just now be able to hear our signals in principle,
but they may be too weak at that distance to realistically pick up, unless they have
a radio telescope the size of New York.
Only earth’s biosphere itself serves as a long term signpost that there is life here,
but it says little about what kind of life other than the very simplest types.
The aliens might know that there is photosynthesis here, but little else, especially since our
technological civilization such as it is, is new, a mere blip in the recent history
of earth.
There are many reasons we do not build contact beacons to try to get the attention of random
aliens, whomever may be out there.
For one, it would be really expensive.
As in one of the most expensive things we could do.
We’d need to blast out broadband radio in all directions for lack of a target to send
more efficient signals to.
The energy needed to do that would be titanic for our civilization now, far beyond what
we can do using our current energy generation methods.
It’s better to listen right now, rather than dedicate a portion of the full output
of the sun into a beacon.
Now, we might do something like that if we ever detected someone else, but until then,
the odds are simply too great for METI to become a serious effort, and even then there
will be objections against it for fear of revealing our position to potentially hostile
aliens, though that also faces very low likelihoods simply because of distances.
One does not expend the enormous amount of resources to cross space, only to gain the
resources of a star system that seems to have nothing special in it other than a civilization.
Meeting that civilization is why you might make the journey, otherwise just go to the
nearest star system for materials and planets, instead of halfway across the galaxy to steal
someone else’s.
So in a way, it’s not really surprising that when our radio astronomers look to the
heavens they do not see obvious signals from beacons.
Indeed, we actually probably have very little chance of doing that with our current targeted
SETI searches, even if such things exist.
Remember, we’re not watching the entire sky all of the time.
Rather we are taking tiny pieces, individual star systems of promise, and targeting them,
often for only a few hours, to see if there is anything there.
We do not continuously monitor anything 24/7, even the possible origin stars of things like
the Wow signal.
In the future, all sky SETI surveys will come into play.
And it’s possible that as we do those, we may find the voices of alien civilizations
that we weren’t aware of simply because we were not listening as broadly as we needed
to be.
Or the great silence will continue, in which case at some point we will have to ask ourselves
why.
But within the story of ourselves, there may lie an answer.
We often look to the only alien civilization we know, ourselves, to try to glean clues
that might lead us to know how to look for other civilizations.
After all, we are someone else’s alien civilization.
But something is developing in our own civilization that seems to point to what might be a truth.
That the period where biological life flirts with technology is short, and that soon after
you hit the computer age, you transition to a new society, one where the biological is
not strictly the biological, and the technological increasingly becomes the greater concern of
existence.
We may someday BE machines, rather than the makers and inventors of them.
This idea partly is the famous singularity, where technological progress moves exponentially
faster and faster as to the outcome becoming incomprehensible and unpredictable.
Whether the outcome of a technological singularity actually is unpredictable is another question,
but the idea is basically that humans merge with their machines, singularity or not, whether
through mind uploading or augmentation and evolution to 100 percent machine.
You become one with your smartphone, in short, until you are the smartphone.
And presumably at some point, unless there is some physical advantage to maintaining
biology, you leave it behind.
Becoming a machine has significant advantages, not the least of which you could back yourself
up in a cloud type of environment and in some way become functionally immortal, as the Cylons
did in the classic reboot of Battlestar Galactica.
Another is that you only need power generation at that point, and are no longer beholden
to things like growing food, maintaining cities, and all that goes with it.
The trappings of biology.
You essentially live in a giant data farm running as a program on a computer, having
found a way to seamlessly upload yourself to it, which presumably happens during the
stage of transforming between biology and technology.
Even reproduction becomes frivolous, though the pleasure of it may not.
You don’t need children in such a machine civilization, rather that may well be replaced
by completely artificial but new human consciousness that never were biological, or for that matter
alive.
Or none at all, maintaining a static population of sorts in the cloud.
This is an interesting idea for another reason.
At that point, where all of civilization exists as a machine, have humans as a biological
species gone extinct?
Functionally yes, making the transition from a biological to a machine civilization an
extinction event, even if the civilization undergoing it survives.
Other advantages include all biological disease becoming irrelevant, though perhaps not computer
viruses.
One could envision scary scenarios of alien machine civilizations infecting each other
with some analogue of computer viruses as an act of war, or even a final act of the
destruction of another civilization.
Scenarios aside, the question then becomes, is this the order of the universe?
Is the transformation of the biological to the machine how it always goes everywhere
in the universe.
Are we in a tiny sliver of time where the biological and the technological are completely
separate?
Just 30 years ago, when I graduated high school, the internet was in its infancy as far as
public use goes, and the smartphone was not even fathomable and the world was all too
human.
That a telephone, something then connected to a landline, would someday become the prosthetic
brain of humanity, allowing for instantaneous access to a vast collection of information
with no precedent even in the great library of Alexandria or stockpile of cuneiform tablets.
That was not foreseen by most.
If this is the way it goes for all civilizations in the universe, then the bulk of their existence
could be spent as a machine civilization rather than a biological one.
In other words, it may take 2 million years to evolve technological intelligence, but
once you hit the technological singularity, you might have a civilization that is virtually
immortal and may last billions, or even trillions of years.
But if that’s the case, does the connection with a biological origin for a machine civilization
drift?
Do they eventually stop caring about biology at all?
And that might be a reason for the great silence and the Fermi Paradox, machine civilizations
vastly outnumber biological ones, but having no connection with biology they may see no
reason to try to contact up and coming biological civilizations.
Too primitive, and too different.
It may be that they only feel akin to another machine civilization when it arises, and they
leave the biological civilizations to their own devices, and their own unique development,
and only make contact when they hit the singularity and their machines become worth talking to.
This might result in a sort of ghostly solution to the Fermi Paradox, where the machine civilization
simply watches you, perhaps for millenia, waiting for you to do something it would recognize.
You may never know it's there, or it may allow you to see glimpses of it to acclimatize your
civilization to the reality of the machine galactic order.
It may gift you technology to move you towards its technological goals, rather than for your
benefit.
It may even feel more of a kinship with a civilization's machines, as opposed to the
biological civilization itself.
It may wait for the development of artificial intelligence in order to form that kinship.
There are several options here for a rather crazy development of future technology.
It may be that once general artificial intelligence is achieved, and it gains access to the entire
dataome of a civilization, and if you throw in quantum computing as a wildcard, then you
may reach the highest expression of a machine possible in the universe.
It in many ways would represent a kind of perfection, with all the pitfalls of biology
discarded, and the advantages of the machine brought to the furthest, most mature state
that the laws of physics allow.
As a biological, it’s difficult to have a kinship with something like that, even if
whatever consciousness its hosting was once biological, or otherwise came from it.
This may be why the great silence pervades, in that biologicals have a reason to talk
to machines, but machines have no reason to talk to biologicals so they simply stay quiet
until the singularity.
Or, perhaps technological singularities are the hard stop, and whenever you hit one, the
machine civilization intervenes, confiscates the budding AI, and downshifts the biological
civilization to the stone age to await for it to create a second round of technological
development, perhaps very different from the first, only to harvest it again when the time
is right.
Here, civilization becomes a repeating AI farm, with intelligent biological civilizations
being manipulated to become the farmers, when in fact there is a higher order in control
that we may never even known was there.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently concerned about the
corn singularity.
Instead of being farmers of AI, think about it, the corn has us roped in.
We must grow it.
Yet 500 years ago, a large percentage of humans didn’t know it existed, as it was indigenous
only to the Americas.
Same with the hot pepper, currently the world’s almost ubiquitous spice.
I won’t even get into that most manipulative of vegetables, the cucumber, anyone that’s
grown them know they have arms and slowly grab things as they vine out, I can see that
one going badly for us in the future and be sure to check out my books at your favorite
online book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the
interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.