According to experts, aliens are more likely to be robots with artificial intelligence than warm and cuddly extraterrestrials like Steven Spielberg’s ET.
Biological creatures are unlikely to live long enough to travel across the vast universe to reach Earth, making robots the most likely candidates for such a long and hazardous journey through space.
As a result, any extraterrestrials that reach Earth are more likely to be artificial intelligence, like the robots in the Terminator movie series.
This revelation could revolutionize alien-hunting as scientists currently focus their search on planets containing conditions likely to allow biological life, such as water.
Instead, some experts believe that the search for extraterrestrials should be targeted at places that could harbor elements useful for robots, such as abundant solar energy and minerals that form silicon.
Humans should also focus on creating AI astronauts capable of taking on long deep space alien-hunting missions.
Former NASA astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, 59, said that AI is essential for space exploration, and an advanced space program without AI is difficult to envision.
While most movies about aliens depict biological creatures arriving on Earth, this is unlikely to happen because crossing interstellar space would take them a long time, and it makes little sense to send short-lived, perishable organic bodies.
Any intelligent aliens wanting to visit us would also face the same challenges. For that reason, we shouldn’t expect visiting aliens to be organic creatures.
Seth Shostak, 79, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, which is leading the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, believes humans should be looking for “other Mercurys” instead of “other Earths” to find AI aliens.
He thinks that it’s overwhelmingly likely that aliens are present in our galaxy, but he doesn’t believe that they’re hanging out in our airspace, not now, and not in historic times.
Shostak believes that any aliens that trek to our planet are unlikely to be carbon-based life forms, either hirsute or hairless, and their cognitive abilities will probably not be powered by a spongy mass of cells we’d call a brain.
Instead, their cognitive abilities would be powered by artificial intelligence that has gone beyond biological smarts and beyond biology itself.
Experts estimate that machines able to beat humans on an IQ test will emerge from labs by mid-century, and if humans can do it, some extraterrestrials will have already done it.