Everyone has a vested interest in uncovering alien life form. That’s why so many organizations, from your local school district to the Vatican, are looking to join the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence. However, SETI researcher Seth Shostak (the guy who said we’ll find alien life within 25 years) says we might be looking in the wrong direction. Rather than simply hunting for living aliens, he argues, we should also be looking for sentient alien machines.
“I think we could spend at least a few percent of our time… looking in the directions that are maybe not the most attractive in terms of biological intelligence but maybe where sentient machines are hanging out,” says Shostak in the latest edition of journal Acta Astronautica. That would involve beaming coded radio messages into red dwarf stars and galactic centers where power-hungry robots might be mining stars for fuel.
It’s an interesting theory, but as far as I’m concerned, we should just shut up and let aliens continue to ignore us. As any scholar of US history can attest to, invading forces are seldom kind to the folks who they are conquering.
Tags: alien life forms, intelligent machines, SETI, alien life form search should include artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence, robots, Acta Astronautica, Seth Shostak, coded radio transmissions, astronomy