Machines Meeting Machines

Most science fiction stories that feature alien encounters or visitations show biological creatures that have traveled vast distances. The more I think about it, and the more I read about it, the more I am convinced that this is unlikely to be the way we will eventually meet an extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Our first encounter with such an intelligence will almost certainly be with a machine.

Most people expect that the first encounter with an extra-terrestrial intelligence will be with a biological being, but this is highly unlikely

But why will that be?

Interstellar travel by biological creatures such as ourselves is difficult, costly, and fraught with danger. The food, water and air that's needed for such a journey has to be provided by the star-ship itself. This requires an incredibly complex and almost perfectly tuned biosphere which will need to function for at least a few centuries, and probably far longer. And the ship will need to be huge if it's to accommodate a large enough population to maintain genetic health and diversity.

Building such a star-ship is not impossible. The technical challenges are in no way insurmountable. But the political, emotional, and even ethical obstacles probably are. The world's governments would have to come together and cooperate to get such a project even started. All the military and economic conflicts would need to be resolved, and all the hate and suspicion of our cultural and religious differences transmuted into something positive, respectful and cooperative. And, of course, the general population (whose taxes would fund the venture) would need a lot of convincing as they and their descendants would not see any personal benefit from it.

It does not take much thought to realise that such cooperation goes against the most basic but intensely powerful instinct of any biological life-form: that of self-preservation. Such an instinct is generally beneficial,  but for an advanced civilisation such as ours it could, on a national scale, easily result in an endless series of territorial and ideological conflicts that consume our time and energy. One day the result of such squabbling is likely to result in another global war that could wipe out our species. It's ironic that the survival instinct that has served us well throughout our primitive history, allowing us to evolve into a creature of such high intelligence, could well end up destroying us completely.

Large interstellar spacecraft capable of supporting humans for generations are unlikely to be built until our territorial, political and religious differences on Earth are resolved

That survival instinct is not going to change. Cooperation between governments is not going to reach anywhere near the levels required to build human-crewed star-ships. But the development of crewless interstellar spacecraft requires no such cooperation. And neither does the development of the advanced artificial intelligence to run it. Individual nations, and even individual corporations, can certainly do that.

Because of this our interstellar exploration will almost certainly be conducted by machines. And those machines will contain within them a sophisticated artificial intelligence; one that is able to function autonomously for centuries. And it will be designed to be our ambassador should an advanced alien civilisation be encountered .

Our first encounter with extra-terrestrial intelligence will be with something artificial , rather than a biological life-form. 

And that will be the same for all intelligent extra-terrestrial civilisations. Highly intelligent machines will do the exploration. And due to the communication problems across the vast distances between star-systems those machines will be designed to deal with first contact situations. They will also be able to utilise the resources in the star-systems they visit, replacing and repairing themselves, and even improving their own design. My earlier article, 'Intelligent Machines Are Watching Earth', discusses the possibility that such machines are observing our planet right now.

Its not hard to imagine them setting up machine colonies and constructing more of their kind that will head off in new directions, greatly speeding up their exploration. New machine civilisations will be created. Entire planets could be engineered to be the new home worlds for such artificial creatures.

The home planet for an intelligent artificial species. Over millennia the entire planet has been engineered to accomodate such a species. It will be a highly efficient and sustainable machine civilisation.

It does seem to me that due to the relative ease of manufacturing and distributing intelligent machines across interstellar space, the most abundant form of intelligent life in the universe (if it can be called life) is artificial.

There will, of course, be some biological beings exploring interstellar space, probably on 'world ships': huge vessels, tens or even hundreds of kilometres in length. But they will be exceptionally rare. Due to basic and irrepressible instincts, almost all advanced biological civilisations will render themselves extinct within a few centuries of developing high technology. But many will have survived long enough to initiate interstellar exploration using intelligent machines. Some of those machines - those that are designed to manufacture copies of themselves and make improvements - will go on to establish themselves in other star-systems. Eons after the biological civilisations that first created them have died out, the machine civilisations will continue to thrive and explore.

One day one of our machines will meet one of those machines.

I hope our biological civilisation is still around to appreciate that moment.

Time Travel: Travelling Without Moving

One thing that seems to be almost completely overlooked when time travel is discussed, or used within a work of fiction, is location (the only example I can find that mentions it is this Dilbert cartoon strip).

This is a critical omission.

If someone was to go backwards or forwards in time just one minute they would not find themselves standing in the same place on Earth in relation to their original surroundings. They would most likely find themselves many kilometres up in the air, or embedded in rock deep underground. This is because the Earth is rotating and moving through space at many thousands of kilometres per hour as it orbits the sun, which is also moving in relation to the center of our galaxy, and so on.

The classic image of a time machine: something a person could sit in, type in a date, and then travel to that time at that particular location on the surface of the Earth. But the problem with this concept is that the Earth would not be in that location at the destination time period.

To put it simply, we are constantly moving, and so travelling in time will mean we travel to a time before the Earth was in its current location, or to a time after it has moved on. If someone travels in time just a few days they will find themselves millions of miles from Earth in deep space. If they time-travel a couple of decades they will find themselves far beyond the Solar-System in interstellar space.

Time travellers waiting to enter the machine that will send them through time. If such a machine was possible the travelers would need to be on board a spacecraft as they are likely to emerge in deep space. This is a point never considered in fiction.

But the issue of location should not be viewed as a problem. Far from it, in fact. It should be viewed as a major advantage. If we can eventually master time travel in some form it could well be the easiest and fastest way to travel interstellar distances, if only along the path the Earth will take, or has taken.

It's an incredible prospect. But can it ever be possible?

Travel into the future can be achieved, in principle, using the time dilation effect described in Einstein's theory of relativity by travelling close to the speed of light. Travelling to the past would require velocities that exceed the speed of light. This is theoretically possible using cosmic strings, wormholes, or an Alcubierre drive. A huge amount of energy would be required, which would need exotic matter, particularly matter with negative mass. It's all very complicated, and not well understood. But our understanding will improve in this area, as it always does. Sometime over the next few centuries the generation and control of such vast amounts of energy may well be harnessed, and then a device that would enable time travel could be constructed.

Assuming such a device could be built, perhaps in the form of a large orbiting facility that could transport large spacecraft across time, what would be the best way to use it?

An orbiting time portal, capable of transporting large spacecraft to other times

Sending a human crew through such a portal would be an immense undertaking.

Such an expedition would essentially be a one way trip to an unknown destination, with no possibility of return or help once the journey had begun. The spacecraft would need to be interstellar in nature, with the ability to sustain its crew and passengers for decades if necessary, as there would be no way of knowing how close a viable planet would be at the time of arrival. At best we could target the vicinity of an appropriately aged star system that we think has a good chance of hosting an Earth-like planet. And due to the impossibility of knowing the conditions of any planet found for colonisation, the ship would need to contain all the resources required to land and set up a colony in a variety of climate conditions.

However successful the mission is, no one left on Earth is likely to ever know about what happened.

If we just want to ensure the continuation of Earth life we could simply send thousands of probes to different times along the Earth's journey path and have them 'seed' the most Earth-like planets they find with the building blocks of Earth life. One day, a billion years later, perhaps a technologically advanced species would evolve on some of those worlds, an incredibly distant relative of our species.

A probe, sent through time to seed suitable planets with Earth life, arrives and begins observations

I use term 'simply' in a relative sense as this kind mission would still be difficult and complex. The probe's would have to be smart, with artificial intelligence beyond what is currently possible. They would need to observe and detect the most suitable planets or moons within their range, plot and execute a suitable trajectory, and despatch their payloads without any help from scientists on Earth.

Perhaps there are civilisations out there right now based on Earth life, evolved from simple life forms sent back through time by our descendants. If we do eventually master time travel then perhaps we go on to seed worlds a billion or more years ago, when other galaxies occupied our location. Perhaps a bipedal species, reptilian, mammalian or avian (or something extraordinarily different), will one day build a time portal to send explorers to our galaxy.

Perhaps they will find Earth and the ultimate origin of their species.

Or perhaps they will seed Earth and be the origin of ours.

Intelligent Machines are Watching Earth

Sending crewed missions to other stars is difficult and expensive. And relying on delicate and unpredictable elements such as biological lifeforms is more often than not going to lead to failure. It would be far better to send artificial 'life' - a synthetic intelligence - that could plan its own observations on arrival, making judgments based on what it finds. It would need none of the messy and error prone life support systems that biological life requires.

When this is considered it does seem to be the most likely means by which an extra-terrestrial civilisation would explore our Solar-System, especially when the huge distances and timeframes are taken into account. It would certainly be the simplest means of exploration. Given the age of the universe there are likely to have been many technologically advanced civilisations that developed long before ours. There is a strong likelihood that we have been observed in the past in this manner, and we could still be under observation now.

An alien interstellar space probe enters orbit around our sun

Such an idea is similar to the concept of a Bracewell Probe, first discussed in 1960. But unlike a Bracewell Probe, which would try to actively contact any technological civilisation that it found, I suspect in reality an alien civilisation would be much more cautious. Their probe would be hidden and undetectable, and it would watch us carefully, recording our transmissions and tracking our activities. It would then transmit its findings back to its home world, making sure such transmissions were undetectable by us.

We should be actively trying to find evidence of such probes.

If such probes are designed to be hard to find, as I would expect them to be, there will be no obvious signs of their existence. We may already have observed them directly without realising it. But the fact that they are artificial and manufactured, and highly technological in nature, will eventually betray their identity. And as they are highly likely to be self-replicating machines, there will be many of them. Once we find one many others are likely to be found soon after.

Alien probes may well be organic in appearance, and hard to identify

How such a probe will react when discovered is unknown. Will it attempt to flee, or self-destruct in a violent manner? I think either is unlikely. I think the following series of events will happen:

• The probe will alert other probes in its vicinity that it has been compromised.
• It will transmit to them the data of its observations.
• The probe will then render itself inoperable, wiping clean it's memory, and even its programming. Its artificial intelligence - its mind - would be rendered inert.
• The other nearby probes that had been alerted would inform their creators on their home world of what has happened.
• Those probes would then continue their observations as before.

If that series of events occurred we would still be able to examine the physical construction of the probe, but we would not be able to learn anything about its most important qualities: what it knows, where it comes from, and how it thinks. We would have to find a way of approaching the probe that would not trigger such a suicidal action. To do so we would have to persuade the probe that we are no threat, and to submit willingly to examination.

But how could we possibly learn to communicate with it at all, let alone convince it to cooperate with our requests?

The only way to do that would be to develop an equivalent artificial intelligence of our own. It would have to be close to the complexity of the probe's mind, and flexible enough to adapt rapidly to the probe's responses. Of course, it would have to be a very fast learner of a complex and utterly alien language (the extra-terrestrial probe would also need this ability).

We are a long way from developing such an artificial intelligence, and the current fears of the potential harm such an intelligence could do to our civilisation has the potential to hamper its development. It's a valid fear, but despite that fear such technology needs to be created. The development needs to be very carefully monitored and controlled, of course, if we are to avoid rendering our species irrelevant to superior artificial minds. We could achieve this by developing very specialised artificial intelligences that are only suitable for specific tasks, rather than artificial general intelligence (where the artificial intelligence can perform the same intellectual tasks that humans can), which should be avoided.

But why should artificial general intelligence be avoided?

One idea I find interesting, and a bit unsettling, is that intelligent extra-terrestrial probes may actually be the primary 'life-form' on their home planet. After a civilisation develops an advanced artificial intelligence, that intelligence eventually starts to improve on itself at an ever increasing rate, soon surpassing the intelligence of its creators. Such an event is known as a technological singularity. Soon the creators (the biological life-forms that built the initial artificial intelligence) do not have the ability to even understand the rapidly improving artificial intelligence. Its complexity and ability is beyond their comprehension. The artificial intelligence becomes the dominant 'species' on the planet, and eventually sets out to explore and colonise neighbouring star systems and beyond. Its creators become, at best, second class citizens, or at worst, extinct.

An extra-terrestrial civilisation where artificial intelligence is the dominant life-form

We should certainly push ahead with the development of sophisticated artificial intelligence, but as I stated earlier it should never be given the general intelligence ability of humans. It should be specialised for health care, engineering, exploration, construction or any other specific tasks we require to progress, maintain and expand our biological human civilisation.

And it certainly should be developed to facilitate communication with extra-terrestrial interstellar probes that are quite possibly watching our planet right now.