Thursday, December 6, 2018
as if It Is, to be known
I'm glad to see this article, “NASA Scientist: 'We May Have Missed Signals from Aliens Capable of Interstellar Travel,’”especially since it's sponsored by S.E.T.I.
I wrote to Seth Shostak (lead astronomer for SETI) recently that he shouldn't be so dismissive of unexplained Unidentified Aerial Phenomena ("UFO"s), as he has been. He didn't reply. I look forward to reading the Ames/SETI discussion that is referenced.
If there are vast differences in the technologies of The Other and ourselves, there would be no discernible relationship between “intelligence we might find and that might choose to find us.” What finds us would recognize that It isn’t to be found yet.
So, the “natural” result might be to prompt us to look for what we’re not yet looking for. Our appreciation that there are Other entities here would be a milestone comparable to Edwin Hubble’s neo-Copernican discovery that “the Universe” of pre-1923 was merely an “island universe” among countless galaxies. In other words, if there are entities here, that will not be understood by searching out there (and which anyway aren’t to be captured here—as I note in a little detail below).
“Are you ready to know what it is to not be Alone?—to know that there are entities millions of years beyond you that are very aware of you?”
And the speed of light might not be an ultimate barrier: We write about Dark Energy/Matter as if being in space-time, but actually DE/M is outside of space-time as we know it. It’s affecting space-time itself. Gravitational waves are showing energies in which space-time exists (i.e., DE/M is perpendicular to space-time itself, in a realm of being that is all of that).
Communicability outside of space-time could provide relatively immediate linkages between entities within space-time. That is, a probe sent out a hundred thousand years ago that is here may be available to the sender as readily as something in space-time is available to us a year away.
So, Colombano (the SETI article author quoted in the Daily Galaxy article) is understating his observation that “we need to re-visit even our most cherished assumptions.”
Indeed, “the size of the ‘explorer’ might be that of an extremely tiny super-intelligent entity,” a point I coyly prospected 12 years ago. It’s not great extrapolation of our own technological evolution that computational miniaturization will soon yield robots as tiny as flies, and as uncapturable as a hummingbird.
If an axial synthetic intelligence (that manages terrestrial entities) was stationed at a Lagrange Point, we wouldn’t detect It (being technologically far beyond our capacity to be radar immune), if It regarded detection as dangerous.
And think of how an octopus can camouflage its presence. Extrapolate that to body-shape plasticity. We accept “morphing’ in computer animation. Why can’t an entity look like a tree branch?
And the synthetic forest of branches could be planetary, and simultaneously present in Itself.
Of course, this is silliness. But it’s physically feasible. And it’s Our legacy to seek to do whatever is physically feasible that is scientifically promising.
Synthetic intelligence that is millions of years beyond us would exist because existence remains interesting. That may be the ultimate meaning of “life”: to keep existence interesting, as the galaxies speed away from each other, with perhaps many intelligences connected outside of space-time, a web in the DE/M fluidity.
Before writing the above, I wrote something that I thought I should abandon. Now, in effect, it’s a little prologue that’s antedated by what’s above. So, I might as well attach it:
Carbon-based life here is well on the way to becoming a tightly integrated singularity through hyper-efficient communications technology such that the superintelligence that emerges will be massively distributed in the form of life that we are. At the same time, the exponential evolution of specialized A.I. will become so integrated with robotics that we might well regard leading humanity as becoming a single biotechnological organism. In short, the difference between massively distributed bio-intelligence (“superintelligence”) and synthetic intelligence (i.e., dissolution of the A.I./robotics separation) will make excursions to other star systems post-bionic extensions of our planetary Singularity. That is, thinking of life spans becomes irrelevant. Waves of probes sent out over thousands of years may result in a continuous feedback process, endlessly. Planetary intelligence may lose a clear distinction between planetary self-presence and exploratory self-presence. “Robotic” parts of Ourself may becoming circulating aspects of countless excursions in other star systems.
