AI Aliens: What If Extraterrestrial Life Is Artificially Intelligent?

Ever since then, the idea that we may not be alone in the universe has captivated the human imagination. From tales of the “man in the Moon”, to Wells (and Welles) induced hysteria, to Mork from Ork and ET phoning home, stories about aliens looking down on us from above or even coming to meet us in person have always proved popular. But despite the many various shapes these visitors have taken, there’s one thing they all seem to have in common: they’re all organic.

With the possible exception of Data (and Lore, we suppose), our visions of non-human intelligent beings are almost exclusively alive: developed through natural evolution; generated and born from biological material donated from some kind of parent; the whole messy gig. But… is that really how it would be?

Turns out, there’s a lot of people out there who think not. Alien life, they think – assuming we ever meet it – might be less “ET” – and more “AI”.

Could they be right?

Little green men? Unlikely

When it comes to envisioning life from other planets, most of us have sadly limited imaginations. At least, that’s what an interested observer would be forced to conclude from our media: “the iconic aliens of film and TV […] are no more than modified humans,” wrote Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute – the acronym stands for “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence” – in a 2021 article for The Guardian. 

Yes, they may have pointy ears, or forehead ridges; perhaps they’re short and have weird football heads and extra-long glowy fingers; maybe they’re just more irritating than anything known to humankind – but ultimately, they’re just – well, not all that alien, Shostak said.

“Their four appendages, upright stance, and absence of body hair are simple extrapolations of ourselves,” he wrote. “Yes, Hollywood offers up these beings as residents of faraway worlds. But really they’re just the guy next door, lacking in eyebrows and whites in their eyes.”

That’s undeniably weird, when you think about it. Even just here on Earth, life takes all kinds of weird and wonderful forms: we have muppetish murder-birds and nightmarish fish that come with their own headlamps and dissolve when they mate; we have monkeys in both “decadent mob boss” and “thieving bastard” varieties; we even have whatever the hell is going on in Madagascar. 

Those, as weird as they are, are all creatures we share DNA with. They may be far away from us in the sprawling family tree of evolution, but it’s ultimately the same damn plant. Not so for extra-terrestrials: “Any aliens that trek to our planet are unlikely to be carbon-based life forms, either hirsute or hairless,” Shostak predicted. “Their cognitive abilities will probably not be powered by a spongy mass of cells we’d call a brain.” 

In fact, Shostak goes further. “They will probably have gone beyond biological smarts and, indeed, beyond biology itself,” he wrote. “They won’t be alive.”

The case for AI

Could humanity’s first interaction with alien life really be just interfacing with artificial intelligence (AI)? It sounds outlandish – the product of one too many futurist thought experiments to the head – but the practical arguments are convincing.

“The reason is a simple consequence of the staggering distances to the stars,” Shostak argued. “Even the nearest, Proxima Centauri, is 25 [trillion] miles from Earth. Our fastest rockets would take 75,000 years to reach it.”

Immortal jellyfish notwithstanding, that sort of timeframe is simply not feasible for most biological life. And sure, perhaps you’re about to bring up Star Trek and subspace travel – but (unlike surprisingly many sci-fi gadgets and concepts) as far as anybody knows so far, that’s nothing more than a fictional MacGuffin: “the Galaxy may house societies that are millions or even billions of years ahead of Homo sapiens,” Shostak wrote. “Their technology might be in a different league[.]”

But “the aliens must operate under the same laws of physics,” he wrote – and faster-than-light travel simply doesn’t fit within that framework.

It’s not only organic beings’ pathetically limited lifespans that this affects. Suppose some intergalactic traveler encounters a surprise black hole or asteroid field, and has to course correct – well, that requires some level of intelligence. 

“So far, humanity only explored space with robots that are operated by Earth-based commands,” pointed out Avi Loeb, the Baird Professor of Science and Institute director at Harvard University and author of Extraterrestrial and Interstellar, in an essay last year. 

But for interstellar or intergalactic travel, that’s simply “not a viable option,” he wrote, “because of the long time-delay in communications even at the speed of light, the faintness of the communication signal at great distances, and the inability to transmit all of the relevant information over a reasonable time.”

The solution: “we will need to send out probes that can make their own decisions based on circumstances,” Loeb predicted, and “Artificial Intelligence (AI) would provide the brain of these autonomous space probes.”

And once those machines get smart enough, they will presumably be capable of – well, of procreating, basically. “Machine intelligence can evolve much more quickly than biological intelligence,” Shostak told Popular Mechanics earlier this year, “and if you use it to design the next generation for machines, you can use those machines to design the next generation, and so on.”

Before too long – and we mean really, not that long at all – you have an entity more intelligent than the organic creatures that made it. “Researchers who work in AI estimate that machines able to beat humans on an IQ test will emerge from the labs by mid-century,” Shostak wrote. “If we can do it, some extraterrestrials will have already done it.”

“Therefore[,] it’s reasonable to expect that any cosmic intelligence paying us a visit will be synthetic.”

IT phone home?

If we do ever meet alien life, then, what should we expect? For astronomers like Shostak and Loeb, as well as other big names like UK Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, the answer is clear – and to be honest, rather humbling.

“Most people are under the illusion that there is nothing better than human intelligence,” Loeb told Popular Mechanics. “They talk about consciousness [and] free will as qualities that only humans are able to possess.” 

But “I think once the AI systems have more parameters than the human brain, they will show the qualities we call free will [and] consciousness,” he said.

This arguably reduces our chances of ever finding proof of alien life. Much of the search for extra-terrestrial life at the moment concentrates on looking for things like water or food – things we know are necessary for life on Earth, and therefore assume must be important for other organic beings. But for AI beings, no such limitations exist: they would likely not be motivated by human or human-like desires; neither would they be scared or angered by things we see as dangers. They “may have no use for an atmosphere, or the planet on which they originated,” Rees wrote in 2023; “Indeed, they may prefer to live in zero-gravity,” or “to hibernate for billions of years until the cosmic microwave background […] is further cooled by the continuing expansion of the Universe.”

But here’s a question: what if they find us first? 

Well, to be honest, we probably shouldn’t worry too much. For one thing, if any artificially intelligent aliens do reach us, and have ill intentions toward our planet… well, there’s not going to be a lot we can do about it. “Frankly, if that’s what’s on their mechanical minds, it’s probably impossible to keep them at bay,” wrote Shostak. 

“Devices who can manage a trip to Earth will have the capability to do whatever they wish once they get here.”

Still, it may not be all that bad. AI aliens might simply decide that, like a particularly successful microbe or species of ant, we’re overall not all that interesting. 

“I don’t know that coming to Earth would even interest aliens,” Shostak told Popular Mechanics. “If they’re smarter than us, they probably can’t be bothered with the idea that they’re going to come to Earth to destroy our cities – that’s a lot of effort and expense. They don’t need to do that if they have machine intelligence.”

After all, when we imagine alien life, we base it on ourselves – both how they look, and also how they think. “We have evolved through Darwinian pressures to be an expansionist species,” Rees pointed out. “Selection has favored intelligence but also aggression.” 

“But if Darwinian pressures do not apply to these artificial entities,” he wrote, “there’s no reason why they should be aggressive. They may just want to think deep thoughts.”