Searching for aliens

Here's what I don't understand about the alien civilizations that send spacecraft to Earth and abduct people in their sleep to subject them to mysterious experiments back on board the Mothership: Why don't they just read about it on the Internet? We're posting genomic data about human beings and other organisms right there on the Web. Isn't the abduction thing a lot of fuss and bother? I know what you're going to say: The aliens aren't just interested in our DNA, they also want to map our aura, our chakra and the source of our chi energy. That's right: They're technological, but they're also really into yoga.

From a purely scientific standpoint, the great mystery of aliens is why we haven't found any yet. You know: the Fermi Paradox. "Where are they?" Fermi suddenly blurted out in a conversation in 1950.

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is 50 years old this month. It was April 8, 1960, that Frank Drake used a telescope at Green Bank, W. Va., for the first search for radio signals from other worlds. It's the subject of a new book, "The Eerie Silence," by Paul Davies, who is one of my favorites -- imaginative, smart, lucid. He's sort of a throwback natural philosopher who takes on cutting-edge ideas about time, space, life, God, the whole ball of wax.

Davies thinks we should throw out any and all assumptions about what alien intelligence might be like. Classic SETI supposes that ET will intentionally send radio signals; Davies thinks we should be more focused on detecting anything anomalistic in our astronomical observations. He also suspects that ET will quickly evolve out of a flesh-and-blood state and become a form of artificial intelligence.

A similar argument has been advanced by Seth Shostak, who last year sent me the abstract of a talk in which he outlines the reasons for expanding traditional SETI strategy to encompass the possibility that civilizations of artificial intelligence may be inhabiting what we'd call empty places in the galaxy -- that is, places other than rocky, Earth-like planets.

Shostak's reasoning is that, once artificial intelligence reaches a certain threshold, it becomes a bit of a runaway train (pardon the weak metaphor; it's actually a runaway brain of sorts). Machine intelligence is immortal. Interstellar travel is possible, and the time it takes to get somewhere is unimportant when you live forever. Shostak goes on:

"... the restriction to watery worlds is not one that such intelligence is required to heed. Indeed, it's unclear that they need be situated on planets at all. The interstellar flux in our part of the Galaxy is roughly a watt per square kilometer of collector. Consequently, it's not inconceivable that efficient machines could be situated anywhere, not just in the immediate neighborhoods of stars. "While low-power machinery might eke out an existence between the stars, the intellectual giants of the universe - machines able to expand their computational activities far beyond what we can conceive - might be prodigious consumers of energy. That suggests that these alpha male sentients might repair to regions of high energy density, for instance the center of the Galaxy. For the machines, for whom the trip to the center is only an inconsequential inconvenience, and for whom the bad environment would be tolerable, this might be a desirable place to set up shop."

Shostak thinks we should search for intelligence in and around Bok globules. I'm a little fuzzy on what a Bok globule is, but I'll take Shostak's word for it that such things might be loaded to the gills with aliens.

Shostak's idea is similar to something Freeman Dyson has been saying for a long time: That life will adapt to space and find habitats in places we would find inhospitable, such as the Oort Cloud.

I do wonder if this migration to artificiality, from flesh-and-blood to machine, is an inevitability for any intelligent species. Sure, it's happen to me personally, but this isn't about me. Maybe the artificial aliens will realize that they want to evolve still further -- back to being meat creatures.

This subject is one to be approached, of course, with intellectual modesty. Let us recall something Stephen Jay Gould said to me back when I was researching my book "Captured By Aliens":

"No data."

We know of exactly one example of life in the universe. Until we have more data, everything's possible -- and we truly don't know what we're talking about.

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For space policy buffs: Here's a statement from Norm Augustine about Obama's space strategy. I think it needed an editor: