Popular culture, ranging from various forms of science fiction to mass delusions, is replete with imaginations of what alien extraterrestrial life and civilizations may look like and act like. Essentially all of it is direct projections and fears from the human past and present, human behavior, values, etc., represented as some variations of terrestrial life forms. Human activities like wars, invasions, colonization, feudal structures, princesses, swordfights, etc., are assigned to the ostensibly more advanced civilizations. In other words, these projections reflect a spectacular lack of imagination. In the science fiction domain, there are a few notable exceptions: writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem, Ted Chiang, and a few others wrote about extraterrestrial life and encounters that are like nothing that we know and maybe simply incomprehensible to humans.
Even the ostensibly scientific approaches to the searches for extraterrestrial civilizations and their technological manifestations, such as the radio-based SETI, suffer from the same weakness, by assuming that a putative advanced civilization would choose to communicate (a questionable assumption in itself) using a mid-20th century planet Earth technology in the way that we would understand. It is notable that in the early 20th century when radio communications were just invented, the three great inventors, Eddison, Tesla, and Marconi all believed that they detected radio signals from Mars at the wavelengths that do not pass through the Earth’s ionosphere (but they were unaware of it); Marconi even thought that the Martians used the Morse code to do so.
We now know that planets are common in the universe; as of this writing, over 5000 have been confirmed, and we estimate that there are a few hundred billion in the Milky Way alone. Some fraction of them is sufficiently Earth-like that they may support life that could be similar to the life that evolved on our planet. Thus, imagining what extraterrestrial life and intelligence may be like is a subject worthy of serious study.
A more rigorous approach assumes that only mathematics, physics, chemistry, and information theory may be truly universal and that the evolution of matter to ever greater complexity, reaching the emergence of intelligence and its evolution may be vastly different from what happened on our planet. On the other hand, we know from the convergent evolution in terrestrial biology that very similar, complex forms and behaviors can emerge through very different evolutionary paths. Astronomy now generates vast amounts of data over a full range of wavelengths, spanning the entire sky, and detecting billions of sources. Exploration of such data using objective Machine Learning techniques offers less biased approaches to searches for extraterrestrial technosignatures.
The rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which currently evolves on time scales that are about a million times faster than biological evolution, opens new possibilities. AI is based on vastly different principles, materials, and architectures than biological intelligence. In other words, we have created an alien intelligence on planet Earth, which is very different from us, and which evolves much faster. Not surprisingly, it has also triggered the same fears and projections in the popular culture as putative aliens did in the past: AI is the new Martians.
