aliens – Militant Futurist

Among people who think about intelligent alien life, the first question is whether the latter exist at all, and the second is usually “What do they look like?” People who claim to have seen aliens on Earth (and often, to have been abducted by them) usually say they are humanoid, but with considerable variation in other aspects of their appearance. Typically, the aliens are said to have larger heads than humans, meaning their brains are larger, giving them higher intelligence and perhaps even special mental abilities like telepathy. Hollywood has provided us with an even more diverse envisagement of alien life, from the beautiful and inspiring to the grotesque and terrifying.

Betty Hill with a sculpture of one of the aliens that allegedly abducted her and her husband in 1961. They became famous five years later when a book was published about it.

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was released in 1977 and was a hit film. Its aliens were similar to what the Hills described. The “Grey alien” is now a familiar sci-fi trope.

I think intelligent aliens exist, and look like all of those things, and nothing in particular. They’re probably “shapeshifters,” either because their bodies can morph into different configurations, or because they can transplant their minds from one body to another, just like you change outfits.

As the multitude of animal species on our planet demonstrates, there is no single “best” type of body to have. Depending on your environment (terrestrial, underwater, airborne), role (predator, herbivore, parasite), and other factors, your optimal body plan will vary greatly. The best species is thus one that can change its form and function in response to the needs of the moment.

Humans have been so successful as a species because our big brains and opposable thumbs give us the ability to create technology, which is a way around the limitations of our fixed anatomy. For example, we originated in Africa where it was hot, and so lacked thick fur to keep us warm in cold climates. Rather than being stuck in Africa forever, we invented clothing, and so gained the ability to spread to the temperate and polar regions of the planet.

Our technology has let us spread, but its has limitations. Nothing but a fundamental alteration of human biology will let us live in oceans and lakes, to fly naturally, or to live comfortably in extraterrestrial environments. For example, on other planets and moons, our ideal heights and limb proportions will vary based on gravity and temperature levels, and in the weightlessness of space, legs are almost useless and should be replaced with a second pair of arms.

And making any of those changes to tailor a human to such an environment would make them less suited for conditions on Earth’s land surface, where we are now. Biology is very constraining.

For those reasons, AI’s and some fraction of our human descendants, who I’ll call “posthumans” for this essay, will find it optimal to not have fixed bodies or “default” physical forms at all. Intelligent machines will exist as consciousnesses running on computer servers, and posthumans as brains inside sealed containers. Those containers will have integral machinery to support the biological needs of the brains, and to interface the organ with other devices.

Whenever the AIs or posthumans wanted to do something in the physical world, they would take temporary control of a body or piece of machinery that was best suited for the intended task. For example, if an AI wanted to work at an iron mine, it would assume control over one of the dump trucks at the site that moves around rocks. The AI would see through the truck’s cameras as if it were its own eyes, and hear its surroundings through the vehicle’s microphones. In a sense, the dump truck would become the AI’s “body.” If a posthuman wanted to experience what it was like to be an elephant, it would take control of a real-looking robot elephant whose central computer was compatible with the posthuman’s cybernetic brain implants. The posthuman’s nervous system would be connected to the artificial elephant’s sensors, effectively turning it into the posthuman’s temporary body.

AIs and posthumans could physically implant their minds into those bodies by inserting their servers or brain containers into corresponding slots in the bodies, in the same way you would put a movie disc into a Blu-Ray player to display that movie. The downsides of this are 1) they could only take over larger bodies that had enough internal space for their servers/brain containers and 2) they would put themselves at risk of death if the commandeered bodies got damaged.

A much better option would be for AIs and posthumans to keep their mind substrates in safe locations, and to remotely control whatever bodies they wanted. Your risk of death is very low if your brain is in a bulletproof jar, in a locked room, in an underground bunker. (Additionally, if posthumans were liberated from all the physical constraints of human skulls and bodies, their brains could grow much larger than our own, giving them higher intelligence and other enhanced abilities.)

This kind of existence will be more fulfilling than your current life.

Finally, being able to switch bodies and to indulge in risky activities without fear of death would make life richer and more satisfying in every way. Intelligent aliens would presumably be gifted with logical thinking just as we are, and they would see all these advantages of having changeable, remotely controlled bodies. While such aliens would probably look very different from us during their natural organic phase of existence, once they achieved a high enough level of technology, they wouldn’t have physical bodies anymore, and so wouldn’t look “alien.” They would look like nothing and everything.

This part of why I’m skeptical of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens who tried to cover up their actions by sneaking up on the people at night and then “wiping” the abductees’ memories of the event afterward. If aliens wanted to keep their activities secret, why wouldn’t they temporarily assume human form before abducting people? If they did that, then the abductees would assume they had been kidnapped by a weird cult or maybe a secret government group. Their stories would not attract nearly as much interest from the public as alien stories, and no one would suspect that the abduction phenomenon was related to alien life. It would be assumed that the henchmen were doing some dark religious rituals, were sex fetishists, or were doing medical experiments that were illegal but whose results were potentially valuable.

Have you ever checked to make sure every bird you see flying through the air is actually a real bird?

Surely, if aliens are advanced enough to travel between the stars, their space ships much have manufacturing machines that can scan life forms they encounter on other planets and then build robotic copies of them that the aliens can remotely control from the safety of their ships. Using fake human drones, they could ambush and abduct real humans almost anywhere without risk that anyone would suspect aliens were involved.

A team of scientists built a robot gorilla (right) with a camera in its right eye to infiltrate a troop of real gorillas in Africa.

This belief about the protean nature of advanced aliens is comforting since it lets me dismiss the stories of nightmarish abductions by grey aliens. However, it’s also disquieting since it makes me realize they could be here, possibly in large numbers, disguised as animals or even as people. We could be under mass surveillance.

…when it came to subjects outside of his expertise?

That is the question. I ask it because, in the aftermath of Stephen Hawking’s death, I’ve seen several news articles about alarmist predictions he made towards the end of his life. This article is actually one of the less sensational ones I read: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43408961

Stephen Hawking was literally a genius and one of the world’s greatest minds, but his education and professional expertise were in theoretical physics and cosmology (the study of how our universe was created and how it evolved). Moreover, his most important contributions pertained to black holes, an interesting yet extremely esoteric subject. Put simply, though Stephen Hawking was unquestionably brilliant, his brilliance was narrowly focused and didn’t equip him to make pronouncements about topics like global warming and killer robots. While everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, I disliked how Hawking’s opinions always carried special weight and attracted public attention, even when those opinions were about things far outside his expertise.

As I said in my past blog entry Rules for good futurism, predictions always be analyzed systematically, and the first step in the analysis is to ensure that the person who made the prediction actually has relevant academic or professional credentials. In several instances, Hawking failed this basic test.

In 2017, he predicted:

“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump’s [decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement] could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid.”

Stephen Hawking had no education in climatology and contributed nothing to the field. Moreover, his words suggest that he may not even have understood the Paris Climate Agreement, which has been criticized as weak to the point of being almost meaningless (countries can make up whatever pollution goals they want–including goals to increase their emissions–and there’s no punishment for failing to meet them). To that end, consider that even though President Trump effectively withdrew the U.S. from the Agreement in mid-2017, U.S. carbon emissions for that year still fell, whereas China–one of the Agreement’s signatories–saw its carbon emissions grow. Both of those trends are continuing well into 2018.

Hawking’s gloomy vision of a Venus-like future Earth is also unsupported by reputable climate models. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme estimates of future global warming fall well below 250 degrees (Celsius or Fahrenheit), and there is still considerable doubt over whether the catastrophic climate “tipping points” Hawking appears to be referencing exist, and if so, whether we are nearing any of them. Finally, Venus’ sulfuric acid rain was caused by volcanic activity, and not by global warming. Even if the Earth gets much hotter in the future, that won’t make volcanoes erupt more.

Stephen Hawking also made predictions about intelligent aliens in 2010:

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans…We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”

Though Stephen Hawking spent his life studying “space stuff” like black holes and the expansion of the universe, that left him scarcely better-equipped than an average person to speculate about aliens. While it’s possible that advanced aliens could come here with hostile intent, his apparent certainty in this outcome–made clear through his use of the definite “would be”–is unsupported by any facts. We have no clue what advanced aliens would be like, so we can’t even assign gross probabilities to how they would behave towards us (hostile, helpful, indifferent).

While I agree with Hawking that we should err on the side of caution and minimize humanity’s “leakage” of radio signals into space to hide from any hostile aliens that might be listening, I think it’s very important to realize that this is just a prudent course of action any person would settle upon if they thought hard about the problem. Stephen Hawking’s superior intellect did not let him go any farther, and the insight didn’t become any more valid once he made it known he shared it. To be clear, Hawking was not the first to advocate such a cautious course of action: three years before his aforementioned prediction, an American diplomat and science writer named “Michael Michaud” said the same thing in his book Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials. I suspect the idea actually predates Michaud by many years, but I didn’t have enough time to research its origins further.

In 2014, Hawking also shared thoughts about home-grown threats to humanity, in the form of hostile A.I.:

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race…It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Again, Stephen Hawking’s prediction is nothing new, nor does he appear credentialed to speak on this matter with real authority. The idea of a robot uprising destroying the human race dates back to the famous 1920 Czech play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the theory that intelligent machines could enter a cycle of runaway self-improvement was first postulated by the British mathematician I.J. Good in 1965, and the observation that computers are getting smarter at a faster rate than humans are should be obvious to anyone who compares their cell phone to the one they had ten years ago. There’s nothing insightful about Hawking restating a few, closely related ideas that have been embedded in the popular consciousness in one way or another for decades (mostly thanks to science fiction films).

And even though Stephen Hawking famously used computers and a robotic wheelchair to overcome his speech- and motor impairments, he had no experience working on artificial intelligence, which is a sub-field of computer science (his education was instead in physics and math). Similarly, I depend on my car for daily transportation and am proficient at using it, but that doesn’t mean I know anything about automotive engineering.

And in 2016, he issued this dire (depending on your time horizon I guess) warning:

“I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet…Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”

From past comments, it’s likely Hawking saw extreme climate change, nuclear or biological war, alien invasion, hostile A.I. uprising, and extinction-level natural events like asteroid impacts as the potential causes of that epic “disaster,” but he never explained how he calculated that one or more of them would happen for sure by his 1,000 to 10,000 year deadline, meaning his prediction runs afoul of another step in my analysis: “Be skeptical of predictions that are unsupported by independently verifiable data.” In truth, the probabilities of any of those misfortunes happening are unknown, making a future risk assessment impossible. For example, it’s entirely likely that a planet- or even continent-killing asteroid isn’t on course to hit Earth for another 20,000 years, by which time we’ll have space weapons that can easily deflect it.

In closing, Stephen Hawking’s discoveries in theoretical physics and cosmology changed our view of the universe itself, but his doomsday predictions added nothing new. Let me be clear: I didn’t write this to denigrate Hawking or to make myself sound smarter than he was, but rather, I wrote it as a reminder that no one knows everything, and future predictions should always be carefully scrutinized, regardless of how famous, smart, or seemingly benevolent the person making them may be. As a scientist, I think he would have actually appreciated these precepts, even if they worked against him in the handful of instances I’ve highlighted.

Links

Tag: aliens

Aliens and posthumans will look the same

Was Stephen Hawking any smarter than you?