Comments on: Will Aliens be Alien?

By: Marcia Space Travel

Marcia Space Travel — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:02:47 +0000

The idea that evolution leads to the “optimal” development of a species sounds more like religion – which talks about perfection (and leads to “theories” like Intelligent Design – than about science.

Species evolve so that they can manage to survive in their environment. Human beings manage to survive on Earth. We aren’t perfectly designed, however. An alien living on an Earth-like planet may be better or worse-suited for their environment than a human being. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that they can survive where they are.

By: etbe

etbe — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:10:50 +0000

I agree that it’s more likely that robots rather than biological entities will travel between stars. But I also predict that the biological forms that built the predecessors of any such robots that originated outside our solar system will be alien to us.

Also robot designs evolve too. How many arms will robots built in this solar system have in 1000 years time? I’m predicting that the majority will have two arms, not that two is inherently better, but all thought processes and all machine designs are based around two arms.

Robots are not immortal, among other things radiation can corrupt them. I think that any entity complex enough to be fully self-repairing will have the scope for something equivalent to cancer and that any entity capable of thought processes comparable in scope to ours will be at risk of psychological problems that can lead to suicide. Then of course there are super-novae and other significant events that will occur on occasion and sterilise large areas of space.

For robots to be infinitely adaptable it seems that they would have to be weakly godlike and therefore vastly different from anything we are likely to imagine.

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:46:59 +0000

Aliens will be robotic AI. They are near infinitely adaptable, scalable, immortal, and can handle enormous distances and eons of time without without the entourage of assistive devices a human would need to barely operate in the same capacity. They are the perfect space wayfarers and thus the first thing I’d expect to be coming guns a’ blazing from the other side of the universe.

By: Don Marti

Don Marti — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:30:19 +0000

By the time we meet them, how close will they be to their evolved ancestors and how much will they be designed? And how closely will our genetic engineering and cybernetics fields parallel theirs? Jonathan Coulton sang, “It’s gonna be the future soon, and I won’t always be this way, when the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away.”