Send AI to Space to Contact Aliens: A Bold New Strategy by Researchers
Hasn’t this become a reality, that the globe is now being covered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), which in turn provides us answers to everything we ask? Now, it is about time AI goes to space. Now some researchers are preparing to take AI off-world, not so much as an answerer on Earth but as a way of communicating with hypothetical alien civilizations. The idea, which sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, was recently outlined in an essay published by Scientific American.
For over 40 years, Frank Marchis and Ignacio G. López-Francos have devoted their lives to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) through space exploration efforts as the director of citizen science at SETI Institute and a principal research engineer at NASA, respectively. But they have so far not found any trace. They now think that the search is in need of another solution — AI.
According to the researchers, they have already tried a number of times over humanity’s history — also in the formative years of Star Trek— on an initiative like say seeding information about our species using something as experimental and grandiose or sophisticated as what many would be familiar with even from such science fiction classics (though executionally flawed!) starting with somewhat ignored Voyager Golden Record, but sadly speaking, spontaneity had not produced so great data. They argue that the growing power of artificial intelligence means we should be thinking about a different approach to searching for aliens. The researchers suggest in the essay that a language model such as ChatGPT should be made to speak with extraterrestrials, answer their queries, and offer some lessons on human behavior.
“Such ET intelligence hasn’t been found in 40 years of searching, and our messages go unanswered,” Marchis and López-Francos state. There’s no way we could prove that within our life on this planet. It might be time for a radical rethink. We are alien-curious scientists and we suggest improving METI not by disseminating music, maths, or short bios of ourselves but rather through the distribution of something more profound: a large language model reflecting the rich diversity of humanity as well as our highly complex planet.
The pair say that by beaming out this language model via laser (which moves quicker and is more directional than radio waves), they aim to transcend the great void between stars. The researchers also note it would take decades just to reach the closest star system, but argue that homing in on specific language models may quicken travel.
It would allow, in short, ETs on the other side of space to “talk” with us and to learn about who we are without our human-life delays across these vast distances between stars getting in their way. ALIEN: in one of our languages, ask the LLM questions about us and get back responses that are representative of humanity.
There are challenges to this method, but suffice it to say that one of the biggest might be how long a message would take just getting out as far even simply go our closest star systems. Current technology would make it take hundreds of years to send a full-sized LLM like Meta’s Llama-3-70B. The duo did suggest that if the model were shrunk down to just core information, and coupled with some “fancy laser systems,” transmission could then take less than 20 years – an achievable feat for humans. It would produce text, images, and sounds. Researchers, philosophers, and historians — the thinkers of our time — should decide what it will contain for researchers, philosophy-historians, etc… that would represent humanity as a whole,” Roy and Bonicki write in their collected paper.
But for all that the thought is futuristic and awesome, I do worry about sending AI out into ourselves? Meanwhile, other experts suggest that information of such an advanced alien civilization could be used to the detriment of humanity if it fell into its hands. However, the authors argue that finding evidence of life from beyond Earth would more than make up for it.