Aliens Won’t Be Little Green Beings, They’ll Be AI Machines

Credit: cfhdesign / Adobe Stock

Sightings of hovering UFOs were at an all-time high in 2020, but we have yet to snap up an image of the extraterrestrials, or aliens, aboard their floating ships. Astronomers and scientists are sure that extraterrestrial life exists, including intelligent beings, but exactly how these beings will take shape is what alludes to us. 

There has certainly been a fair share of attempts to portray aliens, from E.T. trying to phone home back in the early 1980s to the Alien franchise spanning five decades, these sci-fi extraterrestrials have all had a similar organic look. Think green sinewy arms, oversized eyes, slime oozing over their upright bodies, and sharp teeth. 

Aliens are not what we are expecting

However, Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the Seti Insititute, an organization that has been looking for extraterrestrial life for over 50 years, strongly believes those iconic E.T. portrayals have nothing to do with the real deal. Instead, life forms from other planets or universes won’t be life forms, they’ll be AI or synthetic intelligence. 

Shostak has been publicly sharing his knowledge and views about extraterrestrial life forms for years, such as with the BBC in 2016, and just this week with The Guardian. 

The most compelling reason Shostak believes extraterrestrials won’t be organic life forms like us is that if they ever pay us a visit on Earth — something this physics isn’t too keen on — they’ll have had to travel over staggering distances to the stars. 

For example, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, sits 75 trillion miles from us, which would currently take our rockets 75,000 years to reach, per Shostak. No human form of life can endure that trip, so Shostak posits that any being that can do so will have to be a machine. 

Granted, Shostak also makes the argument that beings living out there could have faster spacecraft, and would likely be much more advanced than us — but that only adds to his belief that those beings would, in fact, be AI. 

So, gather your binoculars and be prepared to see… a machine.