A paper written by Oxford neuroscientists and Artificial Intelligence experts Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong, along with Milan Ćirković of the Belgrade Astronomical Observatory in Serbia, argues that very advanced civilizations could have explored a large chunk of the Universe.
To do this, it is necessary to think about the hypothesis of prolonged hibernation. Based on the assumption that the more advanced a society becomes, both culturally and technologically, the more likely it will be to transition from biological to completely (or almost) artificial.
If humans are already starting to build bionic body parts and devices that can combine a living brain with artificial intelligence, imagine what civilizations thousands, or even millions, of years old would have already achieved.
According to a NASA scientist, when searching for aliens in SETI, we shouldn’t limit our search to biological signs of life, we also need to look for extraterrestrials who have long ago advanced beyond blood and flesh to artificial intelligence.
The idea behind the article is that the most advanced civilizations would have discovered how to abandon their inefficient and death-prone biological bodies by uploading their minds into a machine, making processing power the most precious resource of all.
The hypothesis argues that if processing power is the only resource sustaining this civilization, the right conditions are crucial for continued advancement.
“There is a thermodynamic cost to running temperature-dependent information processing: in principle, running processing becomes 10 times more efficient if your computer is 10 times cooler. Right now, the cosmic background radiation does almost everything in the Universe hotter than 3 degrees Kelvin, but as the Universe expands, this temperature will decrease exponentially”, explain Sandberg and Ćirković.
In this way, post-biological aliens could consider putting themselves into “sleep mode” to ignore present conditions.
However, not all scientists are convinced by this logic. Astrophysics and science fiction expert David Brin said in an interview that it doesn’t make much sense to forego thousands or millions of years of advancement only to end up in a more energy-efficient future.
The study was published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.
