Exobiology was the original term given to the sciences central to the question of life-in-the-Universe. It’s now been largely replaced by Astrobiology, but I’ll stick with the original. To investigate life-in-the-Universe one needs to look at what the most likely distribution of extraterrestrial life will be apart from Little Green Microbes. Assuming one or more extraterrestrial civilizations with advanced, interstellar spaceflight capability exists – then what? Perhaps they send out something with the real right stuff; something that better survives the rigors of space and adopts the NASA philosophy of faster, better, cheaper.
Obviously when it comes to exploring space, the ideal is to send your flesh-and-blood self. But, there are lots of negatives to sending out flesh-and-blood relative to steel and silicon. It costs a lot more to send humans to the Moon or Mars than unmanned probes, and unmanned probes need a lot less in the way of life supporting resources. And if they crash land, well nobody gets hurt or killed.
So, a second way to explore is to attach a bit of intelligence to what you send out, yet still keeping things small and light. Nanotechnology and miniaturisation of not carbon, but silicon is an option. It’s artificial intelligence (AI) in mankind’s image. So, we send out to the stars, molasses fashion, intelligent probes; the sort of AI probes that can make decisions about ultimate planetary destinations when they reach those stars. They chose real estate where they can land, use local resources to make copies of them, and boldly go onto another destination. These are known as Von Neumann probes. Note that again, no expenditure of life support resources is required. The drawback here is that Von Neumann probes spread out and colonize what amounts to our intelligence, but not our biology. Whether or not Von Neumann machines would evolve on their own would I guess depend on what sort of artificial intelligence they were programmed with initially.
100% machines – artificial intelligences in the form of cybernetic ‘organisms’ or robots or androids or tiny nanotechnology machines – well one obviously thinks of Data from ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, or something akin to the original ‘Battlestar Galactica’ Cylons. Think of the savings in not having to provide life support and other life essentials for biological organisms. We’ve made a start already down this path. There’s nothing different in principle between a Cylon and our Pioneer 10 & 11 or our Voyager space probes. It’s just that a Cylon is a lot more sophisticated. The day will come when our Pioneers and Voyagers will morph into something approaching a Cylon, or any one of multi-dozens of similar ‘beings’ in the sci-fi literature. Since AI is nearly immortal (relative to flesh-and-blood), that takes care of the lengthy travel time arguments, and the possible hostile environments fit for relative easy exploration (colonization?) are expanded greatly.
There’s one approach in particular I find compelling. Extraterrestrial intelligences will (at least initially) explore their cosmic environment via interstellar unmanned probes, not unlike the above mentioned Pioneer 10 and 11, or Voyager 1 & 2 probes, albeit ours were local explorers not designed to explore other solar systems. The advantages of the (initial) unmanned approach is that such probes will be lightweight (no shielding or other life support systems required) and one-way, probably nuclear powered during flight, perhaps solar powered at voyage’s end. The main components would be bits for broadcasting, detection instrumentation, and propulsion. Such probes, designed to survey only ‘seek out new life [in general] and new civilizations [in particular]’ (among other scientific objectives) would be passive. They would scan alien solar systems for biological signatures (like planetary atmospheres in chemical disequilibrium) and zero in on those listening for indications of electromagnetic radiation with intelligent signatures. The probes wouldn’t actively broadcast to such worlds, rather communicate back any findings to their home world’s civilization – again, alert that populace of a potential neighbour which could also be a potential (short or long term) threat.
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