The United Kingdom's foremost astronomer is cautioning British citizens that if and when we encounter alien life, it may be more bizarre — read: more artificially intelligent — than we could ever have imagined., British royal astronomer Lord Marin Rees maintains that it's not outlandish to consider the existence of AI aliens given that we humans are entering an age of AI ourselves.
"If this happens," Rees continues, "our species would have been just a brief interlude in Earth's history before the machines take over."Though we often imagine extraterrestrials as humanoid, or at least flesh-and-blood, there's a pretty good chance they could be "more artificial," the British lord contends, which "could explain why the cosmos seems so empty of life like us.
"It is perhaps more likely," he adds, "that the aliens would be the remote electronic progeny of other organic creatures that existed long ago."" effect that bottlenecks other types of life out of existence, but rather that other civilizations are far more artificially intelligent than ours.