Motherboard ripropone l’idea che se un giorno ci scontreremo con degli alieni, questi potrebbero essere basati su silicone più che carbonio. Se c’è una forma di vita qua fuori — scrive Vice — probabilmente è artificiale. In primo luogo per quella che Schneider (professore di filosofia all’università del Connecticut) definisce short window observation:
The reason for all this has to do, primarily, with timescales. For starters, when it comes to alien intelligence, there’s what Schneider calls the “short window observation”—the notion that, by the time any society learns to transmit radio signals, they’re probably a hop-skip away from upgrading their own biology. […]
“As soon as a civilization invents radio, they’re within fifty years of computers, then, probably, only another fifty to a hundred years from inventing AI,” Shostak said. “At that point, soft, squishy brains become an outdated model.” […]
Most of the radio-hot civilizations out there are probably thousands to millions of years older than us. […] “The way you reach this conclusion is very straightforward,” said Shostak. “Consider the fact that any signal we pick up has to come from a civilization at least as advanced as we are. Now, let’s say, conservatively, the average civilization will use radio for 10,000 years. From a purely probabilistic point of view, the chance of encountering a society far older than ourselves is quite high.”
Perché non ci siamo scontrati con nessuna forma di intelligenza fino ad ora — e perché questa, se più evoluta di noi, ci ignora? Shostak (direttore alla NASA di SETI, acronimo per Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) dice che siamo interessanti tanto quanto un pesciolino rosso: irrilevanti. Non vuoi del male al tuo pesciolino rosso, e nemmeno vuoi leggerci dei libri assieme.
“I’d have to agree with Susan on them not being interested in us at all,” Shostak said. We’re just too simplistic, too irrelevant. “You don’t spend a whole lot of time hanging out reading books with your goldfish. On the other hand, you don’t really want to kill the goldfish, either.”
(Via Hypertext)