Superintelligent AI in space could explain the Fermi Paradox
Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to have a disruptive impact on many parts of humanity. But what does this mean in the long run? A new paper, available in Pre-print on arXiv From Austrian researcher Sergey IvliyevWhat does extrapolation do? Widespread adoption of AI Means for humanity’s future in space – and especially what this means for the ultimate question of whether or not we are really alone in the galaxy.
A framework for much of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence comes from here Famous Physicist Enrico FermiWho simply asked “Where is everyone?” In discussion over lunch at Los Alamos in the 1950s. Although never officially published, Fermi’s lunch partners from that day have given an oral history of that conversation that further solidifies it. search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), at least until Michael Hart formally presented the logic and mathematics for the underlying question in a paper in 1975.
There are lots of possible answers to the Fermi Paradox, many of which can be found floating around on the Internet – and some are probably more valid than others. But Ivliyev, a Ph.D. in mathematical economics and founder of environmental project consulting companies such as Peatland Ecosystems and Vlinder, suggests a new resolution: the cool expansion filter.
The paper’s central argument is that thousands of alien mega-structures lighting up the night sky are not because once a civilization reaches the threshold of Autonomous AI-Cosmoindustry (AICI), “vigorous”, resource-hungry empires motivated by prestige or romance become irrational. However, this does not mean that expansion stops; Instead, it switches to a “quiet” mode driven by rational goals such as survival diversification, knowledge preservation, and scientific observation.
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The AICI limit is reached when a civilization has a self-sufficient off-planet industrial and computational system capable of designing, manufacturing, repairing, and launching space hardware through AI-mediated autonomy. We are already taking tentative steps in this direction with the advent of space-based data centers, but true AICI – where a civilization can expand its infrastructure beyond its home planet without constant biological interference – is many times beyond our current capabilities.
In this vein, Ivliev builds on work by astrophysicists Sergei Popov, who noted that truly rational AI systems would reject human-like motivations for space travel – such as romance, conquest or prestige. Instead, AI will view space expansion as simple risk management.
For AI, putting all your eggs in one basket – even if that basket is a single planet, Solar systemOr even the galaxy itself, could cause a single point of failure. Therefore, expansion is highly logical as a way of reducing the risk posed by that single point of failure. At the point we have reached AICI, the cost of sending a 10 kg interstellar probe to another star at 1% of the speed of light is about 4.5×10^13 joules – a tiny fraction of the overall energy budget of such a civilization.
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One key aspect is that the 10kg test does not involve any real people – it lays the “seed” to restart life elsewhere in the event of a disaster in the domestic system. This would include knowledge of a civilization, and possibly some of its biological material, which would enable an AI sufficiently advanced to reconstruct an entire civilization from scratch. This is “quiet expansion” where an AI sends low-mass and hard-to-detect “seed systems” instead of moving millions of biological entities in giant interstellar space ships.
There are some additional constraints on this method of expansion, including selecting promising exoplanets discovered by remote sensing and deploying minimal local resources to sustain themselves until needed. Additionally, the AI will restrict self-replication of the probe to avoid any “grey goo” scenarios in an attempt to take over the entire area of the galaxy.
This has obvious implications for why we never found “loud” technosignatures. In this scenario, the “null” result of being unable to find the thermal signature of a Kardashev-III scale civilization does not mean that the galaxy is empty. It simply means that successful civilizations are living in a “cool” state in case it needs backup plans.
But this framework has another, more ominous implication. If interstellar backups are cheap to build, and we haven’t got one in our backyard, that means either we are one of the first civilizations to reach that point or the transition from a planetary industrial society to a space-based one is a narrow path. Supposedly, such civilizations that send probes are probably difficult to locate even in our own solar system, but if we are unable to do so, that means we are traversing uncharted territory – and may simply have slipped into a filter that has silenced the rest of the galaxy. This is a sobering thought, but one that should be kept in mind as we begin to advance our AI capabilities.
