Posted on Dec 5, 2018
“While it is still reasonable and conservative to assume that life is most likely to have originated in conditions similar to ours, the vast time differences in potential evolutions render the likelihood of “matching” technologies very slim,” says Silvano P. Colombano at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
In a new paper calling for a more aggressive search for advanced extraterrestrial life In light of our most recent understanding of the age of the planetary systems that might support life, NASA scientist, Silvano P. Colombano, in the Intelligent Systems Division, thinks we have missed alien life that’s not a carbon-based organism like Earth’s human species.
“Our form of life and intelligence,” Colombano observes, “may just be a tiny first step in a continuing evolution that may well produce forms of intelligence that are far superior to ours and no longer based on carbon “machinery”. After a mere 50 years of computer evolution we are already talking about “super-intelligence” and we are quickly becoming symbiotic with computer power. I don’t want to address here the issue of the survival of our species, or its future “role” within a continuing evolution of millions of years. I simply want to point out the fact that the intelligence we might find and that might choose to find us (if it hasn’t already) might not be at all be produced by carbon based organisms like us.”
Colombano said there were certain aspects of UFO sightings that cannot be explained. In his paper published by SETI, he said there may be some signals we have missed when it comes to looking for UFOs. “We should consider the UFO phenomenon worthy of study in the context of a system with very low signal to noise ratio, but nevertheless with the possibility of challenging some of our assumptions and pointing to new possibilities for communication and discovery.”
“We should study UFO reports as a low signal to noise ratio phenomenon. Big Data Analysis could approach several existing data bases such as 130,000 pages of declassified U.S. Air Force documents, National UFO Reporting Center Database and several other international data bases.”
“In the very large amount of ‘noise’ in UFO reporting there may be ‘signals’, however small, that indicate some phenomena that cannot be explained or denied,” Colombano said. The arrival of a UFO could have been overlooked because of the unlikelihood of interstellar travel, he said but this is something he said aliens have mastered.
“Even if the speed of light continues to be an unbreakable barrier, over spans of thousands of years civilizations could probably make interstellar journeys,” he observed. “I think we need to re-visit even our most cherished assumptions.”
“How might that change the above assumptions about interstellar travel? Our typical life-spans would no longer be a limitation (although even these could be dealt with multi-generational missions or suspended animation), and the size of the “explorer” might be that of an extremely tiny super-intelligent entity.
The Daily Galaxy via NEW ASSUMPTIONS TO GUIDE SETI RESEARCH, NASA Ames Research Center