What if the aliens we are looking for are AI?
假如外星人是人工智能会怎样？
For more than a century we have been broadcasting our presence to the cosmos. This year, the faintest signals from the world’s first major televised event – the Nazi-hosted 1936 Olympics – will have passed several potentially habitable planets. The first season of Game of Thrones has already reached the nearest star beyond our Solar System.
近100年来，我们一直在向宇宙发出信号，表示我们的存在。今年，人类向宇宙发出的最早的电视信号——1936年由纳粹德国举办的奥运会电视直播信号——已经越过了几颗潜在宜居的行星。而流行美剧《权力的游戏》第一季的信号也已经抵达了距离太阳系最近的恒星。
So why hasn’t ET called us back?
那么，为什么到现在都还没有外星人回应我们？
There are plenty of obvious answers. Maybe there are no intelligent space aliens in our immediate cosmic vicinity. Perhaps they have never evolved beyond unthinking microbial slime or – based on our transmissions – aliens have concluded it is safer to stay away. There is, however, another explanation: ET is nothing like us.
有很多显而易见的答案。或许地球附近的宇宙空间并不存在外星智慧生命。或许它们从未能脱离低级微生物的形态并进化出智慧。又或者，基于我们发出的信号，外星智慧文明认为不与我们接触较为安全。但还有另外一种可能的解释，那就是：外星人或许和我们完全不一样。
“If we do find a signal, we shouldn’t expect it’s going to be some sort of soft squishy protoplasmic alien behind the microphone at the other end,” says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for alien-hunting organisation Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti).
搜寻地外智慧生命（Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ，简称Seti）机构的高级天文学家赛斯·肖斯塔克（Seth Shostak）说：“如果我们哪天真的探测到一个信号，我们不应该预期在望远镜的另一端的是某种柔软的原生质形态外星人。”
Seti has been actively searching for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life for more than half a century. Despite tantalising signals (such as this recent one), it has so far drawn a blank. But Shostak believes we should consider looking to our own future to imagine what aliens will be like.
在过去的半个多世纪里，Seti机构一直在积极搜寻外星智慧生命的信号。尽管有几次探测到不明信号（比如最近的这次），但是到目前为止仍一无所获。但是肖斯塔克相信我们应当通过研究人类自身未来的可能发展，来想象外星人可能的形态。
“Perhaps the most significant thing we’re doing is to develop our own successors,” says Shostak. “If we can develop artificial intelligence within a couple of hundred years of inventing radio, any aliens we are likely to hear from have very likely gone past that point.”
他说：“我们正在做的最重要的事情或许就是开发自己未来的继承者。如果我们能够在无线电技术发明后的数百年内，发展出一种人工智能，那么当我们接来自外星文明的信号时，他们很有可能已经超越了这一发展阶段。”
“In other words,” he says, “most of the intelligence in the cosmos, I would venture, is synthetic intelligence and that may disappoint movie goers who expect little grey guys with big eyeballs, no clothes, no hair or sense of humour.”
他说：“换句话说，我猜测宇宙中大部分的智慧文明可能都是某种合成智能，这可能会让很多与电影迷的期待不符。他们希望见到的外星人可能是中那种大眼睛、没有衣服、没有毛发、毫无幽默感的灰色小矮人。”
The argument assumes that the creatures who built the first AIs – grey guys, hyper- intelligent pan-dimensional beings, sentient trees or whatever – are no longer around.
这一看法默认那些当初创造了这些人工智能的外星人（灰色的人、高度智能的泛维度存在、有感知能力的树等待）早已不复存在了。
“Well they might be,” Shostak concedes, “but once you develop artificial intelligence you can use that to develop the next generation of thinking thing and so on – within 50 years you not only have a machine that’s far smarter than all the previous machines but certainly smarter than all humans put together.”
肖斯塔克坦言：“一旦你开发出一种人工智能，你就可以用它来开发下一代智能，如此循环。在50年内，你所拥有的这种人工智能将超越此前所有的机器，当然也会超过全人类智慧的总和。”
“The big question,” says astronomer and author of the Search for Earth’s Twin, Stuart Clark, “is whether the AI goes on to become conscious and define its own goals and decide it doesn’t need the biological creatures that developed it.”
《寻找地球的双胞胎兄弟》（Search for Earth’s Twin）一书的作者、天文学家斯图尔特·克拉克（Stuart Clark）说：“主要的问题在于人工智能是否会产生自我意识，确定自身的目标，并认定它们不再需要当初把它们开发出来的那些生物。”
From the self-aware death machines of the Berserker books to the cyborgs of Battlestar Galactica or The Terminator, science fiction certainly has a rich seam of AIs taking over and wiping out their inferior biological creators. It is not, however, necessarily the inevitable path of any technological civilisation. Artificial Intelligence – truly thinking machines with synthetic super-brains – may not even be possible.
从Berserker系列中具有自我意识的死亡机器，到《太空堡垒卡拉狄加》（Battlestar Galactica）或《终结者》（The Terminator）中的改造人，科幻小说想象了高级人工智能消灭人类并取而代之的各种场景。不过，这并不是任何技术文明的必经之路。人工智能——真正能够进行综合思维的超级大脑——有可能根本无法实现。
“It’s very unclear to me that this is inevitably going to happen,” says Clark. “But the key point is we are looking for something we imagine to be a bit like us and we’re limiting the search as a result.”
克拉克说：“我无法确定必然会产生这一结果。但关键之处在于我们把正在搜寻的目标想象成与我们相似的形态，这限制了我们的搜寻结果。”
Seti uses an array of radio telescope dishes in California to search for signals. The receivers are aimed at star systems where planets have been discovered by Earth or space telescopes such as Nasa’s Kepler observatory. These are planets which might have liquid oceans and life-supporting atmospheres – habitats that have made human evolution possible. But machine intelligences could live anywhere.
Seti在加州架设了一批射电望远镜搜寻信号。接收器指向一些特定的恒星系， 诸如美国宇航局开普勒望远镜那样的太空望远镜已经确认那里存在行星。在这些行星表面可能存在液态水的海洋以及能够支持生命存在的大气——这正是让人类进化的条件。但是不要忘了，人工智能可以生活在任何地方。
“That’s the whole problem,” says Shostak. “Not only could they be anywhere, it would make sense for them to go to places in the Universe where there were big sources of energy – if you’re going to do a lot of thinking, a lot of energy helps so maybe that’s the place to look.”
肖斯塔克表示：“这就是问题的全部。它们不仅可能存在于任何地方，理所当然它们会去往宇宙中蕴藏大量能量的地方——如果你需要做大量思考，那么大量的能量供应会很有帮助——因此，或许那样的地方才是我们应该去关注的。”
If this is the case, then Seti could be looking for ET in the wrong place. “Instead of having their own fields of radio telescopes,” says Clark, “maybe that money would be better spent equipping every observatory with piggyback equipment that looks at every signal that’s been received and look for repeating patterns.”
如果事实的确如此，那么Seti机构一直以来搜寻地外智慧生命的方向出错了。克拉克说：“或许我们不应该将大量资金都投向射电望远镜领域，而是将这笔钱划分给每一个天文台，让他们能够在望远镜上加装特殊设备，对接收到的所有信号进行全面检测，寻找其中存在的重复模式。”
Whether every observatory would agree to host a Seti sensor is a matter for debate. The technology might, however, reveal some other surprising astronomical discovery. We now know that pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars. When Jocelyn Bell discovered the first of these oscillating signals in 1967, only half-jokingly did the University of Cambridge team label it LGM1 for Little Green Men.
每一个天文台是否都能同意安装Seti的感应器是另一回事。但这一技术还会带来其他意想不到的天文发现。我们现在知道脉冲星围绕中子星进行高速旋转。但是当乔斯琳·贝尔（Jocelyn Bell）在1967年最早记录下这类振荡信号时，剑桥大学的团队半开玩笑的将这个不明信号源编号为“LGM1”，这是英文“Little Green Men”（小绿人）的缩写。
In the short term, Seti is likely to continue its search for life on Earth-like planets. “But,” says Shostak, “over the course of time if we can come up with some ideas of where you might find synthetic intelligence, I think they’ll be more and more experiments aimed at doing that.”
简单来说，Seti项目很可能会继续搜寻类地行星。肖斯塔克说：“但是，随着时间推移，一旦我们可以提出关于人工智能位置的想法，将会出现更多关于它的实验。”
Another approach would be to broadcast messages from Earth to target regions of the cosmos. It is a controversial strategy that Stephen Hawking has warned could leave the Earth vulnerable to attack and exploitation. "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” he warned in 2010.
另外一种方案是从地球向宇宙中的目标区域进行广播信号发射。但这是具有很大争议性的策略，正如英国剑桥大学的史蒂芬·霍金（Stephen Hawking）教授所指出的那样，这样做非常有可能会使地球很容易遭受外星入侵。他在2010年曾经警告称：“我们只需要审视一下我们自己就能够明白智慧生命可以发展成何种面目，我们是不会愿意遇到那样的智慧生命的。”
“I don’t agree,” Shostak says. “But Seti has no broadcasting capability and the other thing about broadcasting is that even if you do it, it might be a very long time before you get a response – depending how close the aliens are.”
但肖斯塔克说：“我不同意。Seti并不具备广播能力，即使具备该能力，要想得到回应也需要漫长的时间——取决于外星人距离我们有多远。”
So are we any closer to discovering whether we are the lone intelligence – AI or not – in the Universe? “I don’t think you can ever say there’s nothing there, you can’t prove that negative,” Shostak says. “What you can say is that there’s something wrong with our approach so, for me, it’s very, very early days to think about giving up.”
那么，关于我们是不是孤独的智慧生命的问题——不论是否包含人工智能——我们有没有取得任何进展？肖斯塔克说：“我想我们永远也无法证明宇宙中不存在外星人。你只能说，我们搜寻的方式有错误。因此在我看来，我们还远远没有到该讨论放弃的时候。”
Clark agrees. “I think Seti should generalise its search as much as possible,” he says. “An answer to ‘yes there’s intelligent life in the Universe’ has profound implications for us and that alone qualifies Seti to carry on.”
克拉克表示同意，他说：“我想Seti应该尽可能扩大其搜寻范围。毕竟，一个类似‘是的，宇宙中的确存在其他智慧生命’的答案，对我们有极为深远的意义。光凭这一点，Seti就应该继续进行研究。”
来源：好英语网
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