“There are no aliens, officially, at least….” Elon Musk, writing on his Twitter account, is one of a number of smart technopreneurs who considers that if there is extraterrestrial life, it would most likely already be observing us, and, it will be technological. Artist and singer David Bowie came to a similar conclusion years ago, stating that the internet is an alien life form, and technology is not something we just use, but something with which we are intricately connected. Philosopher Susan Schneider spoke to NASA about her essay “Alien Minds,” and told them that alien minds would most likely resemble our best technology. As Musk says, “Digital Super Intelligence will be like an alien.”
My own research among the technopreneurs of Silicon Valley reveals a similar way of understanding possible alien life. The idea is that since humans are already being spliced with technology, that is, we are already cyborg-like, a more advanced civilization will likely be completely technological, or technological in a way we don’t yet understand. Gaming expert Rizwan Virk at MIT notes that media technologies, particularly immersive realities, generate “memories within the minds of consumers. Neuroscience confirms this, too, that the more we interface with our media technologies, the more our worlds become co-implicated. If human-technology interfaces are shaping what people remember and what they believe, they are also shaping culture, history, and the future. Contemporary humans are cyborg-like techno-beings, immersed within a sea of invisible technology in the form of frequencies, waves, and radiation. Dreams of going off the grid are just that, dreams. The idea of these scientists is that as humans advance they merge more and more with their technologies. If there were a very advanced civilization, its members may very well be a form of technology.
Where, then, are the aliens? Virk suggests we aren’t looking in the right places. Technopreneurs from Jacques Vallee to Virk suggest that we should use our own understanding of technology, which arguably is the apex of human knowledge, to try to understand how alien communication or contact would work. Virk states, “Another explanation is that we don’t have the right tools to see them or aren’t scanning the right frequencies. A recent article in MIT Technology Review went over the parameters that a search for extraterrestrial intelligence would need and found that there were 8 dimensions that need to be searched, and the searches to date have been done on only one fraction of one of these dimensions. Among the biotechnologists I interviewed recently, several believed that humans possessed a biological sensor to contact possible alien, or even future, civilizations. Not surprisingly, these scientists prefer to remain anonymous with respect to this belief, but told me that their data reveals that human beings, and our internal worlds, might provide answers to possible extraterrestrial worlds. “Our human bodies and DNA are naturally designed to be a human receiver and transmitter, and strangely run at similar frequencies as communication technology we’ve put into outer space,” said one.
Technological advancement naturally influences beliefs in transcendence, including possible contact with other worlds.
Featured image credit: Cold future photo by Alessio Ferretti. Public domain via Unsplash.