’t be an excellent medium for experience.
Granted the idea that the heavens are teeming with superintelligent AIs is speculative, but it has practical consequences as Shostak notes:
So far, we’ve pointed antennas at stars that might have planets that might have breathable atmospheres and oceans and so forth … But if we’re correct that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is artificial, then does it have to live on a planet with an ocean? … All artificial life forms would need is raw materials … They might be in deep space, hovering around a star, or feeding off a black hole’s energy at the center of the galaxy.
How then might superintelligent aliens view us? Will they see us as brothers of as biofuel? Schneider doesn’t think they’ll care: “If they were interested in us, we probably wouldn’t be here … My gut feeling is their goals and incentives are so different from ours, they’re not going to want to contact us.” Shostak agrees: “… 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.”
The idea that aliens will be uninterested in us differs from Steven Hawking’s claim that advanced aliens might want to kill us. Either way we should probably continue to upgrade our intelligence. That way, if we encounter superintelligences bent on our destruction, asteroids hurling toward earth, or out of control climate change, our intelligence will increase our chances of surviving the encounter.