Off-Topic: Why I Think Any Intelligent Life We Find Will Be a Machine
In this recording
A two-minute clip from August 2017, filed with my keto recordings but not about keto at all. It starts mid-thought, so it was probably cut from a longer conversation.
- [0:00] The search for intelligent life seems odd to me. We went from the industrial revolution to AI-capable computers in something like 170 years, while biology took hundreds of millions to billions of years to get us here.
- [0:50] Any species that can reach space could probably build AI within about a thousand years. The window where a species has space travel but no AI is tiny.
- [1:35] So the odds of meeting someone "like us", still asking if anyone is out there, are absurd. Whatever we find will almost certainly be some kind of automated machine existence.
What this is
This is the honest label: there's no nutrition content in this clip. It belongs on the list because it was saved in the same folder as the keto videos, and because it's a fair sample of how I talk when I'm not on topic. I start from a timeline, compare two rates, and follow the arithmetic to a conclusion.
That habit is the same one I bring to diet claims. In the keto videos I keep doing back-of-the-envelope maths: how much glycogen you can store, how many calories a cheat meal can actually replace, how much protein fits in a day. Here it's pointed at astronomy instead of my dinner plate.
The figures in the clip are my rough ones from 2017. The 170 years and the "billions of years" are ballpark numbers said out loud, not sourced. Nothing in this project's evidence pages covers astronomy or AI, and this post doesn't try to check them. Treat it as a thought experiment, offered in a couple of minutes, from someone who likes thinking about this stuff.
If you came here for keto, the guide's front door is the better starting point. If you came for the habit of checking a claim against its numbers, the nutrition-science chapter covers how to read a study without getting fooled.
Key points
- Not a keto video. A short thought on technology timelines and alien life.
- The argument: the gap between space travel and AI is so short that any spacefaring species we meet is likely to be machine, not biological.
- The numbers are rough estimates said on camera, not sourced figures.
Related
- Guide: start here · how to read a nutrition study