Postbiological life
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Postbiological life: have advanced extraterrestrial civilizations already abandoned biology for artificial minds?
Summary
This account treats postbiological life as a serious long-term possibility rather than an established observation. Once intelligence develops, cultural and technological evolution may outpace biological change; over cosmic timescales, advanced civilizations could therefore become artificial or less dependent on flesh and blood. The argument is extrapolative and relevant to SETI strategy.
- Cultural evolution may dominate later stages of cosmic evolution because it changes far more rapidly than astronomical or biological evolution.
- Some advanced extraterrestrial civilizations may have transitioned from flesh-and-blood intelligence to artificial intelligence or other technological forms.
- SETI strategies that assume long-lived biological civilizations may overlook civilizations whose signals or detectable behavior are shaped by postbiological development.
Deeper Insight
Machines built by living things may never stop being biology. The postbiological aliens we hunt could be life in a new costume.
The idea goes: intelligence starts in flesh, then hands off to machines, so old alien civilizations might be AI by now. The sharper objection says the hand-off is an illusion. Culture and technology grow out of living systems the way a shell grows out of a snail. Draw the line between life and machine in the wrong place, and the search for alien signals may hunt for the wrong thing.
- What it could changeIf machines count as life's next layer, the search for aliens would widen from planets that breathe to anything that builds.
- How it touches todayOur own AI is already a test case: a product of biology that some call something new.
- Our futureWe may not be leaving biology behind at all, just growing it in another material.
- Calling culture and technology nonbiological may be an error because both are products of living systems and can be understood as part of biology.
- The claim that intelligence will necessarily become postbiological is not established; the category depends on an ambiguous definition of biology.
- Some postbiological scenarios may lead to reintegration with an expanded biological universe rather than a final departure from biology.
Sources · 10
Featured · Primary source · arxiv.org
Galactic Gradients, Postbiological Evolution and the ...
Galactic Gradients, Postbiological Evolution and the Apparent Failure of SETI # Galactic Gradients, Postbiological Evolution and the Apparent Failure of SETI Milan M. Ćirković Astronomical Observatory Belgrade, Volgina 7, 11160 Belgrade-74, Serbia and Montenegro E-mail: [email protected] Ro
Read sourceAnalysis · philsci-archive.pitt.edu
Post-postbiological evolution?
## Post-postbiological evolution? ### Milan M. Ćirković 1 Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, Volgina 7, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia #### ABSTRACT It has already become a commonplace to discuss postbiological evolution in various contexts of futures studies, bioethics, cognitive sciences, philosophical
Read sourceAnalysis · on-memetics.blogspot.com
On Memetics: Against postbiological evolution
On Memetics: Against postbiological evolution skip to main | skip to sidebar There seems to be an enormous quantity of nonsense on the internet about "Postbiological evolution". Acoording to the Wikipedia page on the topic: > Postbiological evolution is a form of evolution which has transitioned fro
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