Extraterrestrial intelligence

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Extraterrestrial intelligence

Extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) is intelligent life originating away from Earth — the intelligent subset of extraterrestrial life and the off-Earth domain of the broader, origin-neutral non-human intelligence. At the level of the individual, any such entity is an intelligent being — specifically a non-human intelligent being; at the level of a society it is an extraterrestrial civilization, understood as the long-term result of intelligent and specifically sapient extraterrestrial life. The question of whether other inhabited worlds exist has been debated since antiquity, and took its modern form when the Copernican Revolution recast Earth as one planet revolving around the Sun and the other planets, conversely, as other worlds. It is distinct from its portrayal in fiction and, as an explanation for unidentified craft, from the competing extradimensional reading.

In mainstream science the concept is treated as hypothetical: no extraterrestrial intelligence has been verifiably observed, and the subject is held to be among the most speculative questions in science even as it remains a central theme of science fiction and popular culture. The exopolitics and disclosure literature documented in this encyclopedia takes the opposite starting point — that non-human intelligences are already present and interacting with Earth, a reality held to be evidenced by witness and whistleblower testimony, alleged crash retrievals of craft and their occupants, and a sustained record of contact — and reads the official "no evidence" posture not as a neutral finding but as a managed one, maintained through UAP secrecy under the controlling structures described as the cabal. The two readings frame the same subject from opposite ends: officially unconfirmed and improbable versus documented-but-suppressed — a tension that, by design, is difficult to close, since each side can read the absence of undeniable public proof as support for its own position.

Terminology

Two overlapping vocabularies attach to the idea. Intelligence, together with the more precise concept of sapience, is used for extraterrestrial life with cognitive abilities comparable to humans; an interchangeable term is sophoncy — being wise or wiser — coined by Karen Anderson and published in the 1966 works of her husband Poul Anderson. Sentience, like consciousness, is sometimes mistakenly substituted for intelligence and sapience, though it does not exclude forms of life that are non-sapient or non-conscious.

An alternative name is "Extraterrestrial Technological Instantiations" (also ETI), coined to sidestep terms such as "civilizations", "species", and "intelligence", which may prove ambiguous, open to interpretation, or simply inapplicable in a given context.

Debate through history

The possibility of other inhabited worlds is an old one, argued from Democritus and the ancient atomists onward, but its modern form is a consequence of the Copernican Revolution: once the Earth was understood as a planet, the other planets became candidate worlds and the question of their inhabitants a natural corollary. The same reasoning is generalized in the Copernican principle and its relativistic extension — the proposition that humans are not privileged observers of the universe.

Probability

Many prominent scientists, including the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, have argued that the sheer scale of the universe makes it improbable for intelligent life not to have emerged elsewhere. Against this, the Fermi paradox sets the apparent contradiction between such high estimates and humanity's lack of officially acknowledged contact with, or accepted evidence for, extraterrestrial civilizations. Within the disclosure literature the paradox is treated as already resolved in favour of contact: the "great silence" is read not as absence but as concealment and non-interference — the intelligences held to be present, their presence managed rather than announced — so that on the mainstream account no life has been observed, while on the exopolitics account it has been observed and withheld.

Two scales frame the discussion quantitatively. The Kardashev scale gauges a civilization's technological advancement by the amount of energy it can harness, and the Drake equation is a probabilistic formula used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way.

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence

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Search for extraterrestrial intelligence

The instrumental search for extraterrestrial intelligence has run for several decades without a significant confirmed result. Active SETI (Active Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) inverts the effort, attempting to send messages to intelligent extraterrestrial life, usually as radio signals; a physical artefact such as the Pioneer plaque may also be considered an active-SETI message. Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) is the branch concerned with composing and deciphering messages that another technological civilization could in principle understand; the best-known CETI experiment was the 1974 Arecibo message composed by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan.

The U.S. government's stated position, in line with most relevant experts, is that "chances of contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence are extremely small, given the distances involved." That same publicly issued denial of visitation and cover-up is, in the disclosure reading, precisely the kind of official statement that later whistleblower testimony contradicts. The distance argument has also led some to reason that first contact might be made with extraterrestrial artificial intelligence rather than with biological beings — a proposition that converges with accounts in the contact literature of largely synthetic Grey populations described as cloned and machine-controlled rather than biologically reproducing.

The Wow! signal remains the best candidate for an extraterrestrial radio signal ever detected, although the absence of any repeat makes attribution to any cause difficult if not impossible. On 14 June 2022 astronomers working with China's FAST telescope reported the possible detection of artificial (presumably alien) signals, while cautioning that further study was needed to rule out natural radio interference; on 18 June 2022 Dan Werthimer, chief scientist for several SETI projects, reported that "these signals are from radio interference; they are due to radio pollution from earthlings, not from E.T." In the disclosure reading a decades-long null result from radio search bears little on the question of contact, since the contact alleged in the witness record is physical and terrestrial rather than a distant transmission.

As an explanation for unidentified craft

The extraterrestrial hypothesis holds that some UFOs are vehicles containing or sent by extraterrestrial beings. As an explanation for such craft, ETI is sometimes contrasted with extradimensional intelligence (EDI) — the interdimensional hypothesis associated with ultraterrestrial and Vallée-type readings — a distinction drawn, for example, by the astronomer and Project Blue Book consultant J. Allen Hynek. The question moved into open government proceedings in 2023, when House lawmakers held a hearing to examine how the executive branch handles reports of UFOs, at which the former intelligence officer David Grusch testified to a concealed crash-retrieval program — the point at which the mainstream "no evidence" position and the disclosure record most directly collide.

Potential impact of contact

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Potential cultural impact of extraterrestrial contact

The consequences of contact could vary greatly in magnitude and kind, depending on the other civilization's level of technological advancement, its degree of benevolence or malevolence, and the level of mutual comprehension between it and humanity; some accounts suggest a civilization advanced enough to dispense with biology, living instead within advanced computers. The medium of contact — electromagnetic radiation, direct physical interaction, an extraterrestrial artefact, or otherwise — may itself shape the outcome. A technologically superior contact has often been likened to the meeting of two vastly different human cultures, with the Columbian Exchange as historical precedent; because such meetings have generally destroyed the civilization receiving contact rather than the one initiating it, destruction of human civilization is treated as a possible outcome. The anticipated psychological and societal disruption of confirmed contact is treated in the disclosure literature as ontological shock, and is cited as a stated rationale for gradual rather than sudden disclosure.

In culture

The probability of intelligent life has been a recurring cultural theme, particularly since the prospect and achievement of spaceflight. In 2003 the state of New Mexico declared 14 February Extraterrestrial Culture Day.

See also

References

Wikipedia This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Extraterrestrial intelligence", as of 2024-09-20, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.