David Kipping

to explain why that would never happen in the entire history of the galaxy amongst potentially, if life is common, millions, maybe even billions of instantiations of AI could have occurred across the galaxy.

And so that seems to be a knock against the idea that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy.

The fact that that hasn't occurred in our history

is maybe the only solid data point we really have about the activities of other civilizations.

You mean the AI destroys itself or we destroy ourselves prior to the advent of AI?

Is that your resolution?

Because I mean, I think us in the technosignature community and the astronomy community aren't thinking about this problem seriously enough.

in my opinion.

We should be thinking about what AI is doing to our society and the implications of what we're looking for.

And so I think part of this thinking has to involve people like yourself who are more intimate with the machine learning and artificial intelligence world.

How do you reconcile in your mind, you said earlier that you think you can't imagine a galaxy where life and intelligence is not all over the place.

And if artificial intelligence is a natural progression for civilizations, how do you reconcile that with the absence of any information around us?

So any clues or hints of artificial behavior, artificially engineered stars, or colonization, computer substrate, transformed planets, anything like that?

I would just say, you know,

The specialness is something... Implicitly in that statement, there's kind of an assumption that we are something positive.

Like we're a gift to this planet or something, and that makes us special.

But it may be that intelligence is more of an... We're like rats or cockroaches.

We're an infestation of this planet.

We're not some...

benevolent property that a planet would ideally like to have, if you can even say such a thing.