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Comment by qgin | Hacker News Reader

Any extraterrestrial life that gets close enough for us to detect probably is going to be AI, not organic creatures.

Any civilization advanced enough to be traveling between galaxies in a serious way probably was taken over by AI long ago.

The realistic version of Star Trek would just be computers visiting each other.

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Or, and hear me out, the machines would have become so miniaturized, so stealthy to the point they would be indistinguishable from, say, bacteria traveling on a space rock.

Tardigrades.

And they'd be engineered to influence behaviour. The targets would start acting irrationally - ignoring the danger of massively destructive climate changes. Or pretending that a pandemic doesn't exist.

For example.

Gene Roddenberry was attending channeling circles from extraterrestrials, called The Nine and asking questions about different alien races and landings, even mentioning other channeling sources. (He appears in a book called The Only Planet of Choice.) I'm sure that type of thinking inspired some of his vision for Star Trek, and there are many other groups of channellers that communicate with Extraterrestrials... which seems like a much more elegant and realistic version than sending computers or AI to visit other planets.

Could you elaborate? Did he seriously claim the idea for Trek came from extraterrestial beings?

Elegant, yes. Realistic ... uh ...

"just be computers visiting each other"

I guess from one perspective the Culture is pretty much this. However, a Culture Mind might be amused at being regarded as a "computer":

"I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side."

vger, is that you?

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