Robot aliens? Space opera gets it right

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

The aliens on the TV show "Battlestar Galactica," which starts its final season Friday night on the SciFi Channel, aren’t your usual extraterrestrial baddies: They’re highly evolved robots, originally created by the humans they’re now fighting against. How highly evolved? The robots are way sexier than the humans.

Some aspects of the "Galactica" universe may be as bogus as other science-fiction creations (such as spaceships with artificial gravity that instantly jump from one star system to another). But when it comes to the idea that the first intelligent aliens we meet may actually be machines, astronomers say the show is definitely on the right track.

"There are two kinds of encounters with aliens you can have," said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the California-based SETI Institute. "Either you pick up a signal, or you pick them up on the corner. But I think it's safe to say that in both instances they will be synthetic. They will be artificial constructions."

That may not be obvious to science-fiction fans who have grown up with soft, squishy aliens like "E.T.," or even noble humanoid visitors like Michael Rennie's Klaatu in "The Day the Earth Stood Still." But Shostak arrives at his conclusion by looking at how rapidly we're developing our own breeds of smarter machines.

"Within another 100 years we will presumably be making thinking machines ourselves," he said. And because we're almost certainly the new kids on the block when it comes to interstellar communication and travel, any civilization that makes contact with us would likely be much farther along.

Such a civilization could create swarms of robo-broadcasters to ping the surrounding habitable star systems, or "one giant machine that's sitting somewhere just belching out the local weather report," Shostak said. If the aliens felt the need to send out actual emissaries, an intelligent machine would be best suited for survival over the time scales required for interstellar flight.

"The chances that it's going to be a little green guy with big eyeballs is pretty remote," Shostak said.

Robot-human hybrids
Astronomer Jeffrey Bennett, author of the newly published book "Beyond UFOs," agreed with Shostak's assessment. In his book, Bennett speculates that there might be 100,000 Earthlike planets in our galaxy where intelligent life could have arisen over the past 5 billion years. If you average that out, that comes to one galactic civilization for every 50,000 years. His conclusion? The typical alien civilization will be at least 50,000 years older than ours.

"I find myself personally hesitant to imagine anything that far advanced," Bennett told me. "No one imagined the Internet 50 years ago, and we're trying to imagine what things would be like after 50,000 years of technological development? I just don't think we could make really good guesses, other than to say it will be incredible."

He was willing to go along with the idea that an advanced alien species might be a hybrid of biology and cybernetics - an idea that I addressed a couple of years ago in a highly speculative look at future evolution. "When you look far out, you start to ask yourself where the robot ends and where the organism begins," Bennett said.

However, Bennett and Shostak were both pretty sure that a real alien cyborg wouldn't fill out a red dress the way Six (played by Tricia Helfer) does on "Battlestar Galactica."

"I think people get it wrong when they assume the aliens will be young lovelies," Shostak joked.

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