So you know the Great Filter, right?
It’s what happens when you look up at the stars and ask “Where the fuck is everyone”.
There are so many planets out there, yet it’s radio silent. The intelligent life to planet ratio is really, bad. So far we’re the only ones.
You gotta ask, why?
Enter, the Great Filter. Something, at some point in the pipeline, prevents planets from developing and maintaining intelligent life capable of electromagnetic communication.
We don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s a quirk of chemistry that makes the chance of multicellular life forming ridiculously low. Maybe it’s a quirk of biology that makes sapience incredibly rare. Maybe it’s a hyper intelligent space worm that eats any civilisation that makes too much noise. Maybe it’s runaway climate change.
The thing is, we really don’t want to be on the wrong side of that filter, because that suggests that an imminent demise is in our civilisation’s future. And with every discovery of non-intelligent life on other planets, it becomes increasingly likely that we’re on the wrong side of that filter.
Enter, the recent discovery of life on Venus. It means that we’re much more likely to be on the wrong side.
But, watching that debate tonight, I began to feel a sense of relief. At least if we’re on the wrong side of the filter, it’s not as though we’re wasting a once-in-a-galaxy chance. We’re just yet another civilisation that failed to get past that filter. I can live with being unexceptionally mediocre.
Is immortality possible even for non-living things, though? If we are talking about the scales of millenniums. Any mechanical part is going to wear out. And you need mechanical parts for movement, resource collection and general interaction with material world. Even non mechanical structrures that you would use for computation eventually degrade. Takes a couple dielectricum breaches and your processor is no longer working correctly. Molecules breakdown over time. At large enough timescales atoms themselves will breakdown. To repair stuff you need additional resources and energy. But more resources/energy you pack the harder it will be to move.
Transfer of consciousness from machine to machine is viable, so replacement machines running the same software seems different than human to machine transfer would be. Redundant parts or fixing them as they break or upgrading hardware altogether solves this, so in effect the machine can be immortal.
Take GPT3 for example. It's a neural network that responds in certain ways, and you can copy it and run it on other hardware with the same result. It's not "conscious", but for several reasons, one of which is because it might just not be complex enough. But that argument is coming to an end in the next few years--neural networks will be complex enough to support general-purpose problem solving. The disconnect is that it doesn't have sensory inputs to the real world and also it has no body to preserve/defend so it has no real-world goals. Give a complex-enough neural network a body, goals, and make it understand that it has to preserve itself somehow, and you might end up with a conscious computer.
That is in the context of machines living in a machine society, but the context of machines trying to colonize universe with probes is different. The energy and resources would be limited and the machine could very well arrive dead at its destination.