Extraterrestrials Might 'Make First Contact with AI, Not Humans' - Scholar

Artificial intelligence has been generating quite the buzzwords these days, and it was only a matter of time before AI would be linked to phenomena such as aliens and UFOs.

Aliens may opt to make first contact with AI systems instead of humans, as they would likely feel a "kinship" with them, a Harvard professor has been cited as saying.

Furthermore, extraterrestrials might send AI drones to our planet Earth, and not the "crewed" UFOs that have become the stuff of sci-fi films and reported "sightings," Abraham "Avi" Loeb, an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics, was cited as saying in an upcoming documentary.

Mark Christopher Lee, the UK director of the documentary, was quoted as saying that Loeb had explained his reasoning.

"My expectation from interstellar travel is that it's best done with electronic gadgets and devices rather than with biological creatures because the journey takes a long time. Even to the nearest star, it will take us 50,000 years to get there with chemical rockets. And artificial intelligence systems have that patience - and then they can remain dormant... so that they survive the journey," Loeb, a Frank B. Baird Jr. professor of science at Harvard University, was quoted as speculating in the docu.

This comes as earlier, a US Air Force veteran and intelligence official made headlines by suggesting that the US government had been covertly collecting intact alien spacecraft as part of a longstanding UFO retrieval operation. After David Grusch made public allegations, Defense Department spokesperson Sue Gough told Sputnik that the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed or currently exist.