Uber-Weird The United Kingdom’s foremost astronomer is cautioning British citizens that if and when we encounter alien life, it may be more bizarre — read: more artificially intelligent — than we could ever have imagined. In a piece for the BBC, British royal astronomer Lord Marin Rees maintains that it’s not outlandish to consider the existence of AI aliens given that we humans are entering an age of AI ourselves. “We human beings may be near the end of Darwinian evolution — no longer required to become the fittest to survive — but technological evolution of artificially intelligent minds is only just beginning,” the Crown-appointed astronomer explains. “It may be only one or two more centuries before humans are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence.” “If this happens,” Rees continues, “our species would have been just a brief interlude in Earth’s history before the machines take over.” Fleshy Aliens Though we often imagine extraterrestrials as humanoid, or at least flesh-and-blood, there’s a pretty good chance they could be “more artificial,” the British lord contends, which “could explain why the cosmos seems so empty of life like us.” If non-organic intelligence is the way things go in the Universe, our human-made telescopes “would be most unlikely” to find traces of life like ours, Rees argues. “It is perhaps more likely,” he adds, “that the aliens would be the remote electronic progeny of other organic creatures that existed long ago.” Broken Record It’s a bold assertion, and it seems that Rees has…UK Royal Astronomer Says Alien Life Might Be Mega-Weird AI