A senior astronomer has said that the hunt for alien life should take into account alien "sentient machines".
Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has until now sought radio signals from worlds like Earth.
But Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that the time between aliens developing radio technology and artificial intelligence (AI) would be short.
Writing in Acta Astronautica, he says that the odds favour detecting such alien AI rather than "biological" life.
This is really kind of a no brainer. Of course we should be looking for intelligent, non-biological machines, as in Von Neumann probes. It's possible that some UFOs could be examples of such intelligent technological probes. And then again, if evidence was found that human DNA has been tampered with by a superior, non-terrestrial intelligence, then one could argue that we are simply intelligent, biological machines. To read the rest of the article, click here.