Sublime

They had no way of knowing yet whether the population of Quinta was made up of living creatures or, possibly, nonbiological automata: the heirs of an extinct civilization. One could not rule out the grim hypothesis that the arms race, having exterminated life (with perhaps a few remaining souls huddled in shelters or caves), was being carried on by

(Druyan told me this was because Sagan’s number-one rule for writing an alien was never to show them, never to collapse the possibilities of imagination into anything you could clearly see.)

Imagine an existence so bereft of sensation that it couldn’t even be described as “dark,” as no corresponding notion of light had yet been conceived. Imagine a world in which nothing is seen, or heard, or felt, rendering the very idea of being alive little more than a metabolic distinction. Imagine a world of beings lacking even a basic sense of se

Adrift on a hostile planet, the captain knew he would die. Collapsed on the deck, doomed, he looked up. He did not see the churning ice-sea of nature’s riot, lit by perpetual lightning and ecstatic aurora. Instead, he saw a girl with a owl on her shoulder. She pointed past him to a corner in the ship’s research lab. The owl rotated its head to look

distancetomars.com,

As often as he had been a spectator to this abrupt transition, it never ceased to jolt him into an awareness of something—something to which he found it hard to reconcile himself. Was it the lurid manifestation of man’s microscopic stature in relation to the cosmos? The transposition to another—planetary—scale? The visualization of mankind’s feeble

AIs could be—indeed, it is likely that most will be—extremely alien. We should expect that they will have very different cognitive architectures than biological intelligences, and in their early stages of development they will have very different profiles of cognitive strengths and weaknesses (though, as we shall later argue, they could eventually