if we encountered other forms of alien life.

Would they talk like us?

Look like us?

Or would they be completely different?

What if,

instead of encountering organic alien life,

we met

alien artificial intelligence?

Humanity has dreamed up some

pretty crazy technology.

And we're not too far away from

having our tech

look like its come out of a sci-fi movie.

But it's safe to say that

if aliens created technology,

it would be a lot different

than anything we could dream up.

So, what types of

alien AI could we possibly see?

Nobody knows what

life on other planets will be like.

But the first form of alien technology

we could encounter might be

some sort of alien probe.

To help us explain what an alien probe would be like,

we're collaborating with YouTuber Isaac Arthur.

Isaac hosts a youtube channel explaining scientific and futurism concepts.

Thanks Peter.

This probe would be tasked with finding or communicating with us.

The probe would fly throughout the galaxy in an attempt to find some sort of life.

It would either be wandering and searching aimlessly,

or it would have some designated mission.

And once that's completed, it would record any signals it found

and transmit them back to the alien homeworld.

The issue with this is us being able to discover it.

Space is big, really really big.

And the alien probe might be too far away for us to detect it.

It might not want to communicate with us, and if it does, we might not know how to receive its message,

or understand what the alien probe is trying to say to us.

There might be some strange concepts too,

as an alien AI might have very different motivations from anything biological.

So it might be informing us that it plans to stop by and turn Earth into a quintillion paper clips.

For an indepth look on the types of motivations and psychology it might have,

Try out our episode, alien AI. Back to you Peter.

Thanks Isaac.

So if we can't communicate with the aliens,

and they're just simply observing us,

what would happen next?

Well, now that we've been discovered by alien technology,

a number of things could happen.

We could witness more of their technology coming to Earth.

This could be in the form of a machine

that could terraform our entire planet.

This would be very, very bad.

That's because this form of alien technology

would be used to alter our Earth

in whichever way its creators please.

They might want to change Earth's atmosphere,

temperature, or physical features.

And in the process,

the human race would most likely become extinct.

No matter how many missiles

and bullets we throw towards this thing,

there would be virtually no way we could stop it.

I mean c'mon,

this thing is meant to completely alter planets!

You think a gun will help you fight it off?

If we're lucky enough to avoid our home planet being taken over,

we may get sent raw material drones.

This form of AI would

harvest metals and gases from us and bring them back home.

Yeah this would still suck,

but we could at least have some chance of surviving this one.

Okay, now we've seen all this alien technology but,

when do we get to meet the actual aliens?

Y'know, the green guys with funny heads?

Well, there's two ways this could go.

One is that aliens come,

and they take over our planet and resources.

But we have a separate story for that, called "What If Aliens Arrived Tomorrow?"

And the second option could be that we wouldn't see any aliens at all.

That's because,

with all this incredibly advanced alien technology,

there's the possibility that

the aliens aren't even around anymore.

Just like the way we fear AI and robots

are taking over humans,

that may have happened to aliens.

While they were creating this advanced AI,

the aliens may have given it too much power.

And once that happened,

their AI took over and extinguished the alien race.

And then, we could have the exact same thing

threatening to destroy us.

So as cool as it might sound,

alien AI would

definitely not be a cool thing for us to come up against.

But what if,

instead of aliens destroying us,

they enslaved us?

Well, that's a story for another WHAT IF.