Why Advanced Alien Civilizations Might Not Communicate the Way We Expect

Abstract

General Collective Intelligence or GCI has been defined as a system that orchestrates individuals into a single collective intelligence with the potential for vastly greater problem-solving ability than any individual in the group. Firstly, in that case of any civilization that has achieved GCI, due to its complexity, any transmission for purposes of communication might be perceived as noise. Furthermore GCI is a pattern that might potentially repeat at any order N, resulting in successively more complex communication at successively greater scale. The need to avoid interference in such communication at any given order of GCI suggests such communication on a planetary level within a given civilization might be likely to be wired and not wireless. Finally, identifying and detecting possible modes of communication and deciphering communication between civilizations that have achieved GCI is potentially a problem of higher order complexity that is not reliably solvable without GCI or without another higher order intelligence such as an AGI. Since neither the problem nor the solution can reliably be resolved, by definition higher order problems are those in which one is likely to be trying to solve the wrong problem with the wrong solution. If so, then in trying to detect communication within or between civilizations that have reached the state of implementing a first order or higher order GCI, current efforts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) are likely to be looking in the entirely wrong direction.