It is tempting to further develop the story. Its ingredients make for good science fiction scenarios. For example, the way the bots on Proxima Centauri receive or treat the human may make you think of how a group of exhausted aliens are received and treated on Earth in the 2009 District 9 movie. [For the record, I saw the District 9 movie only after I had written these posts, so the coincidence is just what it is: coincidence.]

However, it is not a mere role reversal. Unlike the desperate Prawns in District 9 – intelligent beings who end up as filthy and ignorant troublemakers because of their treatment by the people who initially welcomed them – the robots on Proxima Centauri are all connected through an amazing, networked knowledge system and they, therefore, share the superior knowledge and technology that connects them all. More importantly, the bots do not depend on physiochemical processes: they are intelligent and sensitive – I deliberately inserted the paragraphs on their love for the colonists’ newborn babies, and their interest in mankind’s rather sad history on Earth – but they remain machines: they do not understand man’s drive to procreate and explore. At heart, they do not understand man’s existential fear of dying.

The story could evolve in various ways, but all depends on what I referred to as the entertainment value of the colonists: they remind the bots of their physiochemical equivalents on Proxima Centauri long time ago and they may, therefore, fill an undefined gap in the sensemaking process of these intelligent systems and, as such, manage to build sympathy and trust – or, at the very least, respect.

Any writer would probably continue the blog playing on that sentiment: when everything is said and done, we sympathize with our fellow human beings – not with artificially intelligent and conscious systems, don’t we? Deep down, we want our kin to win – even if there is no reason to even fight. We want them to multiply and rule over the new horizon. Think of the Proximans, for example: I did not talk about who or what they were, but I am sure that the mere suggestion they were also flesh and blood probably makes you feel they are worth reviving. In fact, this might well be the way an SF writer would work out the story: the pioneers revive these ancestors, and together they wipe out the Future system, right? Sounds fantastic, perhaps, but I would rather see an SF movie scripted along such lines than the umpteenth SF movie based on the non-sensical idea of time travel. [I like the action in Terminator movies, but they also put me off because time travel is just one of those things which is not only practically but also theoretically impossible: I only like SF movies with unlikely but not impossible plots.]

However, I am not a sci-fi writer, and I do not want to be one. That’s not why I wrote this blog. I do not want it to become just another novel. I wrote it to illustrate my blunt hypothesis: artificial intelligence is at least as good as human intelligence, and artificial consciousness is likely to be at least as good as human consciousness as well. Better, in fact – because the systems I describe respect human life much more than any human being would do.

Think about Asimov’s laws: again and again, man has shown – throughout its history – talk about moral principles and the sanctity of human life is just that: talk. The aliens on Proxima Centauri effectively look down on human beings as nothing but cruel animals armed with intelligence and bad intent. That is why I think any real encounter between a manned spacecraft and an intelligent civilization in outer space – be it based on technology or something more akin to human life – would end badly for our men.

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus – that’s probably a movie you did see, unlike District 9 – is about humans finding their ancestor DNA on a far-away planet. Those who have seen the movie know what it develops into whenever it can feed on someone else’s life: just like a parasite, it destroys it in a never-ending quest for more. And the one true ancestor who is still alive – the Engineer – turns on the brave and innocent space travellers too, in some inexplicable attempt to finally destroy all of mankind. So what do we make of that in terms of sensemaking?

I think the message is this: we had better be happy with life here on Earth – and take better care of it.