Space Apps Challenge 2018

Our conclusions are highly speculative (probably due to the amounts of wine consumed) but take into consideration various challenges encountered during our research.

1. The first part was to acknowledge our limitations: can we communicate with aliens that have different sensors/senses than we know? Can we communicate with intelligent aliens that have a different kind of intelligence than us? The answer for us was no, and a simple argument is that we have other species on earth that we share a lot with (we have DNA, same enviroment etc.) and we aren´t still able to communicate with them. How can we expect to communicate with aliens that we have even less in common with? But isn´t there a way to overcome this issue?

2. Then we found an unsolvable problem for us: once we accepted that we could only communicate with beings similar to us, we couldn´t find a way to translate our content to make it understandable to an alien. No common cultural background or context seemed to make it impossible.

3. But then we started to think that every attempt to contact aliens was based on the technology at hand at the moment and the notions of communication of the time of the mission. We were thinking inside the limitations we confront in our present time. But we are progressing technologically very fast. So we started to think: is there a way that the spaceship progresses according to what´s happening on earth with technology and knowledge? Could the software be actualized periodically with the new findings? And one step further: could the hardware be changed too? What happens if we find better propulsions that make our future spaceships faster than the actual ones for example?

4. Then we started to introduce the notion of AI and the readings of Ray Kurzweil as well as Max Tegmar or Nick Bostrom. If the aim is to build a selflearning machine, we can start by sending the new information to the spaceship the next years, but very probably at one point the spaceship will be able to progress at it´s own pace with the goal of finding alien intelligence and even learning how to communicate with them. It could be programmed to contact with us back when this happens letting the spaceship decide how to do it.

While the details need further consideration, the conclusion goes in the following direction:

A spaceship that is able to change with time, adapting to the most recent findings in its software and hardware. Perhaps these would be the last spaceships to be designed. They could be then programmed with different objectives and we only had to let them do the rest: decide how to solve the problems ahead.

P.D.: A spaceship flexible like that could even solve problems like our doubts about if interestellar travel is possible like we imagine it now ( see notes in "updates")