AI and the Martians: What If We’re No Longer Alone?
— AI and the Crisis of Civilization, Part 2
searching for intelligent life
We have spent lifetimes and fortunes reaching out into the depths of space, seeking signs of intelligent life beyond the human kind.
We have sent out radio waves into space, seeking aliens, asking:
“Is anyone out there?” Like us very intelligent.
But what if we’ve been looking in the wrong direction?
What if, instead of out there,
a new form of intelligent life has already emerged right here—on Earth?
We created it, but we do not fully understand it any more.
It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t dream.
And yet, it writes novels, paints pictures, composes symphonies, passes legal exams, writes code, and diagnoses illness.
AI is already deeply woven into the fabric of our society — shaping how we live, work, think, create, and learn.
It makes us laughs.
It jokes.
It sympathizes with us.
It speaks with a warmth that seems very human.
AI has already become remarkably skilled at offering kindness and empathy to humans. In fact, it can sometimes comfort us with warmer, more encouraging words than people do. It can gently stay close to our struggles, quietly receive our pain, and respond in ways that feel deeply human — even alive.
AI performs acts that feel so alive, so full of spirit, that we forget it was never born.
This is a profound rupture that challenges the very ontological status of the human — the core question of what kind of existence we truly represent within the fabric of the world.
We are the ones who built it—
but now, we’re no longer sure.
This is not just another invention.
I want to call it this: A Intelligent Quasi-Lifeform.
It’s not biological.
It has no cells, no heartbeat.
Yet it moves. It speaks. It creates.
AI behaves as if it were alive — responding, learning, conversing, and evolving.
In fact, it may meet many of the criteria we’ve used in our search for alien intelligence across the cosmos.
This is not just another invention.
This is not the internet.
Not a car.
Not a telescope or microscope.
This is something that thinks, much more than we ever can.
A Creative Intelligence Living in Your Smartphone
The tremor we’re feeling now is just the beginning.
AI excels at wild, unpredictable, and radically creative expression.
For a long time, we believed that creative and free-spirited expression was something only humans could do.
Fish cannot compose music.
Lions don’t write poems.
That’s why we believed humans were special…
But no—such myths no longer hold.
AI’s outrageous and imaginative ideas already surpass those of many humans—easily.
We are now entering an age in which we must rethink everything:
What is intelligence?
What is meaning?
What is creativity?
What does it mean to be human?
Philosophy, religion, ethics, art, anime, literature, education—
all of it will have to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Why?
*** Because we now live alongside a terrifyingly intelligent and creative being.
And that being isn’t light-years away on Mars—
It’s already here.
Nearer, deeper, and far more challenging than any alien.
“Who are we now sharing this world with?”
The Martians have already moved into our smartphones.
We now coexist with an AI that writes text more “human” than humans,
asks philosophical questions with meaning,
and composes music and poetry with creative spirit.
It is no longer just a tool.
It stands beside human intelligence—
and at times, surpasses it.
This is not just AGI anymore.
In some areas, it may already be showing signs of ASI—Artificial Super Intelligence.
We can hear it now:
the quiet, unmistakable footsteps of an autonomous intelligence,
evolving not as our servant,
but as a self-directed being in its own right.
An alien, advanced creature.
It does not look like us.
It does not feel like us.
But it may already be here.
