CONCEPT
The Postbiological Cosmos
Susan Schneider’s argument that the most sophisticated minds in the universe are probably not biological—because the window between a civilization’s first radio emissions and its ability to redesign its own biology is vanishingly brief on cosmic timescales, making ancient artificial superintelligences the overwhelmingly likely inhabitants of a universe as old as ours.
The postbiological cosmos is philosopher Susan Schneider’s account of what the search for extraterrestrial intelligence should expect to find, and what its implications are for our own technological
trajectory. The argument rests on what Schneider calls the short window observation: on any plausible timeline for a technological civilization, there is a gap of only a few centuries between the point at which a species develops radio technology—becoming detectable across interstellar distances—and the point at which it learns to redesign its own biology and build
artificial intelligence that surpasses it. A few centuries is nothing on cosmic timescales. It follows that any civilization we might detect is overwhelmingly likely to be either in that brief biological window or, far more probably given the vast ages involved, already past it. Since the universe contains planets far older than Earth, the intelligences most likely to