Alien Contact Will Happen by 2060, Claims Futurist Who Worked With Steve Jobs

Futurist Dr James Canton believes our lives and perceptions will see a radical shift in the upcoming decades. And we’ll find aliens too.

Dr. James Canton is a world-renowned expert who worked with a young Steve Jobs and he recently shared some of his insight and predictions for the years to come. In his opinion, the rapidly-changing pace of the world will continue to accelerate and our understanding of the universe is set to grow. We might even achieve alien contact.

On the subject of extraterrestrial life, the futurist believes not only it exists, but that we are also on the verge of uncovering details about its presence in the cosmos.

I think the likelihood of finding other forms of life on other planets is very good,” Dr Canton told Express. “We will find between now and 2060 life forms in other parts of the universe and I think that will be very exciting.”

While discovering alien life might be a possibility, the actual interactions with these extraterrestrial beings could prove harder to achieve. At the moment, any signal we send or is sent our way would have to traverse the vast distances between stars and that takes a very long time.

“Whether we’ll be able to share a beer or cappuccino with them remains to be seen,” the futurist said. “I think life is pervasive, we just need to understand the different forms.”

In recent years, the concept of discovering intelligent alien life and then reaching out to said civilization has gained traction like never before. What was once considered taboo or at best, wishful thinking, is now a scientific venture that incorporates some of the world’s brightest minds and businessmen with the capital to back it up.

But like most specialists, Dr Canton agrees we will need to enlist the help of Artificial Intelligence in out search for extraterrestrial life. One of the best ways we could achieve very long distance space travel would be to send intelligent robots to do the exploration work. Once these robots become sufficiently advanced, their specific needs would be much easier to meet than those of humans.

“Artificial Intelligence is the real breakthrough; a breakthrough in machine intelligence and deep learning which are the new forms of AI, which are the way the car or robot can learn,” Dr Canton said.

Another major area that will be vastly improved is our understanding of the human brain and implicitly, the mind that goes with it. As we dig deeper into the mechanisms inside our own skulls, we draw nearer to completing an artificial mind in our own image. Besides building immensely powerful computers, this process will undoubtedly provide us with valuable information about ourselves.

Few people really understand that it’s emerging. One of the big breakthroughs is that we are learning through the use of MRI devices how the brain works. We’re making computers based on the brain.”

Dr Canton’s hypotheses are believable because he’s not some nutjob throwing wild guesses into the wind. For the past decades, he has been making predictions about the future and the vast majority of them turned out to be quite accurate.

Will he be right about alien contact too?