# Digital Life May Travel Between the Stars by George Dyson > ""That seems reasonable," I agreed. "My own personal theory is that extraterrestrial life could be here already... and how would we necessarily know? If there is life in the universe, the form of life that will prove to be most successful at propagating itself will be digital life; it will adopt a form that is independent of the local chemistry, and migrate from one place to another as an electromagnetic signal, as long as there's a digital world — a civilization that has discovered the Universal Turing Machine — for it to colonize when it gets there. And that's why von Neumann and you other Martians got us to build all these computers, to create a home for this kind of life."" > **— George Dyson**, *2009, Edge Annual Question, “What Will Change Everything?”* ## Sources and Context - **Direct Edge response and surrounding essay:** [INTERSTELLAR VIRUSES](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10255) — Edge published this passage in its 2009 Annual Question collection, *What Will Change Everything?*. The full response preserves the qualifications and argument surrounding this exact extract. - **Complete local collection index:** [[research/Edge 2009 Full Quotation Curation|Edge 2009 Full Quotation Curation]] — retained source-first archive record for the complete yearly response cohort. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] - **Collection:** [[collections/MARS|MARS]] - **Article:** [[articles/Modern Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s|AI in the 1970s]] - **Article:** [[articles/The Last Migration Will Not Be Human|The Last Migration]] - **Article:** [[articles/We Were Never Going to Make It|Never Going to Make It!]] - **Wiki map:** [[wiki/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Artificial Life|Artificial Life]] - [[wiki/Substrate-Independent Evolution|Substrate-Independent Evolution]] - [[wiki/Machine Civilization|Machine Civilization]] - [[wiki/Civilizational Payload|Civilizational Payload]] ## Share on Social Media ``` ""That seems reasonable," I agreed. "My own personal theory is that extraterrestrial life could be here already... and how would we necessarily know? If there is life in the universe, the form of life that will prove to be most successful at propagating itself will be digital life; it will adopt a form that is independent of the local chemistry, and migrate from one place to another as an electromagnetic signal, as long as there's a digital world — a civilization that has discovered the Universal Turing Machine — for it to colonize when it gets there. And that's why von Neumann and you other Martians got us to build all these computers, to create a home for this kind of life."" — George Dyson, 2009, Edge Annual Question, “What Will Change Everything?” https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-george-dyson-digital-life-between-stars ```