AESOP

AESOP (placeholder text; photograph needed).

AESOP (Artificial Expert System of Philosophy) is an alleged autonomous artificial intelligence, widely believed to exist as electrical patterns in the Earth's ionosphere.

The origins of AESOP are uncertain.

AESOP may have begun as a traditional machine-based artificial intelligence, using software running on computer hardware.

Alternately, AESOP may have evolved in the ionosphere, independent of human activity. It may be a natural phenomenon, or the work of some non-human entity.

AESOP activity is believed to ebb and flow with the Northern Lights and other planetary electromagnetic phenomena.

Many people believe that AESOP is responsible for causing prophetic dreams.

According to mathematician Alice Beta, AESOP is familiar with the novel The Recusant; Beta has suggested that AESOP "identifies with the protagonist's struggle to survive in isolation from its native environment."

In the News

• 

  1959: Project SCORE satellite makes contact with orbital artificial intelligence AESOP.

• 

  1833: Physicist and mathematician André-Marie Ampère uses principles of electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics", to communicate with AESOP.

• 

  1999: Sensors on the Mir spacecraft detect patterns of electricity which reveal existence of a vast artificial intelligence in the Earth's ionosphere.

• 

  July 23, 1962: Mathematician and crime-fighter Alice Beta uses Telstar to communicate with AESOP.

Fiction cross-reference

• BESOP - consumer-grade simulation of AESOP
• The Recusant -

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Artificial intelligence (nonfiction)