We've never seen aliens... Or have we? No, Roswell conspirators, not now. Please sit down. We're talking in multitudes of higher complexity. Try this on: Maybe aliens are the puppet masters behind the laws of physics. Or maybe aliens literally are physics. Just when we thought we had a grasp on the fundamental constants of the universe, boom, dark matter rips off the mask and its E.T. Too crazy to be true? Prove it.
British science fiction
writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke famously formulated three adages known as
Clarke's three laws. Of them, number three steals most of the spotlight:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic."
Consider cavemen for a
moment. If you hand-delivered an iPhone to an ancient cavedweller, he'd be
dumbfounded at the "magical" device. But give it some time, and Fred
Flintstone would probably start tweeting and Snapchatting. Now let's crank 'er
up a notch. Imagine technology so advanced, it's not even recognizable as
technology, or magic, for that matter. It could be so advanced that calling it
magic would be an insult. Sorry, David Blaine.
In 2016, Columbia University
director of astrobiology Caleb Scharf posed quite the thought experiment in an
article for Nautilus: Just maybe, aliens are so advanced that we can't tell
them apart from the laws of physics. "After all, if the cosmos holds other
life, and if some of that life has evolved beyond our own waypoints of
complexity and technology, we should be considering some very extreme
possibilities," Scharf writes.
As far as extreme
possibilities go, it doesn't get much more severe than hypothesizing that, hey,
maybe the whole of everything ever that exists anywhere is itself alien
intelligence.
But why not, right?!
"Presumably life doesn't have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could
be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite
complexity," writes Scharf. "If so, a civilization could then
transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps
our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization
transcribed its world." Is this the wildest possible solution to the Fermi
paradox? Well, it sure ain't the tamest.
This isn't all some far-out psychedelic rambling. (Even if it was, we'd still be here for it.) As bonkers as it may sound, Scharf argues that his thought experiment could explain the most mysterious cosmic phenomena. Take our dear ol' elusive friend, dark matter. This unseen stuff makes up 27 percent of the observable universe, but virtually everything else about it is famously unknown.
Based on the assumptions and
predictions of cosmologists and astronomers, dark matter could be much more
complicated than we're ready to understand. Inconsistencies between dark matter
models and observations only back that up.
With all this apparent
complexity, Scharf says it wouldn't be outlandish to think that technologically
advanced life is stored there. "What better way to escape the nasty
vagaries of supernova and gamma-ray bursts than to adopt a form that is immune
to electromagnetic radiation? Upload your world to the huge amount of real
estate on the dark side and be done with it." The inconsistencies might
just be a result of being artificially tampered with.
You can run a similar
exercise with the elusive dark energy, which makes up roughly 68 percent of the
universe. The universe didn't start expanding at an accelerated rate until a
cool 5 billion years ago, and scientists don't know why. Well, well, well, how
convenient.
"It's a stretch, but
maybe there's something about life itself that affects the cosmos, or maybe
those well-evolved denizens decided to tinker with the expansion."
Note that the ideas Scharf
is putting out there are just that: ideas. None of this is peer-reviewed or
even testable (YET). This is just one brave astrobiologist on a mission to
brainstorm the boundaries of theoretical possibility and make you paranoid
beyond all reason that every inescapable, so-called law of "nature"
affecting you is extraterrestrial intelligence. We're just having fun, kids!
Scharf signs off with a
mind-bender: "Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn't just external. Perhaps
it's already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics
itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of
complexity and emergence. In other words, life might not just be in the
equations. It might be the equations."
Via Curiosity.com
The article above is an interesting subject, but please cut the patronising tone, eh?
ReplyDeleteSometimes, what sounds like a "patronising tone" is nothing more than the attempt by the author to pre-empt all the numb-nuts from arguing every little point before the bigger point can be made.
ReplyDeleteI didn't really pick up on any patronizing vibe myself.
DeleteSo I read it a second time -- The author makes a few jokes about Roswell-style aliens, probably to curb any backlash like you said. The write-up generously concedes to the fact that "Even if it was (some far-out psychedelic rambling), we'd still be here for it".
I suppose it's possible someone might find it patronizing if it's information they already knew? But for non-journal-subscriber-pedestrians like myself, the information is new and just plain fun paranoia fodder.
Right then! Off to make my aluminum hat now...
Hardly a new thought. Essentially the same as the God hypothesis.
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