Posted on Dec 17, 2017 in Uncategorized
"It’s a great mind-bending twist," says Caleb Scharf, a research scientist at Columbia University and director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center. "Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn’t just external," says Scharf. "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."
"It would neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the cosmos around us, Scharf adds in an article in Nautil.us. "despite the sheer number of planets it could have arisen on—the so-called Fermi Paradox. perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world."
In other words says Scharf, "What we think might be the effects of mysterious forces such as dark energy and dark matter in the Universe, could actually be the influence of alien intelligence – or maybe even aliens themselves."
Arthur C. Clarke of Space Odyssey 2010 fame famously observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. Lord Martin Rees, a leading cosmologist and astrophysicist has said he believes the existence of extraterrestrial life may be beyond human understanding.
“They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognize them. The problem is that we’re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology. I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the current capacity of our brains. I think it very likely – in fact, inevitable – that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon."
Alien technology a billion years older than ours might not even be made of matter, says Paul Davies of Arizona State. It might have no fixed size or shape; have no well-defined boundaries. Is dynamical on all scales of space and time. Or, conversely, does not appear to do anything at all that we can discern. Does not consist of discrete, separate things; but rather it is a system, or a subtle higher-level correlation of things.
"Are matter and information," Davies asks, "all there is?"
Five hundred years ago, Davies writes, "the very concept of a device manipulating information, or software, would have been incomprehensible. Might there be a still higher level, as yet outside all human experience, that organizes electrons? If so, this "third level" would never be manifest through observations made at the informational level, still less at the matter level.
We should be open to the distinct possibility that advanced alien technology a billion years old may operate at the third, or perhaps even a fourth or fifth level -all of which are totally incomprehensible to the human mind at our current state of evolution in 2017.
But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?
After all, with our universe 13.5 billion years old, the cosmos may hold other life, and if some of that life has evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, says Scharf, "we should be considering some very extreme possibilities. Today’s futurists and believers in a machine “singularity” predict that life and its technological baggage might end up so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t even realize we were staring at it. That’s quite a claim, yet it would neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the cosmos around us, despite the sheer number of planets it could have arisen on—the so-called Fermi Paradox.
"For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. 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. 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."
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