Laws of Physics as Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
Arthur C Clark’s famous third law states… “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Columbia University director of astrobiology, Caleb Scharf has taken this proposition “one step beyond” to suggest… “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from the laws of physics.”
“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.”
“If (Extra-Intelligent) 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.”
The above quotes were taken from Scharf’s article in Nautilus, the on-line (and print) science magazine, titled: Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? In that article, Scharf poses such mind-bending questions as…
Is dark matter an advanced extra-terrestrial cloaking device?
Is dark matter a virtual reality/space for advanced extra-terrestrials?
This article is recommended reading for those who ponder the complexities of the Big Question… Does life exist beyond our own Spaceship Earth? Follow the hyperlink at the bottom of this post to read the full article. Before you go, dear reader… here are a couple of interesting thoughts from the mind of Caleb Scharf…
“Once we start proposing that life could be part of the solution to cosmic mysteries, there’s no end to the fun possibilities. Although dark-matter life is a pretty exotic idea, it’s still conceivable that we might recognize what it is, even capturing it in our labs one day (or being captured by it). We can take a tumble down a different rabbit hole by considering that we don’t recognize advanced life because it forms an integral and unsuspicious part of what we’ve considered to be the natural world.”
"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."
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