Home › View content

Is our universe ruled by artificial intelligence?

Fri, 03/28/2008 - 14:52 - NLN

Science fiction is filled with unusual alien species. But apart from the occasional robot, biological life is running the show. But NASA scientist, Dr. Steven Dick, sees a future Universe that has evolved past biology, where every intelligence is artificial. Consider the likelihood of a postbiological Universe.

Does intelligent life exist beyond Earth? It's easily the most profound and challenging question that humans have ever asked. The consequences of discovering other intelligent life would ripple through every aspect of human society, and actually meeting another species would be even more challenging.

Read full story at Universe Today.


Your rating: None Average: 3.3 (3 votes)

Comments

Fri, 03/28/2008 - 20:31 — quantum_flux

Blackholes and the Multiverse

Whenever 1 parallel universe gets created (black holes may create a lot of these), the other universes always gets destroyed. It's just a conservation of mass-energy. Of course, it is true that mass-energy always takes the path of destruction of lower entropy order to reach a new stabilization point, as the total entropy in the universe always tends toward increasing whenever a high enough activation energy is supplied for a new stabler equilibrium point to be achieved. I believe that the Earth "could" be destroyed by a black hole, but it is highly unlikely that this will happen before the black hole evaporates into pure gamma radiation.

Sun, 03/30/2008 - 15:01 — RobDinsmore

huh?

Is it possible you posted this in response to the wrong article. And even then... What the heck are you talking about?!

There is no evidence for universes being created or destroyed. And I am also a bit confused by your statement about "mass-energy always taking the path of destruction of lower entropy order..." Sounds like nonsense to me. Now I have to assume you mean that lower entropy states are destroyed in favor of high entropy ones, but your poor wording could be taken to mean the opposite. Globally entropy always increases with time via the 2nd law of thermo, and its constrained by the rest of the first law, ie energy conservation, work done, fluctuations, etc.

And how exactly is a black hole, made out of nonphotonic matter going to dissolve into pure photons? I am not a particle physicist but I did take a course once and I am pretty sure the standard model forbids such a transition.

Tue, 04/01/2008 - 08:04 — quantum_flux

My semi-confused reply

Oh my gosh, I am relatively certain that I posted this in a different article. http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/news/doomsday-fears-spark-lawsuit

Well, anyhow, I meant that matter goes through different states, right!? If you compress the atomic nucleus together so much, then you have given your system enough ativation energy to send matter into the black hole state of existance. I am just saying that, in my best theoretical guess, particle states break down into pure mass-energy at such high compressions which results in the release of cosmic and gamma rays and neutrinos. But perhaps, like you say, it is all nonsense. We won't really know until we do the experiment, and I won't really know until I do more research.

I'm not a particle physicist either, just a guy who read the entire 3 volume series of "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" and understood most of it, and up through chapter 15 in Roger Penroses' "The Road to Reality" as well as various Wikipedia articles on the subject. I don't know everything, but it is all starting to come together for me, I think.

Anyhow .... It is a clever way to say that there is only 1 universe at any given time when I say that all parallel universes get destroyed every time anything of uncertainty occurs. Hey, just because the mathematical model can be interpretted in one way doesn't mean that the interpretation represents physical reality. Y=MX+B could have an infinite different interpretations, but only one of those interpretations represents the reality of the problem you are working on. I was merely providing another interpretation to the multi-verse explanation in a sort of tongue in cheek kind of way. Anytime 1 path is taken, the parallel universes with all the other possible paths get destroyed leaving only that universe with the path taken.

My apologies!

Syndicate content