
Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy? - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/can-a-living-creature-be-as-big-as-a-galaxy
======
lazaroclapp
The article makes the argument that intelligent life a couple orders of
magnitude larger than human would think very slowly, since the time for a
single message to cross a brain 10 times the size is 10 times longer. This
necessitates that every thought traverses the entire brain.

But, taking not too much poetic license, we can argue that human society at a
whole is a 10^6m scale intelligence (well, more like 10^3 if we are only
counting the pile of human brains, but the distances are still in the 10^6
scale). It furthermore has incredibly slow thought transmission outside of
very small "fast" nodes. Yet it solves the problem by not requiring most
signals to propagate very far. Only a few ideas need to be globally known by
humankind, the intermediate filtering is still mostly local.

So, a galaxy-sized "brain" can exist, it just needs to be very hierarchical,
since any global consensus would take hundreds of thousands of years to
formulate, even at the speed of light. In computing / distributed system
terms: locality matters.

~~~
jerf
You still can't call that a meaningful organism. The speed of light still
means it can't have had more than a few dozen "clock cycles" since the galaxy
stabilized enough to permit it, and it doesn't have all that many more
"cycles" before the galaxy will be too dead to sustain it. There is no
activity it could set itself out to do and then actually do it that would not
be literally at least tens of thousands of years behind the stimulus that
produced it, and that would be an incredibly quick reaction. There is no force
of "evolution" or anything else that could drive this entity. It's just not
useful to model it as an "organism".

Even human society can only be _analogized_ to an organism. It isn't one
either. It's not enough to point out there's vague similarities but ignore the
multiple-orders-of-magnitude differences in the various scales.

And there's no _need_ for "everything to be an organism". There's no physical
reality to that idea. It's merely a reflection of our own predisposition
towards weak analogical thinking when we should be dealing with things on
their own terms. For human society, analogical thinking can easily lead us
astray; for galactic scale society it's even harder to get away from
analogical thinking because there isn't one (so far as we know) from which we
can derive any observations at all, so there's no concrete facts in which we
can ground our thinking.

As a stepping stone, "human society as an organism" may be the beginning of
understanding. But when you start doing things like bemoaning its lack of
self-preservation instinct, it's a sign you've gone too far with the analogy
at the expense of dealing with what is really there.

~~~
lisper
> Even human society can only be analogized to an organism. It isn't one
> either.

Why not?

An organism can reasonably be defined as the minimal subset of a gene's
phenotype that is actually capable of reproducing. On that view, an ant (for
example) is not an organism, an ant _colony_ is the organism. This neatly
solves the puzzle of how it is possible for evolution to produce ants, since
the vast majority of individual ants are sterile.

On that view, the minimal possible organism for a sexually-reproducig species
is a mating pair. But a single pair of humans would not survive in the wild.
At a minimum it takes a village (as they say). So a human village can
reasonably be taken to be an organism, just as an ant colony can. But a
village can't produce a technological society. At best, a village can subsist.
So why is it unreasonable to consider (say) a city-state as an evolutionary
advance on the village, and hence an organism in its own right even thought it
isn't minimal? And so on through the Roman empire, the British empire, and the
modern nation-state and multinational corporation, all of which are no less
examples of the human genome's phenotype than the human body itself.

~~~
titzer
> An organism can reasonably be defined as the minimal subset of a gene's
> phenotype that is actually capable of reproducing.

Where did this definition come from?

> But a single pair of humans would not survive in the wild.

Not true; there are numerous examples of single families surviving in the
wild.

~~~
lisper
> Where did this definition come from?

From the puzzle: how can it be that evolution produces a creature (ants) where
99% of the individuals are sterile? And the answer: ants are not the organism,
the ant colony is the organism. This idea was introduced by Dawkins in "The
Extended Phenotype".

> there are numerous examples of single families surviving in the wild

Not without some external support. At a minimum they went into the wild with
some clothing and tools.

~~~
titzer
> From the puzzle: how can it be that evolution produces a creature (ants)
> where 99% of the individuals are sterile? And the answer: ants are not the
> organism, the ant colony is the organism. This idea was introduced by
> Dawkins in "The Extended Phenotype".

That has nothing to do with the definition of the word organism. Maybe you
want another word for the unit of reproduction, but the word /organism/
already has a specific meaning, independent of reproduction.

~~~
lisper
That's news to me. AFAIK, the meaning of "organism" is inextricably bound to
the concept of life, which in turn is inextricably bound to reproduction. But
please do enlighten me: what is this established meaning of "organism" that
has nothing to do with reproduction?

~~~
titzer
LMGTFY:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=define+organism](https://www.google.com/search?q=define+organism)

~~~
lisper
"an individual animal, plant, or single-celled _LIFE_ form"

"the material structure of an individual _LIFE_ form"

"a whole with interdependent parts, likened to a _LIVING_ being"

So let's go on to look up "Life":

"the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter,
including the capacity for growth, _REPRODUCTION_..."

~~~
Razengan
So planets that host sentient life are a form of life themselves.

~~~
lisper
Not unless the planet itself reproduces somehow.

~~~
Razengan
If we go and terraform Mars, for example, and make it just like Earth, won't
Earth be said to have reproduced?

~~~
lisper
I don't think so. What really matters is the _information_ that is being
replicated. In the case of humanity, that information is encoded in our DNA
and in our artifacts. But the planet exists independently of any information
that is encoded on or in it, so I don't think it would be fair to say that the
planet has reproduced. But it's arguable.

~~~
Razengan
This mostly depends on whether the planets where life originates are anything
like each other.

We just assume that every life-harboring planet will have water and trees and
blue skies, but even the "dead" planets that we've seen so far are nothing
like each other.

However if Earth is the only place with leafy green trees, for example, and we
go on to plant these on Mars and other planets, we will essentially be making
copies of Earth (which would otherwise be the only example of itself) by
replicating its attributes and variables on other worlds as much as we can,
for our own comfort.

Over a large enough scale of time and space, Earth could be seen as a
successful organism that managed to replicate itself. It doesn't need to have
any direct agency over its reproductive components (us) any more than we have
any agency over our own sperm and eggs.

~~~
lisper
That's a good argument, but it depends entirely on whether we (earth life)
adapt new planets to suit our preconceptions of life, or whether life from
earth adapts to the conditions in finds on other planets and becomes very
different from what it once was. In the former case, yes, I would totally
accept that earth had replicated. But I think the latter scenario is more
likely.

------
titzer
A lot of research suggests that the human brain has about an 80ms time window
within which events are roughly considered "simultaneous". Interestingly,
that's about the same amount of time for nerve signals to travel from your
furthest extremities to your brain.

If we were to scale up our brains and bodies with upgraded speed-of-light
transmitters, then 80 light-milliseconds is about 24,000 kilometers, or almost
exactly twice the diameter of Earth. Thus a similarly time-scaled fully
integrated conscious experience is probably limited to that volume.

Obviously, brains have lots of localized computation and subsystems that are
smaller and have lower cycle times. Planetary brains could have very fast
local regions but the integration time across subsystems is probably what
contributes to the perception of time in consciousness.

~~~
agumonkey
In a book by Bertalanffy (50s System Theory) they also measure frequency
limits (my blub) in animals. Anything faster than that wasn't registered by
said animal. Like waving a a stick 20 times per second would be invisible to
him. While at 15 "fps" it would runaway.

------
ThomPete
Speed isn't a problem if everyone else at your scale are equally slow.

If you are at the size of a galaxy you aren't being affected by humans ability
to be faster just as little as individual cells mostly aren't affecting humans
even though their ability to deal quickly with things at the cellular level
react way faster than your entire body do.

In fact most studies about the human mind seems to suggest that we are
actually more like tourists than captains on our own ship.

So the update frequency of the whole system can vary. The most important part
is that it's a pattern-recognizing feedback loop which can store past cycles.

~~~
mcguire
Until those pesky infestations start building Dyson spheres around your
ganglia.

------
gonvaled
When discussing these issues I have always the impression that we have a too
strong anthropomorphic view. For example, we assume that life needs a liquid
for support, but maybe it can work with other substance (gas, plasma, ...). We
think that watter has magic properties, but maybe another material works
better - we simply do not known about it. Why? Because Earth does not contain
enough material to produce and study the compound, or because Earth simply
does not have the conditions which make the substance perform at its optimum
level (maybe millions of degrees, or extremely high pressures).

I think we barely know anything about chemistry: the universe offers so many
options, that restricting outserlves to life as we know it is bound to make us
miss most of the real alternatives.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
I agree that we have too strong an anthropomorphic view, but disagree that
water and carbon are bad assumptions.

There are only a finite number of elements, and these elements are prouduced
in similar ways due to radioactive decay and stellar processes. Of these, a
simple study shows that carbon is best. Also, life requires some kind of
chemistry to reproduce - this is easiest in a liquid, and water is the best,
most abundant liquid for the process.

Perhaps a complex molecule is superior to carbon in some way. Or perhaps
something could exist and reproduce as a plasma. These materials and
conditions may exist somewhere in the universe, but are not nearly as likely
as carbon and water.

~~~
gonvaled
> There are only a finite number of elements, and these elements are prouduced
> in similar ways due to radioactive decay and stellar processes. Of these, a
> simple study shows that carbon is best.

Maybe another element (or compound) performs better in certain conditions or
in the presence of certain catalizators than carbon. We have not detected this
because we do not have the conditions to perform the experiments, or maybe we
haven't found the right proportions of catalizator to compound, or maybe we
have not even tried that specific combination.

There are maybe other stables elements that we have not yet discovered, with
>1000 protons in the nucleus: another isle of stability which we do not know
about because the stars do not easily reach it when going supernova.

Maybe there are other organization structures (not atoms) for matter that do
not occur in this part of the universe. "Chemistry" would be very different
then.

There are too many variables: humankind is very young, science is in its
infancy, we have a very limited spectrum of the possible conditions /
materials at our disposal, and anyway the possibilities that the universe
offers are way too big for us to make any final statement.

The universe has been running for a long time, in a massive parallelized
manner: it sure has found possibilities that we do not even dare of dreaming
about.

> These materials and conditions may exist somewhere in the universe, but are
> not nearly as likely as carbon and water.

You can be right there, but what is more likely: carbon and water or "the rest
of possible alternatives"? It could be that carbon+water is the most common
option, but still most life in the universe is based in lots of different
alternatives.

------
ilamparithi
I read somewhere that there is a universe in each scale. For example, there is
a whole world in the atomic scale. Similarly there are billions of bacteria in
our mouth alone. They couldn't make sense of their host. Sometimes I think it
is possible that the entire universe is some body part of a giant organism
which we couldn't comprehend.

~~~
mbil
Whenever I hear something similar I think of this Simpson's opening:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OiRk56pNEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OiRk56pNEk)

------
craftandhustle
After recently finishing The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, the sci-fi trope
of life at different magnitudes is fascinating to think about. Without
spoiling too much, there's a chapter where an entire universe rich with
intelligent life is discovered as scientists "unfold" a single proton.

~~~
Confusion
I liked the book very much, until those kinds of things started happening. The
last third of the book ruined it for me

------
justsaysmthng
> Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

This can be followed up by an even "crazier" question: If so, is our Galaxy a
living creature ?

Going in the other direction, are cells in our bodies "living creatures" ?
They sure do exhibit all the qualities of the larger organisms. If that's
true, then our body is a conglomerate of 100 trillion living beings locked
together in a biological ecosystem, each individual cell or collection of
cells having probably no concept of the larger system they are part of.

So then we (our bodies and other animals) could also be locked together in a
biological ecosystem (The Earth) and we would be oblivious of the fact by
default.

Is Earth a "living creature" ? The "overview effect" that astronauts report
upon seeing the Earth from orbit seems to be related to exactly this
realization - that the planet is one big living organism. There's a fantastic
short documentary about this -
[https://vimeo.com/55073825](https://vimeo.com/55073825)

We are just beginning to see the complex interconnection of things and beings
in the biosphere so there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that the planet
might be a huge living organism - not quite fits in our definition of
"organism", but then it might mean that our definition is a bit too narrow.

Ancient shamans and the modern day "psychonauts" repot the same "overview
effect" after tripping on various psychedelic plants and fungi - that
everything is alive, including the planet, the stars and so on.

The idea of a "soul" \- as the differentiating property of living things - has
been around since .. forever. And if we touch the idea of soul, then we're
entering the realm of the Holy and the idea of God.

If all living beings have "souls" and if the Galaxy is a living being that it
results that it too has soul. Interestingly that it's the "soul" that allows
us to "grasp" the "being part of" thing.. So if cells have souls, they feel Us
with it, if the Planet has soul, we feel it with our souls and so on...

Oh well, this is a infinitely long discussion, so I'll just pause here and
contemplate on some C++ code :)

~~~
LordKano
_This can be followed up by an even "crazier" question: If so, is our Galaxy a
living creature ?_

I like this, a galaxy-scale Gaia Hypothesis. Why not?

Our perspective is so small and our life span is so limited, would we be able
to recognize or even comprehend the thought processes of a galaxy sized
organism?

~~~
outworlder
If you like that, and without spoiling too much, read the last book in the
Foundation series.

------
gumby
The article is compelling that you can't have an organism _like a human_ but
why should it look that way? A loosely coupled system with lots of local
computation could just as well "think", just not like us. Ants and termites
are extreme examples of this though we don't typically think of them as a
single organism (except in The Sword in the Stone) but they have collective
behavior. Bacterial biofilms too.

And in fact all parts of our brain do not communicate with all others; there
are specialized subprocessing in the early visual system (cf Letvin) much less
the various specialized cortices.

So one could _construct_ a computational agent on the scale of a galaxy --
this ignores the question of evolution.

I've long presumed that we're unlikely to even recognize an intelligent alien
(and that an alien encountering human interstellar travelers might not
recognize the humans as intelligent). It's a fundamental hermeneutic question.

~~~
zodPod
I've always had thoughts about this too. I understand that our definition of
"living" might be that it requires water and air or something like that but
honestly I think that's a little short-sighted.

------
meric
_Could an intelligent species embark on an effort to build a self-replicating
machine as big as a galaxy?_

~~~
drieddust
This idea is explored by Robert Charles Wilson in his Sci-Fi trilogy. He calls
these being Hypotheticals and they operate over time frame and distances
uncomprehensible to human mind.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_\(novel\))

------
amelius
> Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

If you consider your brain as the brain of the galaxy, and the rest of the
galaxy as its limbs, then certainly :)

The fact that the brain has only little control over its limbs (through very
weak forces of gravity and electromagnetics) doesn't really matter.

~~~
saalweachter
Lack of interstellar travel / stellar engineering == locked in syndrome?

------
vatotemking
Is it possible that galaxies are actually atoms of gigantic beings?

~~~
noonespecial
Or atoms galaxies?

It's turtles all the way down.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down)

~~~
vatotemking
Yeah. When you look at it everything is just a sphere rotating on something.

------
f_allwein
Pretty interesting, and pointed me to the "powers of 10" film visualizing
changes in order of magnitude:
[http://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0](http://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0)

------
millstone
> Progress in the theory of computation suggests that sentience and
> intelligence likely require quadrillions of primitive “circuit” elements.

Can anyone elaborate? What is the evidence that sentience and intelligence
requires this?

~~~
oafitupa
Intelligence maybe, but sentience? We haven't made any progress in that. We
don't even know if science will ever be able to figure that out. See: the hard
problem of consciousness.

------
joshdick
The classic essay on this topic is "On Being the Right Size" by biologist
J.B.S. Haldane in 1926.

It's really worth a read: [http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-
size.html](http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html)

I'll never forget: "You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and,
on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided
that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse
splashes."

------
carlob
This reminds me of Look to Windward, a Culture novel which features
behemotaurs, creatures much larger than whales which are near immortal and
have a very very slow metabolism.

~~~
ajuc
Also Algebraist by the same author Ian Banks - there is a species living so
slowly, that star travel is practical for them, so they are ubiquitus in the
whole known universe.

~~~
tfgg
Also one of the intelligences encountered in Diaspora by Greg Egan.

Actually, they just meet a localised handling agent that explains that they
work for a star-spanning sentience - which is something the characters had
been considering as a way of making themselves robust against civilisation-
destroying gamma ray bursts, but dismissed on the grounds that it made
everything so slow - though that links into the other theme in that book of
simulated beings existing on very different timescales.

------
KineticLensman
It depends on how you define life, which the article doesn't cover. If by life
you mean 'demonstrates complex emergent behaviours', the answer might be
'perhaps, although it would take a very long time for anything to happen'.
However, if 'living' means 'self organised, maintains its integrity and can
reproduce', then the answer is more likely to be 'probably not'

~~~
alanwatts
>'living' means 'self organised, maintains its integrity and can reproduce'

I like the definition of life being something that can reproduce. But self
organized, I'm not sure. All life depends on non-biological environmental
factors for its organization and reproduction.

------
vorg
So, to an accuracy of a factor of 10:

    
    
      smallest theoretical scale is 10^-35 m, i.e. Planck length
      smallest observed scale is 10^-19 m, i.e. quark interactions
      smallest life scale is 10^-6 m, i.e. bacteria and viruses
      size of vessel of consciousness is 10^-1 m, i.e. human brain
      largest life scale is 10^3 m, i.e. Blue Mountain honey fungus
      largest observed scale 10^26 m, i.e. the cosmic horizon
      largest theoretical scale is unknown
    

Looking at this sequence of orders of magnitude, i.e. (-35, -19, -6, -1, 3,
26, ???) makes me wonder:

* is there a theory that encompasses General Relativity and defines a theoretical largest possible distance/time?

* perhaps consciousness, being in the middle, will never, via mathematics, unite such a theory with Quantum Mechanics

~~~
placeybordeaux
For those that wanted a visualization

    
    
      10^-35 - Planck length
      10^-34
      10^-33
      10^-32
      10^-31
      10^-30
      10^-29
      10^-28
      10^-27
      10^-26
      10^-25
      10^-24
      10^-23
      10^-22
      10^-21
      10^-20
      10^-19 - quark interactions
      10^-18
      10^-17
      10^-16
      10^-15
      10^-14
      10^-13
      10^-12
      10^-11 - hydrogen atom
      10^-10
      10^-9
      10^-8
      10^-7
      10^-6 - bacteria and viruses
      10^-5
      10^-4
      10^-3
      10^-2
      10^-1 - human brain
      10^0
      10^1
      10^2
      10^3 - Blue Mountain honey fungus
      10^4
      10^5
      10^6
      10^7
      10^8 - Diameter of our sun
      10^9
      10^10
      10^11
      10^12
      10^13
      10^14
      10^15
      10^16 - Oort cloud
      10^17
      10^18
      10^19
      10^20 - Our Galaxy
      10^21
      10^22
      10^23
      10^24
      10^25
      10^26 - the cosmic horizon

------
wavesum
This makes sense if you make the assumption that Big Bang theory is correct.
In my opinion the theory has quite a few leaps of faith.

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-scientific-criticism-of-
th...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-scientific-criticism-of-the-Big-Bang-
theory)

If we consider the possibility of infinitely old universe with no beginning or
end, the answer is yes, most likely, but it's unlikely we ever know. Those
strange blobs of light could very well be living, thinking things or parts of
them, but everything that happens on their physical scale is so slow that we
can only observe a mere snapshot of their state.

------
JohnDoe365
A galaxy is a living creature. See it that way?

~~~
travelbyphone
Absolutely. Even more if you think that life isn't but a slow transfer of the
Suns energy between organisms. Even our thoughts are just energy.

------
Sommer
Maybe it's worth thinking about it the other way around:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7ojSW5pODk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7ojSW5pODk)

------
habosa
This reminds me of the book "Spin" by Robert Charles Wilson
([http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016IXMWI/ref=dp-kindle-
re...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016IXMWI/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1)).

While I don't want to spoil too much for the HN crowd (more than I have
already by posting it under this link) it's a great SciFi book that hints at
some really cool theoretical questions about life, space travel, and inter-
species communication.

------
miloszf
If you find this topic interesting to think about I strongly recommend the
book Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon.

It was written in 1930's, but in some ways it's still incredibly refreshing
and thought provoking.

------
fit2rule
At some scale, Earth itself could be considered a single life-form.

~~~
FooNull
And the sun, and the solar system

------
ZeroFries
Depends on how you define "organism", I think. If you mean an entity
possessing some sort of unitary consciousness, then yes, thoughts would become
slower the larger you scale the brain. If you mean distributed information
processing system, I think you can classify the entire universe as one, and
there's no such thing as a "thought".

------
mchahn
> The height of the tallest redwoods is limited by their inability to pump
> water more than 100 meters into the sky,

Actually they grow higher than that limit. They absorb dew in their leaves so
they can grow taller. There is a reason there are redwoods only in a certain
climate.

------
netcan
Just the title has two big semantic questions: (1) what counts as life and (2)
what counts as intelligence.

Like lazaroclapp commented, it's not that big a stretch to think of humanity
(as a whole) as meeting the definitions of both. Also (or alternatively), the
earth.

Interesting questions.

------
paulpauper
Issac Asmimov's the Final Question ends with a sentience that spans the
universe

------
hyperliner
Who cares about how long it takes for the thing to think? It seems such large
thing would have no predators, therefore it is not in a hurry to decide
whether to fight or fly.

------
Qwertious
>It’s likely that the first true artificial intelligences will occupy volumes
that are not so different from the size of our own bodies, despite being based
on fundamentally different materials and architectures, again suggesting that
there is something special about the meter scale.

That's circular, it's begging the question. Assuming that there's something
special about the meter scale, then using that to reinforce the notion that
there is something special about the meter scale.

------
awinter-py
if materialism is true, the united states is probably conscious

[http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...](http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140130a.htm)

~~~
gonvaled
Sure. Another level of conscience. Materialism accepts that things are neither
white nor black, but gray; the world is more complex than what we want it to
be; simplifications take you only so far.

Rabits are more conscious that amoebas, and less than men. The consciousness
of the US is probably not comparable to the consciousness of men - they are
basically different things, with some common properties.

So yes, the US is conscious, for some definition of consciousness.

~~~
awinter-py
I think the author of that paper is leaning more on the 'phenomenological
consciousness isn't true' case than the 'united states is conscious' case.

I land in the max tegmark 'information probably is the same as consciousness'
camp. It makes sense that a guy who studies simultaneity would ascribe magical
properties to information that is partitioned like spacetime.

But I can't argue with the critics -- we don't yet have a measurable physical
quantity for consciousness, much less a definition. Dave Chalmers says the
'hard problem' is why we have qualia. I think the hard problem is even more
fundamental -- it's really hard to formulate questions about consciousness in
a way that communciates the problem to someone who hasn't already thought of
it.

You can say the behavioral evidence (i.e. measurable quantity) for
consciousness is that we're having a conversation about it, but that feels
like a copout.

------
staticelf
Is there any reason to think that there exist a limit on how large or small
things can be?

~~~
oafitupa
The Universe is expanding, and some parts will never interact with other
parts, because not even light could make the trip. One could say they are now
in separate universes. So that's one limit I can think of.

~~~
staticelf
Yeah but that doesn't mean they don't exist? Our universe could be a drop in
an ocean of a real multiverse.

------
outworlder
I came here expecting to find a discussion of the Foundation series...

------
abledon
Reminds me of Peter F Hamilton's Void series

------
known
Interesting concept.

------
runn1ng
Galactus must feed.

------
am185
april fools?

------
numbsafari
Yes, I have met your mother.

