
Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/is-physical-law-an-alien-intelligence
======
TeMPOraL
Reminds me a bit of one of the points of the book Death's End (third part of
the Three Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu).

A small spoiler follows.

The point raised in this book is - the Earth looks _much_ different thanks to
life it has than it would without it. Consider e.g. mountains that erode
slower because there are forests and foliage that disperse the wind. Would it
not be the case that advanced alien life existing in the universe also affects
its evolution? So what if some of the physics we study is actually _not_ how
the universe looked at the start? Could the speed of light have changed
_because_ of aliens weaponizing physics in past wars? Could the curled up
dimensions string theory postulates be actually be another consequence of
powerful entities doing wide-scale manipulation of the universe? Maybe
initially, before life, the universe actually _had_ 11 full, expanded spatial
dimensions?

I do highly recommend the book.

~~~
gabrielgoh
yeah, the book was pretty mind blowing. That book blew my mind the way reading
Philip K Dick did when I was 16. I didn't think books could do that anymore. I
recommend this book to anyone who wants a further exploration of the ideas
mentioned in this article.

~~~
sardonicbryan
You should try the short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. Just
finished reading it, it's the story that Arrival is based on. Haven't seen the
movie yet, but the story managed to blow my mind in the same way Death's End
did.

~~~
mirekrusin
"Stories of Your Life and Others" Ted Chiang

~~~
sardonicbryan
On the off chance that there is any confusion, the story itself is titled
"Story of Your Life," and it is also part of a collection of short stories
published as "Stories of Your Life."

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sklivvz1971
Whole article in a sentence:

"These possibilities might seem wholly untestable, because part of the conceit
is that sufficiently advanced life will not just be unrecognizable as such,
but will blend completely into the fabric of what we’ve thought of as nature.
But viewed through the warped bottom of a beer glass, we can pick out a few
cosmic phenomena that—at crazy as it sounds—might fit the requirements."

Meh :-)

~~~
ianai
What were the things?

------
amasad
Any sufficiently advanced new age theory is indistinguishable from rubbish.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from physical
reality.

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teilo
This is nothing but speculation, and represents the nullification of science
by providing the answer: "It's Aliens!" It is functionally equivalent to
arguing for intelligent design.

~~~
erikpukinskis
No, speculation and arguing for something are fundamentally different.

Also, theorizing an entity beyond our understanding is fundamentally different
from theorizing an entity beyond our universe.

~~~
landryraccoon
All simulation theories of the universe require an entity beyond our universe.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Not if the simulation container evolved spontaneously in its own universe.

~~~
landryraccoon
It depends on the semantics of "universe". I consider a simulation to be its
own universe, if you don't agree with that definition then it's a different
universe - but it might be one with completely different physical laws.

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lbenes
We don’t directly see anything. Our brains are trapped inside our head. The
whole concept of "reality" and solid things is just a useful construct for
beings made of matter. We evolved to see in the visible spectrum because it
mostly bounces off of stuff like us(not totally, put your hand up to a bright
light).

We are beings of condensed energy. Would we be “real” to beings in the
neutrino / dark matter world of physics? Or would we "nothing" in their
reality? Even if they studied us, would a rock appear to be any different than
a human when viewed from the realm of WIMPs? To hear physicists Dawkins and
Krauss think about this and the concept of “nothing”:

[https://youtu.be/CXGyesfHzew?t=1229](https://youtu.be/CXGyesfHzew?t=1229)

~~~
seanp2k2
Yeah, I've totally had these thoughts before too. The interesting part would
be proving any of them :)

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johndoe4589
To me it sounds like yet another attempt by materialism to get to grips with a
non materialist view.

We all know at some level that the universe is not just full of "dumb rocks"
(quoting Alan Watts). Evolution CAN coexist with the unknown. We're all
mapping a sandbox from the inside, so to speak.

Evolution is a thing, physics is a thing, and it can all happen in
consciousness.

But the notion of "god" and "intelligent universe" are so loaded these days,
that a materialist has to find all kind of funny ways around it.

I think it's valuable, to try to express old ideas in a more modern
language... But let's be honest theories like the "universe is a imulation",
or that intelligence somehow pertains to alien life ... are just ways to
postpone the hard problem of consciousness.

Potentially related:

The Physicalist Worldview as Neurotic Ego-Defense Mechanism

[http://realitysandwich.com/320896/the-physicalist-
worldview-...](http://realitysandwich.com/320896/the-physicalist-worldview-as-
neurotic-ego-defense-mechanism/)

~~~
monktastic1
> To me it sounds like yet another attempt by materialism to get to grips with
> a non materialist view.

I actually commend that. Opening up to the idea that physical reality is
something far stranger than we've imagined is a great way to open oneself to
the possibility that "physical reality" isn't at all the sort of thing we've
long imagined it to be.

Same with the simulation hypothesis. There was this article recently:
[http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Edge20161030](http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Edge20161030)

And it contained this gem, which may actually get the right wheels turning in
some minds:

    
    
      "If the universe is a computer simulation then we should look at the player, not the level."

------
RichardCA
Shane Carruth, the guy who gave us Primer and Upstream Color, wrote a
screenplay for a movie that would have been called A Topiary. It's essentially
an exploration of this idea. It starts with a traffic engineer in the 80's
finding strange patterns in accident data, and ends with a group of
adolescents building a device of non-human design. The key idea is that
spectra are the manifestation that ties it all together. The screenplay is
available online and would make an excellent SF novel.

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dev_throw
Our universe might just be an alien's Docker container.

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Gammarays
Although some have pointed out that the article is pure speculation, this is a
topic that interests me. Are there any recommendable books that explore
similar topics?

I've tried googling, but there's just too many "Alien" theory books out there.
Hoping for some solid recommendations.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy explores this problem pretty strongly
in the last book (Death's End), and also foreshadows it a bit in the first
two. I recently binge-read them all and I give a very high recommendation for
them. Calling the guy "China's Clarke" may not be a stretch.

~~~
pault
I mentioned it down-thread, but my favorite part of the trilogy is his answer
to the Fermi paradox (minor spoilers ahead): because of the universal limit of
light speed, and exponential growth in technology, by the time you see
evidence of advanced alien life, chances are they have developed to the point
of being an existential threat to your own civilization. So the only logical
behavior is to remain hidden and immediately destroy any civilization you
detect. I haven't heard anyone propose this particular solution before, so I
thought it was quite clever.

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maxxxxx
IIRC that was the idea of the book "2001" (not the movie). First the aliens
developed starships and over time they used space directly and became one with
it.

~~~
jaequery
Anyone ever read 2010? I thought the 2010 was way more interesting and filled
with a lot more sci-fi "facts" than 2001.

~~~
snowwrestler
2001 is a much better movie than book.

2010 is a much better book than movie.

The rest of the sequels are not great in any medium IMO.

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wallace_f
The article talks about the interesting apparent coincidence of timing b/w the
formation of earth and the increased acceleration of the universe.

The article discusses a possible connection b/w life and expansion, but maybe
it's more simple: perhaps it's only possible we can ask this question because
had it not been for the accelerated expansion of the universe, we'd would have
had neighbours close enough that they might not be too happy we popped in and
were working on our own ideas about what to do in the neighbourhood.

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runeks
If a life form can become so advanced that it becomes indistinguishable from
what it observes, won't we too cross that border at some point, and if so,
when will we know that we've crossed it?

If we've already crossed that border without knowing it, we could be observing
our own life form in physics, and not that of "aliens".

~~~
ajkjk
I think if we were to cross that border (which is certainly necessarily going
to happen even conditional on it being possible), we would be able to easily
tell.

~~~
runeks
What makes you think this?

In dreamful sleep, we exist at a level of consciousness where what we observe
is indistinguishable from ourselves. And yet we rarely notice.

~~~
ajkjk
I expect that we would continuously be an intelligent race that performs
observations and does science the entire time, even as we evolve to
unrecognizable forms, so, we'd just "think about it" as it's happening.

There's no analogy with dreaming.

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gormo2
An intelligence that exists in the physical laws of the universe? Well that's
not novel or science fiction, it's been posited by thinkers for thousands of
years and is commonly referred to as "God"

~~~
monktastic1
:)

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ChrisClark
So, we're still living in the 'plain text' part of our universe. Everything
open and visible to the ones who've moved to the encrypted dark matter. ;)

------
DanielBMarkham
Epistemological point: if from the modern world you dropped in on Christopher
Columbus with all your gadgets and tried to explain them, it might sound like
magic. If from the modern world you dropped in on a hominid 100k years ago in
his cave with all your gadgets and tried to explain them? You'd be a god.

Things that exist outside of our ability to have language to describe them are
godlike. (There is an open question about whether the set of such things is
irreducible or open to conquest at some point in time)

If the caveman trapped you and tried to figure out what you were up to? Yes,
to him it would be physics. However -- this is just another way of saying that
he'd have no symbols to grasp your behavior and would be forced to create
various mental models that he could share with others.

Donald Rumsfeld famously talked about knowns and unknowns[1]. But there is
another dimension of things we have no symbology to begin discussing. There be
dragons.

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiPe1OiKQuk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiPe1OiKQuk)

~~~
JackFr
It gets even worse with aliens. Our brains have convinced us that they are
universal computation machines, but consider that there are possibly true
representations of the universe that are literally unknowable to us.

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bitwize
I fail to see how terrestrial life is distinguishable from physics.

~~~
goatlover
If that were the case, there would be no need for biology. It's one thing to
say that life is made up of physical stuff. It's another entirely to say it's
indistinguishable from physics. That's a form of extreme reductionism that
isn't born out by science, although one can adopt a philosophical view that
physics is all there is. Epistemologically, we humans can't explain life only
in terms of physics, thus the reason for biology.

~~~
proteinbased
I think just the opposite is true. Biology can not explain life without
physics, there might not be a complete understanding yet, but physics and math
are the only tools that will get us there. Chemistry too, needs physics all
the time. I think separating science is a historical relic, everything we know
is physics and math, even if it might be hard to recognize in some biological
phenomena. But after all, they tend to be rather complex. I am not sure what
indistinguishable from physics is supposed to mean, but it sounds
philosophical to me.

~~~
Koshkin
It must be noted though that life is an emergent phenomenon, therefore the
idea that it requires physics to explain it is clearly reductionist. For
instance, if you were to simulate chemical (let alone higher-level) processes
characteristic to life using a computer, you would definitely not need to
start with Schrödinger's equation. Even organic chemistry can be modeled based
on high-level "axioms" _of its own_ , and those axioms, or principles, do not
even have to be the same as those used in modeling general chemical phenomena.

~~~
proteinbased
I did not indent to convey that the empirical findings in biology/chemistry
are not important. I agree that you do not necessarily need a quantum
description to understand biological phenomena, but sometimes (eg single
electrons in photosynthesis , bond breaking/formation) you do. Molecular
simulations however were not what I was picturing when I wrote my comment. If
I understand you correctly, you think because of the emergent character of
biological systems, the physical approach is too reductionist. But the
emergence we observe is due to (non equilibrium) thermodynamics, which is
studied primarily in statistical physics. I guess what I want to say is that
we should be aware that many interesting problems are found at the borders of
disciplines which were shaped by historical happenstance. Example: there is
immense overlap between chemistry and solid state physics, still they are
considered as distinct disciplines.

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f_allwein
Given the history of life on earth (3.5 B years of life, 100.000 or so of
human covilization), I think it's much more likely that any alien life we
discover would be very primitive - say, bacteria living on a moon in the solar
system, or maybe plants on a planet somewhere.

~~~
pault
That was part of the premise of the Three Body Problem (slight spoilers
ahead): technology advances so quickly on a universal timeline, that in the
time span between detecting an alien civilization and being able to do
anything about it (assuming no FTL communication/travel), the detected
civilization will have advanced to the point of being an existential threat to
your own civilization, so the only logical response to detecting another
civilization is to immediately destroy it if possible, or remain hidden
otherwise. This is his answer to the Fermi paradox. I thought it was quite
clever.

~~~
f_allwein
... or the detected civilization will just have died out in the same time
span. How much time do we have left as a species? Given climate change and our
current consumption of non renewable resources, I doubt any civilization that
detects us today would be able to reach us on time.

Three Body Problem sounds interesting. Will check it out.

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firethief
> But if the surrounding universe ever got too warm—too filled with thermal
> refuse—things would stagnate. Luckily we live in an expanding and constantly
> cooling cosmos. What better long-term investment by some hypothetical life 5
> billion years ago than to get the universe to cool even faster?

I'm not a physicist, but isn't that not how heat death works at all? Reducing
temperature by spreading out matter doesn't help the "problem" that low-
entropy energy becomes scarce.

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eva1984
This is pure speculation, or fiction. What is the real meat here?

~~~
terrestrial
It's just preparations for the impending first contact.

Now we'll be a little less surprised when they mention they've been around all
this time.

Perhaps Kurzweil wasn't that far off after all..

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stefs
this is an offtopic question: does anyone know, why online magazines like
nautil.us, vox.com and many others still don't use https? certificates are
free and the additional server cost is minimal nowadays, so why don't they
encrypt traffic? are ads and tracking the reason?

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codethief
Does the website stay blank on a mobile device for anyone else? (I'm using
Firefox on Android.)

~~~
ofcapl_
I have it blank too (edge, wp10)

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ivanhoe
Not sure what "physics" exactly means in this context, I presume that gravity,
EM or nuclear forces are just products of some supreme alien technology? Isn't
that just the same, and equally as (un)likely, as the concept of God that
rules the Universe?

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pmoriarty
_" only about 5 percent of the mass-energy of the universe consists of
ordinary matter: the protons, neutrons, and electrons that we’re composed of.
A much larger 27 percent is thought to be unseen, still mysterious stuff"_

What about the other 68 percent?

~~~
flaviojuvenal
dark energy and dark matter AFAIK:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DMPie_2013.svg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DMPie_2013.svg)

------
sriku
The article reads like a wish for a god, or gods, underlying the fabric of the
universe, within the scope of physics.

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chiefalchemist
So there are intelligent living things that influence our world that we can't
see and don't understand? Funny, that sounds an awful like a God to me.

Or what about, Musk's we're living in a virtual reality? That is, a reality
defined and determined by unseen powerful forces.

Is Science finally preparing to offer Religion at the table of "What is Life?
And Why?"

~~~
AsyncAwait
> So there are intelligent living things that influence our world that we
> can't see and don't understand? Funny, that sounds an awful like a God to
> me.

"influence" is an interesting word, because the difference is, if they
influence or world in terms of nature, that's a wholly lot different than the
concept of God, a powerful entity watching your every step, ready to place you
on a burner for eternity at any point, if you don't please him or if he is
just having a bad day.

Bacteria also influence our world, I would argue however, that they're quite
removed from the concept of God.

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crimsonalucard
There is nothing in this universe that is distinguishable from physics.

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jacobmorse
I know of an ancient book that has been saying this all along.

------
given
> Part of the fabric of the universe is a product of intelligence.

Look, it's simple: God made the whole thing. But you don't want to believe in
God so you invent funny theories to explain away God.

~~~
abritinthebay
God is t an answer. It explains nothing. It's the absence of an explanation
hand waved away and given a name.

Even IF a god existed the same questions would still apply

------
known
And Hawking says humans will extinguish in 1000 years

------
jyriand
fnord

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dschiptsov
Life _is_ indistinguishable from physics.

~~~
Retra
Well, _I_ seem to have no trouble with the distinction.

~~~
dschiptsov
Well, I just got tired of hipster bullshit and memes.

There is the only one way to prove something - it is to show that there are
logical truth of all the statements and implication all the way back to the
starting assumptions. Students learn this in an undergrads AI class, leave
alone the basics of mathematical logic.

This shit is full of gaps in logic, just a pile of memes upon memes (dark
energy, my ass!) and bullshit all the way down. Just a single flaw in logic
anywhere in the chain of statements is enough to throw away all the crap. A
single failed assertion.

Things which are not confirmed by independently replicated experiments are
_beliefs_ not facts. Socially constructed memes. The people who speculate
about unproven sets of beliefs are sectarians, not scientists.

This and similar bullshit is no different from the cosmology on the walls of
Egyptian pyramids or the stories about angels pushing the planets to keep them
moving on its orbits.

~~~
imchillyb
> "The people who speculate about unproven sets of beliefs are sectarians, not
> scientists." -@dschiptsov

The entire realm of astrophysics and particle physics would beg to differ with
you. Just because we don't _yet_ know the maths, or truths, behind the studies
does not relegate the science to the realm of sectarians or religious figures.

