Back in college I was in a high-energy astrophysics class. The professor noted that understanding neutron stars was the most difficult problem in physics. In order to understand neutron stars, you need to use every single branch of modern physics: general relativity, solid-state physics, nuclear physics, and fluid dynamics, among other things are all important.
It touches a lot of things. But we are not very good at even understanding basic things on everyday scales of size and energy, like trying to predict the angle of repose of a heap of granular matter.
This article reminds me of the intro in the Cosmos reboot, where all kinds of natural phenomena merge into each other, like the pattern on a flower turning into the iris of someone's eye.
Given that so many physical combinations have the potential to exist, it's almost surprising to think of how few common forms of matter and life (that we know of) take.
For years I have imagined - to no avail - how a form of intelligent life could reach industrialization without resembling humans: bipedal animals with opposable thumbs and multiple digits, heads on top, genitals between the legs. It's probably why most of the Star Trek aliens can only be differentiated by skin color and forehead shape.
So if the inside of a neutron star looks like pasta, then that's what makes sense to nature.
That might just be human pattern matching at work, rather than actual similarities.
Regarding intelligent life looking similar, I sometimes have the opposite thought. What if the reason we haven't seen any aliens isn't that they don't exist, but rather that they are so different we can't even recognize them as intelligence or life? If intelligent creatures existed that were built out of magnetic field lines in the Sun, or variations in density in the interstellar medium, we might never recognize them as life, and they might never recognize us.
"That might just be human pattern matching at work, rather than actual similarities."
In many cases there are actual similarities. Waves appear everywhere because wherever you see a -d^2 x over d^2 t, you get waves. Explosions happen at many scales because wherever you get an exothermic reaction that makes itself happen faster you get an explosion. As the article itself says:
"Because they are made of a water-loving and water-repelling layer sandwiched together, their interactions with a watery environment make them self-assemble into the spaghetti- and lasagna-like structures known as endoplasmic reticulum,"
where you get two things that attract and repel in the same way as fats and water, you get characteristic shapes. Many similarities aren't just visual, they really do represent underlying similarities in the relevant processes.
"If intelligent creatures existed that were built out of magnetic field lines in the Sun, or variations in density in the interstellar medium, we might never recognize them as life, and they might never recognize us."
Life needs to be able to expel entropy faster than the environment jams it in, or it isn't life anymore. It is very likely that nothing can possibly live in a star, because entropy is getting jammed in to every cubic centimeter pretty hard. Interstellar-medium-based life has the problem that it must necessarily interact multiple orders of magnitude more slowly than Earth life because all of its components are much more separated and it has the same speed-of-light limits as our biochemistry has, so even if it somehow overcomes the problem that having complex, information-processing-capable structures that function without chemistry (to a first approximation, the interstellar medium is a tiny puff of hydrogen gas) doesn't seem possible with just gravity, from its point of view the universe is probably too young to even have the initial life form, to say nothing of the fact that on that time scale, the interstellar medium is constantly getting stirred up by things.
"Interstellar-medium-based life has the problem that it must necessarily interact multiple orders of magnitude more slowly than Earth life because all of its components are much more separated and it has the same speed-of-light limits as our biochemistry has.."
When I read about quantum entanglement of two atoms at a distance, I wonder if it could have something to do with serendipity moments, like when you get a phone call from someone you were just thinking of. Interesting to imagine what aspects of life and consciousness might be related to that branch of physics. From my very basic understanding of quantum entanglement, it might not have speed-of-light limits.
Quantum entanglement can not transmit information.
(But in any case, for communications between any humans ever, you wouldn't even notice speed of light on a human scale. Even the furthest astronauts have been out for barely more than a light second.)
Yes. Personally I'd like to think that the Universe, for all its apparent infinity, wouldn't be so — boring — as to be easily figured out by a single species operating within a very limited sensory window, that have yet to leave the comfort of their chair as it were (our home planet), in barely just 200 orbits around their star..
I'm no scientist but I wonder if there isn't a TON of things that we've just been assuming to apply universally.
If all matter in a solar system is largely formed from the same cloud or nebula, then it must limit what we can learn from our sun and neighboring planets, and asteroids or comets.
Other systems may have radically different composition and occurrences of different elements and their isotopes, maybe effectively having different periodic tables, so to speak. The size, gravity, color, radiation of a star may have great influence on how planetary matter forms and interacts with each other; maybe water will have different observable properties in such different systems.
As for life; we have yet to catalogue the complete scale of life on Earth alone. We still get surprised by discoveries like Tardigrades and deep sea creatures. I'm sure the Infinity of the universe has even more surprises in store.
There may be creatures flying around in dense nebulas, not bound to any planet.
There may be rogue planets drifting through interstellar darkness with no sun to orbit, but still supporting life under the surface near their warm cores.
There may be little asteroids inside gas giant planets, effectively making tiny solid worlds inside a sea of different gasses.
As for life that develops industry; just look at the bodies of octopuses and what they're capable of. It's a shame they have such short lives and hostile environments to contend with, though. For now.
There is a plausible argument that certain animal shapes are optimal for certain functions, so an industrialized civilization would likely have evolved to resemble us anatomically (especially the arms with opposable thumbs bit). They probably even used this argument in Star Trek. But the real reason ST aliens just look like humans with latex glued on their faces is because it started out as a low-budget show and that's the easiest way to make aliens.
In reality, there's no way for us to test this theory without actually meeting some alien lifeforms.
They won't look vastly different. When you get right down to it, pretty much every creature bigger than a few cells on land is a tube with a mouth at one end, limbs to move it around and a bunch of sense organs near the mouth.
Add in that advanced intelligence would require communication, the ability to create electricity and infrastructure (which rules out undersea civilisations fairly effectively) and the probability of being vaguely like something we see around us gets fairly high.
Advanced intelligence definitely does not require the ability to create electricity and infrastructure. Rather, it's the other way around. If you are intelligent you might be able to figure out how to make electricity and infrastructure.
Also, it is perfectly possible to create electricity without being intelligent (the electric eel, for instance).
You get the same gnocchi, spaghetti, lasagna phases occurring throughout nature. I've seen it most often in block copolymers, https://goo.gl/images/OXgy4H.
The cool part is you get the different morphologies as you vary the relative concentrations of the copolymer types. I imagine something similar is happening in the neutron stars; different proton neutron ratios give you spaghetti or lasagna.
