Perhaps extraterrestrial life lurks in surrounding matter
NGC 1300, an example of a spiral galaxy with a jumper. Photo : NASA, ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team STScI / AURA
English science fiction writer Arthur Clark in his work formulated three (four) laws, which later became known as Clark's laws. One of them is the most famous. It says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
If you show a medieval man a smartphone with a speech synthesizer and a music player, he will definitely recognize you as a wizard or a witch. Even banal electricity will seem to him magic. But Clark’s law applies not only to our ancestors, but also to modern people.
Perhaps Arthur Clark was not ambitious enough in his thoughts. What if an extraterrestrial civilization has advanced so far that we do not just consider its technology magical, but generally cannot distinguish it from the physical phenomena of the world? This bold point of view was put forward by the famous physicist Caleb Scharf from Columbia University (USA), whose article was published in the November issue of Nautilus Cosmos .
We must admit that if intelligent life is not a unique phenomenon, and if there are a huge number of intelligent civilizations in space, then many of them are ahead of humanity in their development. And some of them are likely to be ahead of us so much that we can not even imagine this difference. That is, we cannot understand the complexity of their technology and the laws by which it works, as a Neanderthal can not recognize the device of a smartphone.
We can assume the presence of extreme development of an alien civilization. Current futurologists consider technological singularity the edge of normal technological development in the human understanding.- the moment when, after the merger of a person with computers and the advent of powerful artificial intelligence, technological progress will become so complex that it will be inaccessible to understanding.
The path to technological singularity. Illustration: Ray Kurzweil
If you realize the possibility of the extreme development of civilization along the lines of Q from the Star Trek series , it becomes very easy to explain why we still do not find signs of its existence. Indeed, even looking at it point-blank, at our level we will not be able to understand that we are looking at this civilization. In other words, this explains the notorious Fermi paradox .
By the way, this simultaneously explains why we still cannot understand all the mysteries of the Universe, including the nature of gravity and the essence of dark matter.
A sufficiently developed civilization can literally subjugate the surrounding matter.
Imagine that computers continue to exponentially increase computing power, in accordance with Moore's law, to infinity. At a certain moment, they will be able to fully calculate the movement of all atoms and molecules of which living beings and material objects consist. “In this case, civilization can rewrite itself and all physical reality in new forms,” writes Caleb Sharf. “In the end, maybe our Universe is one of such new forms into which some other civilizations have rewritten the world around them.”
Probably, such a theory is untestable, like the theory of life in the Matrix. Indeed, in this case, a sufficiently advanced alien life will be able to tightly introduce itself into the fabric of this new rewritten Universe, which we consider to be an untouched natural phenomenon.
But even if the theory is unverifiable, Caleb Scharf suggests paying attention to some cosmic phenomena that fully correspond to it, no matter how wild it sounds.
For example, the well-known fact that only 5% of the mass-energy in the Universe consists of ordinary matter: protons, neutrons and electrons, of which people also consist. A much larger part - 27% - is allocated to supposedly unobservable matter, which remains an absolute mystery. This is dark matter., the essence of which is completely incomprehensible to us.
The mass distribution diagram in the Universe of
Astrophysics provides convincing evidence for the existence of dark matter, based on its gravitational effect on the fabric of space-time. But still, no one even realizes what it can be. It is fundamentally unobservable, because it does not emit electromagnetic radiation and does not interact with it directly. That is, at our level of development it is impossible to observe it.
In theory, huge clouds of dark matter surround galaxies, linking the entire structure together using gravity.
Scientists have no idea what dark matter consists of and how it is organized, although there are several theories on this subject. The most obvious assumption is that dark matter consists of ordinary baryonic matter, but this contradicts the Big Bang theory. Some astronomers suggest that dark matter has a heterogeneous structure with some internal content. It may have an analogue of our light, that is, some kind of interaction of elementary particles invisible to us in addition to strong interaction.
It is possible that dark matter is a complex structure. And maybe this is the line where a fairly technologically advanced civilization goes. In fact, how is it even better to protect yourself from the vagaries of supernovae and gamma-ray bursts from space, if you do not rewrite yourself in a form that is immune to electromagnetic radiation? Perfect option.
According to modern cosmological theory, the accelerating expansion of the universe began about 5 billion years ago. The reason is unknown. It is customary to explain it with dark energy - it is something unknown that was introduced into the mathematical formula specifically to explain the observed expansion of the Universe. But it’s still not clear why the acceleration of expansion suddenly began. For some cosmologists, this clearly indicates that our universe is part ofMultiverse - sets of really existing parallel universes.
Caleb Scharf does not stop at this theory. He suggests fantasizing over the theory that dark energy in itself is a product of a third-party civilization, which has certain reasons to accelerate the expansion of our universe. For example, to absorb the entropy that a highly developed civilization generates. Our universe cools with expansion. This allows you to dump excess energy into it from the outside, it works like a cooling system.
Perhaps some smart life form 5 billion years ago realized how to use our Universe as a cooler and learned how to control the process.
For further study of the theory, the author refers to the idea of quintessenceand to the ideas expressed by the famous physicist Freeman Dyson in the article “Time without End” (1979), discussing civilizations that operate on an astrophysical scale.
Well, if we assumed that a rational being is the reason why the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe began 5 billion years ago, then why not go further and assume that advanced life uses photons in cosmic radiation to transmit data and a backup system. Or it controls the fluxes of cosmic radiation, directing them to predetermined regions of the cosmos to generate interference, excite atoms and molecules, approximately as in the novel “The Voice of the Lord ” by Stanislav Lem.
Perhaps, using the transmission of data in photons, you can transfer and recreate your material objects in another part of the Universe. This is just one of the many ways in which a sufficiently developed civilization is able to hide its existence from uneducated humanity, says the American physicist.
Maybe extraterrestrial life doesn’t really hide at all somewhere far away, but surrounds us from all sides?
In any case, it makes sense to study the surrounding Universe even more thoroughly. Then, over time, part of the scientific truth will be revealed to us.