Superintelligent Extraterrestrial Life, Accelerated Evolution, And The Fate Of The Universe

[exchemist]

???

 

This poster seems to have come out of the closet, as a nutter.

[DrKrettin]

Anybody who uses "bandwagon" as a verb has to be in that category.

[Super Polymath]

Before going and saying it seems ridiculous, so did a round earth at one point.

 

Look into futurists like Nikolai Kardashev, Freeman Dyson, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Steele (abolishing the monetary system as we know it), hell even a T.V. show can give you a taste of the beginnings of a Technocracy. Certain elements of futurism can lead us in this direction. Brain transplants, superhuman replacement parts, all of this is possible given nanotech. 

 

There's not a person on this website as versed in futurism as I am, when I'm sitting there talking about FTL particles and femtotech though, you need to understand what I mean. Why would a Type II civilization travel through interstellar space at all? Obviously Dyson Spheres get destroyed when the star they surround runs out of fuel, that's why. So then how do they spread out?

 

With Star Trek Enterprise ships? No, these aren't biological organisms, you're trying to fold that much space? No, you beam hyper-miniaturized technologies to all green worlds that can be seen, information panspermia, and you recreate the societies that led to your existence. The process takes millions of years but you re-emerge in thousands, millions, or billions of other systems - and you do it without using much energy or matter at all. Mainly information, Godlike mathematical algorithms, exotic matter, and hyper-miniaturized technology. 

 

If you don't like the way I changed the definition of a word, you'd hate Urban Dictionary. 

Edited November 25, 2016 by Super Polymath

[DrKrettin]

There's not a person on this website as versed in futurism as I am, . 

 

I'm glad to see that modesty is not one of your faults. Considering that you cannot possibly know the expertise of everybody here, that statement is consistent with, and as absurd as, your username. Presumably your avatar is intended to express physical prowess in addition to your mental powers - Herakles was no polymath. 

[Super Polymath]

Yes, I realised it would have to mean something like that, but had not heard of it - and I struggle to see what application such a concept could have. 

You haven't heard of it because you have to look for that kind of information. It doesn't really apply much to the modern world. I have pages of urls in this thread that explain every minutiae of what every nuance of what I'm trying to explain. These aren't pre-existing hypotheses, these are very much my own ideas. 

 

People can try and shut them down, but try and understand them and where they come from, first. 

Edited November 25, 2016 by Super Polymath

[Super Polymath]

I'm glad to see that modesty is not one of your faults. Considering that you cannot possibly know the expertise of everybody here, that statement is consistent with, and as absurd as, your username. Presumably your avatar is intended to express physical prowess in addition to your mental powers - Herakles was no polymath. 

Look at all I've written in this thread alone. Imagine someone who reads about futurism at least twice a day since grade 9. I don't see threads about technocracy on the internet at all. I don't see in this website anything about transhuman E.T. or super-intelligent AI E.T. or about how over 95% of the universe (the exotic matter that we can't observe) could be tools or very observable to more advanced life-forms than us. 

 

I look at String Theory, M theory, and the lambda-cdm model as false-hoods, or unwarranted theories. I see no topics here that are based off their very unpopular alternatives, like conformal gravity.

 

My avatar and username are intended to express the best of all worlds. I'm not undermining expertise, and I'm not trying to convey any isolated expertise, I'm trying to convey a very broad body of ideological exoticism. No matter how much you know about something, the totality of all you'll ever know is a spec. 

Edited November 25, 2016 by Super Polymath

[exchemist]

Look at all I've written in this thread alone. Imagine someone who reads about futurism at least twice a day since grade 9. I don't see threads about technocracy on the internet at all. I don't see in this website anything about transhuman E.T. or super-intelligent AI E.T. or about how over 95% of the universe (the exotic matter that we can't observe) could be tools or very observable to more advanced life-forms than us. 

 

I look at String Theory, M theory, and the lambda-cdm model as false-hoods, or unwarranted theories. I see no topics here that are based off their very unpopular alternatives, like conformal gravity.

 

My avatar and username are intended to express the best of all worlds. I'm not undermining expertise, and I'm not trying to convey any isolated expertise, I'm trying to convey a very broad body of ideological exoticism. No matter how much you know about something, the totality of all you'll ever know is a spec. 

A spec? A specification? 

 

Or do you mean a speck?

[Super Polymath]

lol well if you had to guess? 

[exchemist]

Dunno really. A bit the same with "false-hoods". What are those? Sounds like something you find on an anorak. Or in a kitchen.

 

And "minutiae"is a plural. 

 

I've generally found that those who can't use the language accurately can't think straight.  

[Super Polymath]

Well I've learned that grammar nazis are ocd and people who can't find the proper word for its usage lack creativity. 

[CraigD]

So two posts ago when I resurrected this thread, I proposed that this higher order life form's influence could be a possible source for the results of the double slit experiment as it would make sense for these atomic robots to cause something like the observer effect because it is constantly working within or through our perceptions, or working very closely with our perceptions, at the subatomic level.

This “higher order live form” sounds a lot like a modernized restatement of Descarte’s “malicious deamon/deceptive god” from ca 1641 – something cleverer than manipulating what we perceive of the physical universe in such a way that our best scientific theories, like the quantum mechanics with its explanation of the double slit experiment, are wrong. Decartes, as I read him, concluded that this is such an soul-rendingly terrible thought that we’re better off just believing it false – Renaissance Christian that he was, he expressed this as God necessarily being a loving entity that likes our curious nature and wouldn’t be so unkind as to have us in a universe we can’t figure out with science.

 

It also reminds me of Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, which uses some clever but statistically questionable reasoning to conclude that our reality is most likely a very detailed computer simulation created by being we might sensibly call higher order life forms or deceptive gods.

 

For any of these speculations to be scientific, there must be some experiment to distinguish them from the simple explanation that reality functions without the ongoing support or higher order life forms/demons/gods.

 

If we assume Descarte’s divinely infallible malicious demon/deceptive god, such an experiment is impossible – our deceiver has either made our fake universe’s fakeness undetectable, is always a step ahead of us, fixing each detail we might experimentally detect as we’re about to, or just undoes or alters our minds whenever we learn the awful truth. Similarly, if we’re in a simulation being carefully watched by its operators (who may be accidental or artificial intelligences) to prevent us discovering it is a simulation (like in Daniel Galouve’s 1964 novel Simulacron-3, and the many stories and films closely or loosely following it central idea) they can just debug around any “the simulants found proof it’s a simulation” state.

 

For an experiment to distinguish a demon/god-managed/simulated reality (for short, let’s just call it an “artificial universe”) from an “it is as it seems” one to be possible, its overseer must either want or not care if we do, or be unable to care – be asleep or dead at the controls.

 

So, like Descartes, I’ll just assume the terrible “can’t be done” scenario isn’t the case, and consider what such an experiment might be. In another post - this one’s accreted too many words. :)

 

Neutrinos, or hawking radiation, are particles that are so small. Small enough to validate the possibility of femtotech.

Neutrinos interact very weakly with themselves and other particles, which limits their usefulness in computing or mechanical machines. The only use I can think of or have heard proposed by scientifically competent futurists is observation. Because they interact so weakly, practically everything is nearly transparent to them, so it might be possible to use them to image the internal structure of planets and stars. The challenge would be to make the “receiver” part of such a system of something they interacted with many times more strongly than usual.

 

Hawking radiation is hypothetical (but strongly suspected to exist) radiation from black holes. Most models conclude that it would initially consist of charged particle pairs such as electrons and positrons, so of which would collide and/or annihilate with ordinary particles outside the black hole to emit radiation of many kinds of particles.

 

I don’t see how neutrinos or Hawking radiation would be of much use in femtotech - building machines with feature on the order of 10^-15 m.

 

For comparison, the classical diameter of an electron is about 10^-15 m, of a proton about 10^-12, a hydrogen atom about 10^-9. So “fematomachine” would be proton or nucleus sized. From what we know of nature, this suggests we would have to build them the way nature builds protons and neutrons, and combines them into atomic nuclei – out of quarks, gluons, and a smattering of weak bosons. They might simply be natural nuclei, in some way “programmed” to perform a desired task – I imagine some kind of calculation.

 

Since such artificial fematomachines might be identical or nearly identical to ordinary nuclei, it may be that they exist all around us now. There might be an advanced computer or computer-hosted civilization inside us and the matter around us.

 

I think this is what you meant, Super Polymath, when you wrote

Atomic robots.

Imagine someone who reads about futurism at least twice a day since grade 9.

When I imagine this, I’m imagining someone like me, except that I was swept up in the majesty of imagining the future, and reading about it, since about grade 1, which for me was 1966. I surely had some days of not reading 2+ futuristic fiction or nonfictions, but to the best of my ability, I read everything I could, from Asimov in the 1960s and ‘70s to John Varley in the ‘70s and the ‘80s to Rudy Rucker in the 90s to the likes of Charles Stross in the 2000s. Robert Forward, Greg Egan, Steven Baxter, and a host of others beyond my ability to quickly recite were there for me, too.

 

If you’ve missed any of these, and want to start with the wildest, I recommend Egan, his 1997 Diaspora and 2002 Schild's Ladder.

 

If you think I’ve missed something seminal, please point me to it. Like many humans, I’m an voracious nanoscopic infovore. :)

 

I don't see threads about technocracy on the internet at all. I don't see in this website anything about transhuman E.T. or super-intelligent AI E.T. or about how over 95% of the universe (the exotic matter that we can't observe) could be tools or very observable to more advanced life-forms than us.

This poster [super Polymath] seems to have come out of the closet, as a nutter.

I've generally found that those who can't use the language accurately can't think straight.

I think it’s fair to say Super Polymath uses language loosely, and often thinks along non-obvious geodesics. He’s been a valued member for 1000+ days, though, and I think that if you take him seriously, you’ll come to agree with me that it’s not fair to call him a nutter.

 

One of Hypography’s core principles is “science for everyone”, and IMHO we’ve often been at our best here when loose and creative collides with rigorous. Loose folk need rigor, while rigorous folk often need to loosen up, and when that happens well, it’s intensely fun. Science, I think, works well with many personal styles.

[Super Polymath]

So, like Descartes, I’ll just assume the terrible “can’t be done” scenario isn’t the case, and consider what such an experiment might be. In another post - this one’s accreted too many words. :)

Please do. It wouldn't be science if we left it at "can't be done".

 

Neutrinos interact very weakly with themselves and other particles, which limits their usefulness in computing or mechanical machines. The only use I can think of or have heard proposed by scientifically competent futurists is observation. Because they interact so weakly, practically everything is nearly transparent to them, so it might be possible to use them to image the internal structure of planets and stars. 

Also, for faster than light communication, necessary between a Dyson Sphere and their local network. As a collective, over a certain amount of area and depth, a receiver is possible. Not to mention that fempto-structures could utilize neutrinos or tachyonic particles fields in a mini-alcubierre drive. 

 

 

For comparison, the classical diameter of an electron is about 10^-15 m, of a proton about 10^-12, a hydrogen atom about 10^-9. So “fematomachine” would be proton or nucleus sized. From what we know of nature, this suggests we would have to build them the way nature builds protons and neutrons, and combines them into atomic nuclei – out of quarks, gluons, and a smattering of weak bosons. They might simply be natural nuclei, in some way “programmed” to perform a desired task – I imagine some kind of calculation.

 

Since such artificial fematomachines might be identical or nearly identical to ordinary nuclei, it may be that they exist all around us now. There might be an advanced computer or computer-hosted civilization inside us and the matter around us.

Well, they could be used to disrupt the signals and sort through the natives' secretion of sensory information until patterns are found that can be used in the sense of "super-evolution" i.e. Robert C. Clarke's A Space Odyssey. It's going for a technological singularity. A raw terrestrial globe doesn't have the circuit-like infrastructure for these designed atoms to assimilate, whereas a cybernetic mind of silicon-based artificial neurons would.

 

The Dyson Sphere itself would be composed of "designed atoms"; this femptotech. 

Edited November 26, 2016 by Super Polymath

[Super Polymath]

For an experiment to distinguish a demon/god-managed/simulated reality (for short, let’s just call it an “artificial universe”) from an “it is as it seems” one to be possible, its overseer must either want or not care if we do, or be unable to care – be asleep or dead at the controls.

Assuming the purpose of this guided evolution is a technological singularity for it to assimilate, it would be in-between not caring and wanting us to know of its existence. On one hand it has mapped every possible synaptic connection, it knows what we're going to do before we do it, it's pinging back and forth with tachyonic signals and knows what stellar dangers are present long before we do - so us knowing about its existence seems rather trivial. On the other hand us finding these artificial atoms and demonstrating that they're indeed artificial constructs of some sort, might help us produce a technological singularity faster. 

 

The point of all of this is transportation and construction really. Yes you might get a lot of feedback from intelligent organisms that you've touched upon after they've already begun as products billions of years in the making, that mapping of a very novel type of mind. However, the real point of assimilating primitive life or primitive technology (nanotech) for this higher form of life would be to ultimately construct an energy-harnessing Dyson Sphere around our middle-aged star. 

 

Imagine that two, three, maybe even a million unrelated technological civilizations naturally evolve into the exact same thing; a sphere made of designed atoms that harnesses one hundred percent of a star's output and uses cosmic particle accelerators to generate "mystical particles" or particle fields that can do all kinds of physics-breaking (at least to our understanding). 

 

The universe seems to be an exponential energy device. Heat is constantly lost from it, causing it to expand. If a dyson sphere, harnessing 100% of a star's energy output, composed of engineered atoms, housed maybe a hundred particle accelerators with double the circumference of a star, some pretty neat types of particle fields could be generated that could help retain the thermodynamic balance, with enough of them present over a great enough expanse of space, entropy could be delayed. 

 

So if the universe is an ever-increasing, self-sustaining fusion reactor - very advanced technology - than the fate of the universe might also fall upon the very same infinite technology idea behind my inforvores, a reality in which this higher form of life is a parent to ours, and it itself has parent-civilizations that have grown to creating universes that constantly provide it with greater amounts of energy. It's reality itself as a sort of organism capable of self-perpetuating growth.

 

It's a modification of the Kardashev scale. FTL communication removes the definition of a Type III civilization. Type II encompasses a star, Type III doesn't necessarily encompass one galaxy, it could encompass a galaxy's worth of Dyson Spheres over a few quadrillions year time-line.  Especially if they're constantly generating dark matter like particle fields to fight expansion and this loss of heat. More energy is being harnessed by an exponentially expanding collective of Dyson Spheres. Eventually in a hyper-dimensional sense something of a multi-dimesional sphere, manifesting in a shape beyond our perception, a collection of infinite dyson-spheres over a non-linear expanse of space time (long dead dyson spheres communicating with yet to be born dyson spheres to form into a larger collective body of information), comes into focus. If time is removed from the picture, or if all times are combined into one, you get a super-position of infinite Dyson Spheres, more energy is being harnessed by these infinite stars than there exists in the universe at one point in time, because this thing is cognizant across all time when the communication of Dyson Spheres of the past, present, and future are intersecting through triangulation. This hyper-sphere would be capable of creating a hot dense universe so it can harness more energy - which would expand as its energy is absorbed just as ours does. 

 

So we come to an engineered reality that does not require a beginning or end due to the "chicken or the egg" logical loophole. A clock both with and without a craftsman. 

Edited November 26, 2016 by Super Polymath

[OceanBreeze]

One of Hypography’s core principles is “science for everyone”, and IMHO we’ve often been at our best here when loose and creative collides with rigorous. Loose folk need rigor, while rigorous folk often need to loosen up, and when that happens well, it’s intensely fun. Science, I think, works well with many personal styles.

 

It seems that loose and creative have already collided.

 

A peer-reviewed paper has already been written that has very similar ideas to what has been written here.

 

Note: I haven't read this entire thread so if that link has already been posted, I apologize.

[Super Polymath]

It seems that loose and creative have already collided.

 

A peer-reviewed paper has already been written that has very similar ideas to what has been written here.

 

Note: I haven't read this entire thread so if that link has already been posted, I apologize.

 

KIC 12557548 was brought up. 

Edited November 26, 2016 by Super Polymath

[CraigD]

Neutrinos interact very weakly with themselves and other particles, which limits their usefulness in computing or mechanical machines. The only use I can think of or have heard proposed by scientifically competent futurists is observation. Because they interact so weakly, practically everything is nearly transparent to them, so it might be possible to use them to image the internal structure of planets and stars.

Also, for faster than light communication ...

Neutrinos have non-zero rest mass, so travel less than the vacuum speed of light c. Because their mass is very small, and they carry a lot of energy, they travel only slightly less than c. Their precise speed is difficult to measure, and the goal of a lot of experiments, but a good guess is about 0.99998 c.

 

In an absolute vacuum, photons, (AKA light) travel exactly at 1 c, slightly faster than neutrinos. Photons, however, interact strongly with many particles, and not much of the universe is vacuum, so in most situation, neutrinos travel faster than photons. So you could say they’re “faster than light”.

 

That’s not what most people mean by faster than light communication or FTL travel, though. “True” FTL means a speed greater than c. I think the best present day theory strongly suggests that FTL particles – tachyons – don’t exist, and no experiment evidence suggests otherwise.

 

If tachyons did exist (and could be detected – things that can’t be detected practically don’t exist), some very weird things could be done with them, because FTL signaling can violate causality. The best non-technical explanation I’ve seen of how this works is Richard Baker's 2003 Sharp Blue: Relativity, FTL and causality.

 

Consider some of the weird and wonderful and perhaps horrifying things we could do violating causality with FTL signaling:

 

Make a computer for which P = NP is trivially and almost literally true – which is a jargony way of saying a computer that could perform calculations considered intractably hard for non-causality violating computers, such as finding a number that evenly divides a large number (factoring). This is an NP problem, because if given the correct answer, it’s easy to prove it’s correct – just divide the large number by the proposed factor – but it’s hard to find the correct answer.

 

If the computer had a system like the one shown in the Sharp Blue page, you could run the following program on it:

Where A is the number to be factored,

1. Initialize B =1 or to a number sent back in time to you in step 5.

2. Increment B by 1

3. Divide A by B, giving remainder C

4. If C = 0, B is either equal to A, and A is a prime number, or B is a factor of A. Stop

5. Otherwise, send a message consisting of the value of B back in time, to be used in step 2.

 

Your experience running this program would be that it immediately received a message from the future with the value of B such that B +1 is equal to or a factor of A.

 

You could write a program like this for practically any problem. The computer need not be fast. If people had computers like this, they could solve any problem for which there is an efficient program showing the answer is correct or not. Cryptosystems like RSA would be worthless.

 

Another weird thing would be to send information to your own past, allowing you to avoid mistakes. Though no a different kind of FTL signaling causality violation than the factoring program in the previous example, this feels weirder, because by the person sending the message from the future would have experienced event that would never happen, and also would not have experienced having gotten the message from themselves. This is the mind-boggling paradoxical weirdness of time-travel science fiction stories.

 

For a realistic person, then, I can see only a few options regarding conclusions about FTL signaling:

• FTLS is impossible
• Special Relativity is wrong in predicting that FTL can be used to send messages into the past
• FTLS is possible and SR is right, and causality violations happen commonly, but we’re not aware of them
• FTLS is possible, SR is right, and causality violations happen, but they’re very difficult to produce, so we’ve not experienced any, and may never.

… [FTL communication is] necessary between a Dyson Sphere and their local network. As a collective, over a certain amount of area and depth, a receiver is possible. Not to mention that fempto-structures could utilize neutrinos or tachyonic particles fields in a mini-alcubierre drive.

I don’t think FTL communication, nor computers with femtometer scale features, are needed for a computer system so sophisticated that it could host post-singularity AIs or transhumans.

 

Per my discussion of FTLS causality violations, however, it should be clear that a computer system with FTLS could host practically any program possible. They wouldn’t need to be denser or faster than present-day computers, because they could execute a literally infinite number of operations in a very short time.

[Super Polymath]

We don't know if they're zero mass. They're weighing them, they also don't know the top speed of a neutrino. Again, it has a very low mass. 

Edited November 27, 2016 by Super Polymath