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"Everything is number", mused Pythagoras...and indeed, he was right.
Thus, a reaction against this in an extreme postposthuman future (for I do not imagine such an achievement to be made in less than a million years): transnumeralism!
Transnumeralism, or transpythagoreanism: the prospect of breaking out of the infinite omnipresence and dominion of number. The exploration and artificial creation (if such phenomena do not exist naturally) of "regions, states, etc." where not even O, ∞ or anything in between exist at all. This takes us back to the infinity thought loop:
If infinity is infinite with all it's infinite meta-infinities, then it cannot be escaped from in the way a transhuman would from their old biology, or a space rocket would from the Earth. To actually break out from infinity would be a contradiction and would cause feedback, since if one broke out of infinity, they would end up back in infinity because infinity is infinite and includes the area outside of infinity...because it is infinite. Thus, cyclo-anarchic technology...*
And yet: Number/exo- or trans-number ---> duality ---> 2 ---> !
*Cyclo-anarchy: The future prospect of transcending from strange loops and feedback, be they physical, conceptual, ethical, et cetera, we are unable to escape from in our current forms in this current universe. Illustration: true cyclo-anarchy.
A friend of mine sent me this link to Greg Baden's video:
Into the Zero Point (right click to save)
Some topics: 2012, Transcendeing the Kali Yuga's Four Ages, Mayan & Eygptian Calenders, accelerating technology and why it exists, Magnetic Shifts, Global Climate Change, Changing Human Chemistries, Becoming and Demonstrating Love-Wisdom-Compassion, Acceleration of Intense Healing of the "Big Stuff" since all the easy stuff is past us, Why your feeling disenfranchised and hopeless, and how we can get past it.
Very interesting and intense food for thought on the coming changes.
I wouldn't have taken this seriously, but I read it over at Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends:
According to the Heim quantum theory (HQT) developed in the 1950s, it should be possible to build an 'hyperspace' engine allowing a spacecraft to reach Mars in 3 hours. It would also allow us to travel to stars more that 10 light years away in 80 days by slipping into a different dimension. But is interstellar space travel a dream or a future reality? It all depends if this controversial theory about the fabric of our universe is correct or not. So far, it seems that a majority of physicists thinks that this theory is either incomplete or almost understandable. Nevertheless, some scientists working for the U.S. Department of Energy think that such an 'hyperspace' engine could be tested within five years.An extraordinary "hyperspace" engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government.
The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today's New Scientist magazine.
The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.
The US air force has expressed an interest in the idea and scientists working for the American Department of Energy -- which has a device known as the Z Machine that could generate the kind of magnetic fields required to drive the engine -- say they may carry out a test if the theory withstands further scrutiny.
Professor Jochem Hauser, one of the scientists who put forward the idea, told The Scotsman that if everything went well a working engine could be tested in about five years.
However, Prof. Hauser, a physicist at the Applied Sciences University in Salzgitter, Germany, and a former chief of aerodynamics at the European Space Agency, cautioned that any prototype would be based on a highly controversial theory that would require a significant change in the current understanding of the laws of physics.
"It would be amazing. I have been working on propulsion systems for quite a while and it would be the most amazing thing. The benefits would be almost unlimited," he said.
"But this thing is not around the corner. We first have to prove the basic science is correct and there are quite a few physicists who have a different opinion. It's our job to prove we are right and we are working on that."
He said the engine would enable spaceships to travel to different solar systems. "If the theory is correct then this is not science fiction, it is science fact," Prof. Hauser said.
"NASA have contacted me and next week I'm going to see someone from the [U.S.] air force to talk about it further, but it is at a very early stage. I think the best-case scenario would be within the next five years [to build a test device] if the technology works."
The U.S. authorities' attention was attracted after Prof. Hauser and an Austrian colleague, Walter Droscher, wrote a paper called "Guidelines for a space propulsion device based on Heim's quantum theory."
Imagine you have running on your computer a small piece of code, even something as small as 1 kilobyte. Consider this small program a node. Imagine this node in turn generates output data that is based on two things - the first being determined by the specific algorithm its running and the second the data it receives at any one instant from hundreds or thousands of similar nodes elsewhere on the network (i.e. nodes running on other peoples computers). Imagine still further that all of these nodes, potentially hundreds of millions of them around the world, are all running and communicating with each other at light speed, and at increasingly faster speeds, based on available idle cpu time. At first you might compare such a scheme to SETI@home or other similar grid computing projects. The difference here though is that unlike grid computing projects, these nodes have no central controlling authority. This is important, just as the brain has no central controlling neuron or clusters of neurons.
The next question is what happens next? I'm not entirely sure, but the possibilities are both compelling and disturbing. First of all, it would depend on exactly how the seed node was created and instructed. What if it was given the simplest of rules, just like basic cellular automata that Stephen Wolfram describes? In this case, we would have no idea what evolve until it was released and ran through potentially quadrillions of massively interacting iterations. However, unlike basic cellular automata which occur on 2D or 3D grids, this p2p node system would, like the human brain, interact with tens of thousands of potential "neighbor" nodes. Further, these nodes would not just interact based on locality (latency times), but on semantic connections as well. The possibilities for experimentation here are endless, and even risky. Why risky? Because the level of complexity this p2p node network could achieve would be astounding, possibly exceeding the complexity of the human brain by orders of magnitude. It would represent a major advance over traditional neural networks (like the human brain) because connections would be made based on any definable means whatsoever, rather than on neurochemical convenience or traditional computer architectural constraint. The constraints would be more software than hardware based. And since computers are general computing platforms, such software constraints may not exist as we currently know them, since this type of informational exchange would exceed and surprise the person(s) who created the original seed node in the first place.
What this would essentially represent is a totally decentralized, out of control seed based cellular automata intelligence.
To me it seems the creation of such a thing would be totally reckless. Who is to say someone hasn't already done something like this? Who is to say that right now, running on your computer is some trojan node doing just such a thing?
Amazingly enough, what I have just describe would be one of the simplest possible implementations, and yet it is quite possible the end result of it running long enough could be some kind of super-intelligence. In other words, there might be a superintelligence running on the internet right now. One of many problems with this type of superintelligence is it emerged based on totally self-referential internal feedback. Nowhere in the scheme were humans, or the human world even taken into consideration. Quite possibly this type superintelligence, assuming it could evolve from the above scheme, would have no idea that humans even exist. It would by all definitions be an alien intelligence in every way that counts.
Ok, now lets start this experiment over, except this time we take a great deal more care about how its created and implemented, starting with the first node. What if we created a node that was general purpose enough, but with the specific goal reflected as much as possible the needs and wants of every participant on the network. A kind of avatar or virtual assistant that learned from everything you say and do. Obviously creating such an avatar would depend on the level of software advancements currently available. Lets assume we created this node today with the best minds in the world creating the best possible virtual avatar that we can. This though is only half the problem. The other half is how to these virtual avatars (smart nodes) interact with all the others. It seems that there would be a nearly endless number of semantic levels in which they could communicate. What if instead we created these avatars as basic "blanks" in which each human user defined them as they went along? More importantly they are open-sourced so that the best minds could continue to offer plug-in modules that enhanced these avatars in different ways. This way the marketplace of supply and demand of human needs would determine the courses, pathways and options these avatars took.
Meanwhile, why all these millions of avatars are running, even duplicating themselves, and intermingling at hyper-speeds all around the network, communicating with millions of other avatars, carrying on complex and subtle negotiations on your behalf, and in turn modifying themselves as they go along, what then do we get? Would we get a superintelligence from this as well? And if so, what kind of superintelligence would emerge? Interestingly such a superintelligence would likely be far more reflective of all of us. In a sense this new emergent superintelligence would be us. No longer would it simply be the amorphous global brain of all of us talking, but an actual instantiating global superintelligence that continually learns and improves upon itself based on constant human input.
One possibility of course is that someone or group of someone’s could modify their avatars to subvert the system towards less democratic means, in which their avatars, like agent Smith, takes over every one else’s. Who is to say what would happen then.
As you can see, I have no easy answers to how all of this could evolve, but the possibilities of p2p superintelligences seem to be much closer than I previously realized, for good or ill. One thing is for sure, the more open sourced it is the more resiliant it becomes to malicious tampering. The question then is what can we do to create the most friendly p2p SI possible? Eliezer Yodkowsky has his own ideas, and I'm pretty sure they are not p2p based. I would be very interested in getting comments from working members of the Singularity Institute on this.
Related:
Peer-to-Peer Games
Peer-to-Peer Virtual Culture
Black holes don't exist, at least not how we think. The very name black hole comes from the depths of our subconcious fear of the unknown. "Aye, there be sea dragons!". Of course we could get all literal about it and say light does not escape, and so they appear black from our perspective. Ok, but this belays a bigger point. You see, even the most astute physicist when pressed to a corner will admit that beyond the event horizon of a black hole, the laws of physics as we know them evaporate. At first this sounds devastating, as if everything is destroyed. Not destroyed, only unbounded. You see, if the laws of our physics cease to exist past a certain point, otherwise known as the singularity, then that means that what lies beyond this singularity is a realm where the laws of physics no longer apply. This is not a vacuum, unless we are taking about a power vacuum on the most massive scale possible. For without the laws of physics, all of a sudden the information entropy Bekenstein bounds become unbounded. We enter as Greg Egan would say into the macrosphere, a place of much vaster possibilities. My guess is these so-called blackholes are the escape route out of our universe into a much larger higher-dimensional macroverse of even greater possibility. And in turn in these new 7,9,10-dimensional macroverses, there are escape openings into every greater realms, and this process continues forever upward, outward, beyondward into increasing numbers of dimensions, levels of intelligence and infinity without a ceiling (see the Sans Ceiling Hypothesis).
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, we are in the process of bootstrapping ourselves off of the planet and out of the shackles of tyranny. $100 hand-powered Linux and wifi laptops are about to flood the third world. With the internet becoming the storehouse of all knoweldge - wikipedia and its half million articles and growing, in dozens of languages, google scanning millions of books despite the petty threats of publishers, the acceleration and proliferation of p2p technologies and workarounds. Everything is being rapidly converted to bits, and bits can be hacked, liberated. Information wants to be free. What is capital now, but information bits? Since its all bits, and bits are infinitely replicable, distributedable, decentralized and democratic, capital becomes liberated from control. Meanwhile scientific advances continue a pace, science is becoming open-sourced, even hardware is becoming open sourced.
Meanwhile, mass produced nanotubes are coming and will utterly change the world. Solar and wind technologies are becoming cheaper, and things are only going to accelerate even faster.
I have long thought of parallel time dimensions. Since time is unique to our bubble universe, it only makes sense that other bubble universes with time would not run on the same clock as ours. From each others perspective, there could be no time at all, or even time running in the opposite direction. Further, its quite possible that within our universe, or at least accessible from our universe are an infinite number of other dimensions of space, time and god-knows-what.
From India Times, by way of Bird on the Moon.
In the physical universe, the concept of time is always positive. However there are simultaneous parallel time dimensions within the physical universes. Every physical universe is associated with one time dimension and innumerable parallel time dimensions. The concept of time is always starts at zero – the time of the big bang in the physical universe.
But according to researchers in contemporary physics, the parallel universes have the concept of no time dimension and time can become negative in that environment. The time dimension that allows time as negative value makes strange things happen. One can literally fabricate the future in that environment from the past and them come to the present. A spatial with no time concept built in is not a point of singularity.
What really happens in the parallel universe, the lack of time as a dimension or presence of time dimension that allows negative time makes living through that environment very different form the physical universe. Space becomes finite and time becomes non-existent or retraceable factor. Like we can walk around in the physical universe from point A to point B, in the parallel universe, it is possible to walk from one time to the next time. Even it is possible to travel to negative reference value in time.
The best way the negative time factor or value can be expressed is when an entity crosses the physical universe to a parallel universe through a specific wormhole. The moment the point of singularity is crossed, the entity enters the time zone marked as negative in physical universe and null or non-existent in the parallel universe.
Multidimensional time can also span across the physical and parallel universes. That is the reason why mind regression tests and experiments show very strange results. The minds and souls can travel from one time dimension to the other and while do so sometimes they fall into parallel universes of higher dimensions. At that point of time, the mind regression experiment looses its touch with the soul telling all these. As minds regress multiple time dimension spanning across physical and parallel universes, the experiments show gaps. This is because no one can regress into a parallel universe from the existence in a physical universe. It is similar to trying finding air in the vacuum. All that you can do is experience the emptiness or lack of anything from the side of the physical universe.
Article recently: New model 'permits time travel'. Researchers are trying to find models for time travel that avoid the good old paradox, of what would happen if you went back in time and stopped your grandfather from meeting your grandmother, or you killed your dad before you were conceived. Which would make it sort of impossible that you're still there, then. So, it has been used to sort of prove that time travel is impossible. Now, these new thoughts don't sound terribly much better. Even scientists have a hard time wrapping their mind around time. So, let me help them out a little bit. Here's how I think it works.
Time is a dimension, just like the 3 dimensions of space. There probably are more dimensions. String theory seems to predict something like 12 dimensions. So there's most likely more directions to move in than the 4 of spacetime. But there certainly are those.
Despite time being just another dimension, we seem to be wired to perceive it as a one-directional stream. Something happens, and then it gets frozen in the past, as the history that leads to this point. And the future hasn't happened yet. So, both the past and the future seem equally inaccessible to us. But that's really just the fault of our perceptual wiring. Doesn't actually have much to do with Reality with a big R, the stuff that's really there. It is just the reality that we construct from our perceptions, and our abstract conclusions about those perceptions, which keeps time in that format.
However, we can learn something about time as a dimension by studying the dimensions of space, which we perceive ourselves moving more freely in.
Let's say I'm standing on the town hall square, and then I walk down to the train station. I can remember that I was at the town hall square. Now, if I walk back to the town hall square, will I catch myself standing there? No, of course not. Not even if I do it really quickly. That's logical for us in space. But really it isn't all that different with time.
Our lives are objects in 4 dimensions, at least. Even if you take just your body. It has length, width, breath, and it has an extension in time. It extends backwards in time from where you are now, and forward in time to its death. All of that sort of sticks together. It might change in various ways, but it does have a certain coherence.
Let's take a mobile item with some spatial size, like a bus. It might be 15 meters long, but it sticks together. If the front end moves, the back end moves with it. Whatever influences the front has an influence on the back, and vice versa. It won't be entirely the same, but it will be connected. If the front end stands in the sun, the back end will get warmer too, even if it doesn't. If somebody puts a sign on the front, saying that now this is a school bus, then the meaning of the back will suddenly change too, even if nothing else changed about it. Your life is kind of like that too.
Good actors will prepare for much more than the role they're asked to play. They will sit and write down what they think the past history is of this character. They will construct events in his or her life that might have made him what he is. They will construct emotions from past experiences. They will decide where he's going, what he wants to do, and why. And that creates a much more full character in the present.
The past is where you're coming from - the path and experiences that add up to who you are now. The future is where you're headed - the path and the experiences you'll go through if you continue as you are now, and with the history you've had. In principle both that past and that future are changeable. If you suddenly change, you'll need a different past history to explain it, and you'll suddenly be pointing towards a different future.
But it is difficult to suddenly change, because there's a lot of inertia in all this stuff. There's a considerable weight in your past history. It adds up quite convincingly to explain who you are now. The most likely way of changing it is to re-interpret it, and get a different meaning out of it. But it would also just have to change, if you really change.
All of it is quantum probabilities, so it is really a lot more moldable than what a 10ton bus seems like to us. It seems so solid. But really it is all the holodeck. It can be whatever you want it to be. We just have so much invested in all the stuff we've observed and what we've concluded it is, so it is very hard to just change it arbitrarily, and observe something else. But there's nothing that makes it impossible.
Anyway, back to time travel. My life is like this bus that is moving. It sticks together, but it sometimes changes. The lives of everybody connected to me are also all intertwined.
So, let's say I go back in time with the intention to meet my dad, and stop him from meeting my mom. But the problem is that they're part of the back end of my bus. If I move, they move with me. They're not standing back at the bus depot any more, because the bus moved on. Just like I'm not standing back at the town hall square when I go and check. Because I moved. Duh.
In part because of our language, we often make the mistake of assuming that a place is the same, even as time changes, or other things change. You know, this is my office, and I can talk about my office yesterday, or last year, and in my mind I tend to think it is the same office. I believe it is the Hopi that have a language that doesn't do that. My office yesterday is not "here", it is "over there". Over there in yesterday. And they probably have a point. It isn't the same office. It looks a good deal like it, but it is different, the time is different, and a lot of the sub-atomic particles are probably different. We short-circuit our logic when we fall for the misconception that places and times are "the same" when they really aren't.
So, if I go back to where my father met my mother. Well, we could say that they no longer are there, because they moved on, got married, got me, etc. So, if there's only one of each of them, they're no longer there. The bus left. If you wanted to change things, you've have to catch up with the bus where it is.
Or, are they still there? See, that gets us into the more fantastic subject of parallel realities and multiple versions of ourselves. The funny thing is that most people intuitively would expect that if time travel were possible, they would go back and find exactly what "was there". I.e. your dad and mum exactly as they were, ready to have their first kiss at the drive-in, playing "Rebel without a Cause". But that requires that we keep existing at all times and places we've been. That there are a zillion you's stretching far back, and probably forward.
That's entirely possible, that it works like that. That the past isn't just a memory in your brain, but it is real, it is there, it is alive.
So, let's say they still are there. They're, however, also still connected with you, as part of a probable past that let to you being born. And, incidentally, to you getting around to go back in time at some stage in your life. It is all connected. Not two separate events, you and them. Rather, part of one bigger spacetime event.
One possibility is that you might find that the past event has already changed from what you thought it was. The later events in their and your lives might have redefined what really happened. Maybe the original event was a happy kiss in the drive-in. But later on they got divorced and got therapy and decided it all was different. Like, he was really a brute who raped her. So maybe that's what you'd see if you went back. Because the whole gestalt is connected backwards and forwards.
But then we have to touch on the possibility of what happens if the past changes.
We're talking about objects in 4 or more dimensions. A bit like the screenplay of a movie. It is all connected, the characters, the timeline, the events, the climax. If we change one part, we'd have to change others. If we rewrite the script a little bit, and make the main characters meet in Paris rather than in Rome, then a bunch of things will change. Their kids will speak French rather than Italian, etc. If you had already shot the movie in the first version, then the next version will be a different movie, even if the story is similar on many points, and some of the characters are roughly the same, and even if it has the same name.
Quantum physics seem to say that things exist if somebody has perceived them in a particular way. If they haven't been perceived, it is uncertain what is there. Could me many things, but the reality hasn't been frozen. So, if nobody was there to hear it, we don't know if the tree fell in the forest and made a sound. We don't know if Schroedinger's cat is alive or dead, unless we look.
So, my past is a certain way because I perceive it to be so. Not really that I *have* perceived it that way. More that I'm doing it now. If I stop perceiving it, it might go back to uncertainty. Or if I succeed in perceiving it differently, it becomes something different.
You'll notice that science skips rather quickly over the mystery of who it is who perceives things, as consciousness isn't a popular subject for people in the material sciences. So they usually just talk about "measuring", rather than awareness or consciousness. But it is unavoidable. Things are real when there's somebody there who perceives them. It would all become a little more logical if we accepted that there were such a thing as consciousness, and that it probably is extremely basic to how the universe works.
Now, what if you get to a fork in the road in your life? You might go left, you might go right. Your life develops differently, depending on which one you pick. Before you make the choice, the two possible futures are maybe equally probable. Once you make the choice, your future falls into a certain groove, and that choice becomes part of your past that explains how you got to where you are.
But how about if you also took the other road from the fork? No, not the you who's here today, who went left. But there's maybe a parallel aspect of you who took the path on the right, and went on from there. There might or might not be. Depends on whether anybody's there to experience it. If there were a consciousness which found the right side path interesting, it might have turned from the realm of uncertainty into a reality.
In your life there has been many forks in many roads. Possibly many or all of those turned into realities. One of which is the one you're sitting in now. They're related, at least by their common branching points, but they're otherwise different. The Flemming who decided to move to Rio and be a street performer would clearly be a different character than me, even though we might have a lot in common, and part of our history would be exactly the same.
So, back to those time paradoxes. If you try to go back and meet your mom and dad, before they conceived of you, then several things might happen. If you focus on the path that is part of your past, you'll probably find difficulty in trying to interfere. That's not as mysterious as it might sound. It is a bit like trying to spin around to see oneself from the back. No matter how fast I do it, I'll miss, because my back moves at the same time as the front. So, the same with the characters in your past. You might be surprised to find that they just walked out before you walked in. Because they're connected with you.
The difficulty of doing so depends a bit on how long the tail is. You can't see yourself from the back by spinning around. But if you were a snake, you could grab your own tail, because there's enough dimension there. The front of the bus can't see the back, but a litte train with many wagons maybe could. So, in time travel, you might have trouble getting to meet a recent version of yourself. But if you go far enough back, it isn't so hard. So, maybe it is not any great problem to go back and meet your parents.
But remember that there's a considerable inertia towards them doing roughly what they did, because there's already a well-perceived future reality in front of them, which they're connected with. There's a certain pull in that.
But maybe if you exert enough energy, you might make something else happen. You manage to throw a Molotov cocktail into their car, and they burn to death. Then what happens? Really just that you created a fork. Your parents would still have met in that drive-in, and you don't suddenly disappear. But there's now another timestream which develops differently. It will include a few hundred people for whom the mysterious tragedy in the drive-in in '62 happened, with the stranger who blew up a young couple, who claimed he was from the future, and was carrying strange electronic devices in his pocket. And that reality develops differently from the one you knew, in small or big ways. Might be huge, with time travel technology being then discovered in 1962, from somebody studying what you had in your pockets, or it might just be a minor ripple, and it becomes a world very similar to ours, just without your parents, but with you as an older criminal. And back here in our reality, we'll wonder why you never came back, but everything will otherwise continue as normal.
So, there is no paradox. There are just potential paths, and actual paths taken. Sometimes multiple parallel paths might be taken. Sometimes you might go back and take a different path. None of which changes that all of the paths, that somebody perceived themselves taking, were real.
Back to one little detail. That article mentioned that of course we aren't seeing any people who suddenly disappear because their past changed, so obviously that isn't happening. I wouldn't be so fast on that. OK, forks might happen in the past that lead to different realities. But this reality might also change. It is just that everything in it is connected and relatively consistent with each other. Remember, it is a 4 or more dimensional "object". So, if somebody succeeds in changing something about it, everything connected to it changes. Like, the whole history of why things are the way they are, and everybody's memories of what happened, which explains things. And that is probably hard, because there's a lot of inertia, and a whole lot of things to change. But probably possible, if enough energy is exerted. So if your neighbor across the street got written out of the story, it wouldn't be that his house suddenly, poof, evaporates, and everybody stands there wondering what happened to him. No, you'd be quite sure that there had never been a house on that lot, and you'd have no recollection of anybody with that name, and it would all be very logical, and everybody could confirm each other's stories. I'd say that stuff like that probably happens once in a while, but you most likely wouldn't have noticed, except for maybe an odd feeling that something was off, which you couldn't put your finger on. If you rely only on your perceptions and your memories, nothing would reveal that anything changed, because they would have changed at the same time.
I have little doubt that we'll figure it all out eventually, and that there's somebody somewhere who already can travel freely in time and space. See, it doesn't matter if it takes a million years to develop the technology, because that's just "right over there" in spacetime. And it is probably unavoidable that the spacetime multiverse becomes one big subway system, if it isn't already.
via Boing Boing
RU Sirius's latest podcasts on the MondoGlobo Network feature interviews with
UC Berkeley engineer/artist Ken Goldberg and "mad scientist" Jack Sarfatti (Blog, StarDrive Discussion Group). Goldberg discusses robotics, surveillance, and "tele-epistemology" while Sarfatti delves into UFOs, time travel, and the science of Star Trek. Link to Show #3 with Goldberg, Link to Show #4 with Sarfatti.
I just heard of John E. Mack, M.D. (Oct 4, 1929 - Sep 27, 2004) from a reader who pointed me to the John E Mack Institute. When I saw that he was writing about alien abductions my initial reaction was somewhat dismissive. Then I read the following blurb from someone I deeply respect - Ralph Metzner. For those of you who don't know Ralph, he along with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) were doing the famous LSD studies at Harvard (1960-63). Here is what Metzner has to say about Mack's book, Passport to the Cosmos:
John Mack's research on the challenging phenomenon of alien encounters represents a stunning breakthrough in our understading of ourselves and our place in the larger cosmos. With a rare combination of empiricism, reason and empath, he skillfully guides us to reconsider our attachment to the bankrupt materialist worldview and open our minds to the possibilities of a universe with awesome diversity.
John Mack was a Doctor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Here is what John Mack has to say,
What if the alien encounter phenomenon were subtle in the sense that it may manifest in the physical world but derives from a source which by its very nature could not provide the kind of hard evidence that would satisfy skeptics for whom reality is limited to the material? What if we were to acknowledge that the phenomenon is beyond our present framework of knowledge? Might not such an attitude of humility become, paradoxically, a way to enlarge upon what could then be learned? Is it possible that adopting an open attitude toward the testimony of witnesses could enable us to learn of unseen realities now obscured by our too limited epistemology, allowing us to rediscover the sacred and the divinity in nature and in ourselves?I think of these experiences as a crossing over between the material world and what in Eastern philosophy is called the subtle realm. Like a reified “mystic's journey,” experiencers describe being brought into another dimension of reality from which a new perspective on life on Earth is possible. Sensitivity to our dysfunctional ecological and social conditions emerges as many come to feel that every living system is connected to what many call “Source,” or “Home.” An awareness of this relationship must be regained, they say, if we are to create a sustainable, peaceful world.
Having listened to the similar testimony of more than 200 experiencers from the West and from indigenous cultures, I have come to feel that the phenomenon is of great importance to our evolution, regardless of its ontological status.
With recent revelations regarding the probability of water on Mars, a nitrogen atmosphere and liquid water on Titan and the proliferation of extra solar planets, the question of extra-terrestrial life seems to be getting more pressing.
Many people are familiar with Drake’s Equation which estimates the number of detectable civilizations in the galaxy. When first proposed, values for all of the variables were fairly speculative, but as data pours in from the scientific community, we are starting to get a sense of how values for these values might be determined. The predictions are startling. My own estimates of the most realistic assumptions would hold that for every year, on average, that a technological society persists, there is such a technological society extant in our Galaxy right now. So, if we assume that technologically advanced society lasts for say 1000 years, there are currently 1000 such societies in the Milky Way alone. This would also be true for galaxies throughout the universe, bringing the universal total of extra-terrestrial intelligent species into the trillions. And this takes into account only extant species, the number grows even greater if we consider species that have come and gone, perhaps by orders of magnitude.
So where is everyone? The issue is discussed in depth in this earlier post. Given the extraordinary discoveries of the past week, I thought it worth revisiting. Fermi’s Paradox, as Paul points out, rests on several assumptions about the exploratory and expansionistic proclivities of technological civilizations. But even if only a fraction of the supposed technologically advanced civilizations in our universe were of an expansionist bent, they should have been here long ago.
There are a number of proposed answers, all speculative. One possibility is that they are already here. Sightings of unidentified objects are commonplace, millions believe that we are being visited constantly, but that evidence (or perhaps merely acceptance of the evidence) is suppressed. Another possibility is that the presence of alien technology is all but undetectable, in the form, for example, of nanotechnologic probes of infinitesimal size.
Another possibility, however, is that advanced intelligences are by their nature ontologically transcendent. To put it in Terence McKenna’s nomenclature, perhaps our extra-terrestrial brethren are not on distant planets, but are waiting for us in hyperspace on the other side of the transcendental object at the end of time. Given the revelations of the past few weeks, the evidence could be read as suggesting that any sufficiently advanced species evolves into a non-physical, or perhaps non-ordinary physical, space.
If so, this transformation probably occurs rapidly. If species typically lingered in an advanced technological state for say a 1000 years or longer, we would expect a lot of them around. If, however, the lifetime of technologically advanced cultures was only around say, 50 to 100 years, we would expect just a handful in the entire Galaxy. The latter appears to be the case.
This hypothesis also rests on a mass of anecdotal evidence that thousands of human beings have contacted highly advanced entities in non-physical realms:
I saw angels, extraterrestrials, then I called them guides and finally I called them ECCO and it's totally impersonal. It's way beyond what people can understand except in a ketamine or LSD state. Then they tell you, well we're at a low level, there are influences above us. It would be nice to meet these entities that experience these various states. They won't take human form, though; it's a waste of their time.
John Lilly, From Here to Alternity and Beyond
The elves and gnomes are there to remind us that, in the matter of understanding the self, we have yet to leave the playpen in the nursery of ontology.
Terence McKenna, Trialogues at the Edge of the West
So consider: first, mounting evidence suggests that the universe teems with perhaps billions of intelligent species strewn across space-time; second, against overwhelming odds we don’t seem to see them anywhere around us; and third, human beings around the world are in contact with advanced discarnate intelligences in non-ordinary states.
These discarnate entities, are, perhaps, the missing E.T.’s, existing in some non-ordinary space: in a dream-like state, or the astral plane, or the bardo, pick your metaphor, but some essentially non-physical space. If so, we may be headed there ourselves, and in a hurry. Recent discoveries of water elsewhere in or solar system, extrasolar planets and the almost inevitable discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system, all seem to support the proposition that the physical universe we currently inhabit is merely a part of an embryonic stage and that a dramatic shift in our ontological status is looming. And if so, we may find that space populated with billions upon billions of galactic sisters and brothers that have gone before us.
Or perhaps they will have already moved on . . .
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Life, Universe and Everything
Exotic Civilizations: Beyond Kardaschev
Way back in 1981, one of sci-fi's greatest visionaries, A.A. Attansio, wrote a breathtaking book called Radix. I was lucky enough to discover it the same year. I took it home and read it from cover to cover without putting it down. I was spellbound by the story, and the extremely imaginative psychophysics of this world. Like Dune, there was a large glossary of far-out terms in the back. Here is just a sampling.
CIRCLE (Center of International Research for the Continuance of Life on Earth, 2009-2113): a self-sufficient scientific community on the southern Peruvian coast (kro), established to find ways to compensate for the massive morphological changes that began as the earth swung into Line; at the time of its causal collapse (2113), CIRCLE was the only technological community of any significance on earth.
Kro: the term designating the people who dominated the earth before the Line exerted its influence; protected by a magnetic field around the earth and a clement sun, they thrived on their self-absorption and paid only cursory attention to the cosmos that surrounded them.
Line: a hypertube; the timelike geodesies which connect the spacefree internal domain of a naked Kerr-singularity (a rotating black hole that is "open" to our universe); CIRCLE mantics first identified the ray of metafrequency energy jetstreaming from the massive black hole at the galactic hub as the Line; earth migrated into the flux of the Line fully in 2113 kro, though the transmuting effects of this atypical energy had been altering the planet for over a century. (See Linergy.)
Mantic: a human brain coupled to an ATP-pump; this mechanical means of extending intelligence was devised and utilized in CIRCLE; because of the mantic insistence on thinking in dialectical schema, they were obviated when the earth entered into the emergent, pluralistic reality of the multiverse.
Multiverse: the subquantal Field; the "internal" structure of the universe outside of time where all possible universes exist; this nth-dimensional domain is a reality at the core of all black holes; in some rotating, assymetrically collapsed black holes, this core is not shielded by an event horizon and "information" from the multi-verse enters the Einstein-space of our universe. (See Line.)
Psiberant: a substance which acts directly on the brain's third ventricle, the pineal gland, and the Fissure of Rolando; it dramatically increases empathic response in the user.
Radix: a mantic term for the root of existence, the void, or, if you prefer, the isostasis in which the infinite-dimensional space of the multiverse is imbedded; within this void, everything exists; the kro called it wu, ain soth, and sunyata.
Timeslip: collected Linergy, redirected to shape new, transient realities.
Tropiform: eo-crafted furniture which conforms to the shape of the user.
The story takes place in a future earth after it becomes transformed from a beam of energy/radiation that washes over the earth from a super-massive black hole in the galaxies core. The effect of this beam utterly transforms human consciousness into an entirely new plane of being. For 1981, this book was way ahead of it's time. You could say this book planted the seeds for my further initiation into the whole 2012 idea. Radix preceded Jose Arguelles book The Mayan Factor, which relied on a similar proposition that on December 21st, 2012 the Mayan Calendar will end, and humanity will enter into the Galactic Community. According to Arguelles this date represents when Earth will leave a denser vibrational energy and enter into a higher one via a beam of energy from a super-massive black hole at the Galaxies core. At this point humanity will become surfers of the Zuvaya - cosmic immortal beings joining the galactic community of light.
At the time scientists said that it was impossible for there to be black holes at the center of the galaxy. Then in the late 1990's they revised this position when indirect observations confirmed that Arguelles was at least right about there being large black holes there.
Now fast forward to a few days ago, and the latest image from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory orbiting the earth reveals that in addition to the very large super-massive spinning black hole, there are another 10,000 black holes and neutron stars at the center of our milky way galaxy. From the article:
In this Chandra image (shown below), four bright, variable X-ray sources were discovered within 3 light years of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). The variability suggests these are X-ray binary systems where a black hole or neutron star is pulling matter from a nearby companion star. Such a high concentration of X-ray binaries in this region is strong circumstantial evidence that a dense swarm of 10,000 or more stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars has formed around Sgr A*.
I find it interesting that three authors, Attanasio, McKenna and Arguelles, independent of each other all come to very similar conclusions about a future transformation of humanity. Even more curious is to find that what were once considered proposterous speculations on their parts regarding the galactic center have now been confirmed by the latest scientific evidence, contrary to expert opinion at the time their books were first published.
Ever since I was a small child I’ve had the most amazing dream life. Although I’ve also had my share of nightmares and even off periods, most of the time my dreams are always deeply satisfying and beautiful. Like most children I lacked the capacity to clearly distinguish between the dream world and reality. However, if you ask the Aborigini’s, such a distinction is meaningless anyway, with the dreamworld being the more "real" of the two. For me this is a belief I share with them and have carried into adulthood. My dreams have offered so many profound insights, and the lucidity of them has been so intense and real to the depths of my being, that to deny the veracity of these experiences would be to deny my very soul – the deepest meanings that guide my life. And it is here that people start to make value judgments that although the inner life of dreams might be significant, the external world is more important, because without it we die. In the West particularly this emphasis has been valued almost exclusively to the detriment to our inner lives. As Ghandi once said when asked what he thought of Western Civilization, he said, "I think it’s a good idea."
So what am I getting at? Quite simply, I have come to believe that dreams are actually quite real, more real the so-called “waking life” and that this waking life is simply part of what we must make authentic via this dream world. I can’t speak for others, but I am now quite certain (as certain as I can be about anything) that my dream life is trying desperately to become manifest here in the real world. This might sound too new agey for some people, but it all makes perfect sense to me. When things go right in my life, they have this unmistakable resonance with my dream life – the feelings, sensations, gestalts and so on. In my dream life all the answers are there, the solutions to our problems, to world peace, to sustainable society, to genuine happiness for everyone. It seems so obvious, so simple in my dream life, and yet so complicated here. I have speculated often about how I think there are “dark forces” that are conspiring in one way or another, perhaps merely out of greedy and banal self-interest to further their own ends, at the expense of everyone else. So as a result over the centuries we now have this overly complex, rigged system that benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of not only everyone else, but now the planet itself.
Bucky Fuller said way back in 1965 that right now we have the capability to feed, house and clothe everyone on the planet sufficiently that everyone would live like billionaires. So why hasn’t this happened? Because those at the top want remain the exlusive shareholders of such graces. To sacrifice their exclusivity would be to sacrifice power and control. Since fear ultimately rules these people, that fear will keep them stuck in this struggle for power. Unfortunately for them, their days of power and control are coming to an end. Despite the signs all around of us of increasing repression, surveillance and control, there is no way the system can sustain itself much longer. I have written about this lack of sustainability here and here.
I started thinking deeply again about all of this since I came back from Burning Man a few weeks ago. The evidence of a build-up towards some kind of cambrian explosion as Ming points out here is all around us. What amazes me these last few years is how much everything has changed from a 'potential' standpoint in terms of connectivity, collective intelligence, communications, smart mobs, internet, global network point of view, yet how much everything has remained the same.
How much longer can the old hierarchies, this old civilization keep hanging on amidst so much grass-roots intelligence burgeoning all around us? Burning Man is a good example of just how much energy and connectivity is there - so much that it was overwhelming... and until I went I had no idea! I could feel it everywhere, the social networks, the people all talking with each other, most of them all on this high vibratory wavelength. It's not a fluke, and it's not just because of Burning Man. It's already there. I compare it to the functioning of mushrooms, which are merely the sex organs of this vast underground mycellia network. This network grows, and grows, and it then reaches a critical point, where it then flowers. I see the same thing now in what I recently called Counter Culture 2.0. The connections are so thick and complex, that no manner of oppression can wipe it out now, except the end of life itself.
And since each day the technologies of connectivity continue to minuturize and grow smarter each day, there will come a point, soon I think, where this huge breakout will occur.
Those at the top are not stupid, they know this, sense this is coming, which is why I think they are so scared, and the global politic is getting so nasty and repressive, especially here in the states, where this connective freedom is greatest. That is no coincidence.
So rather than some smooth "controlled" evolutionary move upwards, its going to be a sudden out of control breakout. I suppose I was hoping for the former, but I'll settle for the latter over stagnation and death.
I'm more hopeful than ever.
We often learn of hyperspace in books, TV shows, movies like Star Wars, and in the psychedelic literature of Terrene Mckenna who often talked about escaping history and entering hyperspace. So what Terrence was really saying was that this hyperspace was hypertime as well. I first heard the term of hyperspace from the orginal Star Wars when I was a kid, then within a scientific framework some 20 years ago. In all that time I always wondered about the possibility of hypertime, and what the implications of it were. When you think of the concept its even more bizarre and interesting that hyperspace. As part of my own psychedelic voyages, I've had several expereinces of hypertime, existing simultaneously in both eternity and what appeared to be endless dimensions of time and possibility completely indpendent of our own. On a couple of occasions, when I returned to baseline, I had no idea if an hour or a year had passed in my absence from consensus reality.
So what is hypertime and how would it work? All contemporary physical theories treat time and space as one thing - spacetime. At the so-called beginning of our local universe, spacetime was created in the first instances of the big bang, expanding outward, resulting in at least 3 macroscopic dimensions of space, and one of time. According to the latest Grand Unified Theories (GUT's), there are probably another 7 dimensions of space wrapped up in extremely convoluted shapes at extremely small scales. These types of GUT's seem to change and evolve weekly, so no one is really sure what an accurate theory would be of our local universe. One of the nifty things that have come out of all these theories is the increasing likelihood of an endless number of other universes representing every mathematical property and variation. Our universe being an arbitrary one among an infinite number of possibilities. Concepts like space and time, which to us seem innate to existence, are probably entirely foreign concepts to intelligences living in these other exotic universes.
Buts lets just stick with universes similar to ours - ones with 3 dimensions of space and one of time. Most people automatically assume that these other universes are operating and moving along at the same speed as ours. This is the intuitive way of looking at it. When we hear tales of other universes, we think that they are going about their business just like ours... a day passes here, and a day passes there. But how could this even be? Our timeline is completely and internally self-consistent only within our universe. All those other universes with their own timelines should be operating completely orthogonal to our timeline. In other words, each of these timelines of these other universes are all operating within their own independent dimension of time. If there was a way that we could go from one universe to another, this would also imply that we could hop into these others universes at arbitrary points in their timelines. If for example, large rotating black holes, such as the one in the center of our galaxy were gateways to other universes, for all intents and purposes these gateways would take us to an arbitrary point in their universe. And if we traveled around one of these universes and found another black hole back to our universe, the chances are extremely likely that we would end up in an entirely different point in our timeline, possibly billions of years in the past or future.
If an artificial means were ever found to leave our space-time continuum then there is no reason to think that we couldn't travel to other space-time’s, spend thousands of years in these timelines, then come back to ours at the exact moment we left. This would be equivalent to traveling at 90-degree angles to our timeline.
So how many dimensions of time exist in this super-set of all possible universes? Probably as many dimensions as there are universes with time as a property. Same goes for space as well. In other words, true hyper-space-time consists of an infinite number of space and time dimensions.
Life flows ever forward in a myriad of shifting forms, feeding back on each other like eddies in a stream. Iteration of structures evolves morphology as life literally feeds upon itself, the unified hologram of creation expressing itself through an infinitude of shapes and affiliations. Creation, it would seem, is playing in the field of time, like a harlequin dancing with itself in hermaphroditic meiosis. Life begins through asexual reproduction of clone populations, exposed to cosmic rays and radiation, environmental scalpels capable of the most minute alterations of DNA, breaking the genotype and altering phenotype. Over millions of years these variations, so dependent upon the random interjection of exogenous events, gave rise to sexual differentiation and the mechanism of meiosis critical to sexual reproduction. Organisms seized control over the random updating of genotypes by environmental factors and, instead, crossed genetics with each other, pushing evolution of the biota radically forward as genotypes mixed and matched to create a myriad of natural forms. The garden of Eden began to bloom as patterns established themselves along germ lines giving rise to plant populations, invertebrate sea life, fish and sea mammals, amphibians, reptiles, small land mammals and on up to apes and chimpanzees and humans, all reflections of life's compulsion to create novelty in morphology and function.
What is the reason? What is the impetus for this ever-marching evolutionary process of novel morphologies? Our cities and emperors rise and fall with the turning of the heavens. Our very civilization is merely a blink in the eye of Shiva, a momentary footnote in the galactic record, a spark in a Universe that remains to us quite empty. Our struggles and conflicts, our preoccupations and distractions, are like grains of sand swirling in the tides, slowly and steadily grinding away at the rocks. Over a thousand years they may leave their mark on the shoreline... But in a hundred thousand years that shoreline will be gone, erased by much greater forces. For all of our creation and destruction the Universe simply watches as the tides ebb and flow, carrying life into ever new harbors.
The glory of life is that it allows the Absolute to play, to interact with itself, to step into time and observe its creation through the sensorium of the kingdom, iterating the hologram through fractal dimensions and involutions into the material world. This creative process is mirrored in humanity, so capable and adept at manifesting its dream into reality. The material world is malleable to us, given to extrusions of objects and technologies. The glory of the human species is its ability to extend the creation of the Absolute, to imagine forms and give them life, to create symbols and ideas and stories that only exist as information unbound to material constructs. We make fictions and turn them into living beings. We read the Mind of God and make offerings in accord.
Through us the Absolute observes itself and imagines what dreams may come, remixing creation into ever more novel forms given life by the hand of humanity. We are servants of the harlequin, symbiotes of the Absolute, gaining life and Self for the chance to bring infinity closer to Creation.
The aeon is a child at play with colored spheres.
*I was blown away by this tonight, so I felt like sharing it again. I hope you enjoy it.
~~
We've probably all heard about hyperspace, but what about hyper-time? Is there such a thing? Well, most likely. Each bubble universe by definition has its own space-time continuum, and so it would only make sense that other bubble universes have their own space-time continuums. Since they have their own self-contained space-times, why then would these timelines synchronize with ours? Logically, since they are separate, they wouldn't. Which means each timeline operates independently of our own. Although in a way it's a meaningless statement, while millions of years passed there, no time at all would pass here. The same could be true from their perspective. It's possible, as hard as it might be to imagine, universes with 3 time dimensions and 6 spatial ones. Better still, why not universes without space and time at all, but something altogether different and more extraordinary? Why not intelligences from realms where time and space would be completely alien to them, even restrictive from their perspective? It all seems arbitrary really, so why not an infinite number of other dimensions? I think this is closer to the true nature of things. We get something beautiful, perfect already a universe becoming more permeable all the time - higher dimensions, wormholes, baby universes, superspace, and continuing beyond all that we can possibly understand right now. A universe without end, infinitely beyond our comprehemsion for all eternity - the lasting mystery that propels us forward, upwards, outwards, always becoming more free eternally. Sounds like sweet blissful perfection to me. So it's all just semantics really what we call the universe. That's why I like Bucky's fuller Universe.
We exist and perceive Universe within certain boundary conditions. However, we have also noticed that if you change your hyperspective those boundary conditions are broken or transcended. For example Universe becomes much larger, more interesting, bigger, better. This change in perspective is because of your increased intelligence. Measuring the universe simply as a result of our physical technologies is just one part of a larger expansive process going on.
From a psychological perspective our experience of Universe has been equally if not more profoundly changed and expanded since our ancestors were struggling with fire. Imagine further the gulf between our ontological space and that of an insect or small microbe. Now imagine looking beyond our current technology and psychology, to the future of post-human intelligence vastly exceeding our own. Who is to say that these other dimensions of space described by string theory and quantum gravity will not open up to us? Who is to say that parallel universes (which apparently are right next to us - less than a micrometer, just in a parallel dimension out of our 3d space) will not become known and experienced by our future post-human selves?
If David Bohm is correct about the implicate order, then there are an infinite number of dimensions of space, time and everything else, within us and all around us. All we need is believe in them and open ourselves up to them. It doesn't require any fancy technology, only a willingness inside you to go there. You'll soon learn that our physical bodies, space and time, and all that other stuff doesn't matter very much. It's just this tiny place we happen to be in at the moment. But the next moment, the one right after now, can become the first moment you are living in infinity. Many people who have taken sufficient amounts of psychedelics to have experienced these hyperdimesnions. The best part is we don't need drugs anymore to go to these places. The helped show many of us the way, but the way out is past the drug experience. I know this view has given me some flack here on this 'psychedelic' site, but I believe ultimately that drugs are a dead end. It's kind of like an old tool that has served us well, but is now no longer necessary. We cling to it because it gave us fond memories, but it no longer serves us. We have outgrown it. We have become one with these higher spaces, we are going there in dreams, in OBE's and NDE's. Death is an illusion.
The holographic theory provides a great map to understand and integrate this beautifully simple and inclusive worldview.
According to the Holographic theory - everything is an interconnected continuum, on up thru the highest of dimensions - accessible to us right here, right now. The universe bubble we see through our eyes, telescopes and microscopes are merely the arbitrary boundary conditions defined by a combination of our physical space-time body-apparatus, technological augmentation and psychological development.
The conclusion we can draw is that given sufficient intelligence increase we can access all time vectors, continuities, discontinuities, realities, hyper-realities - the akashic record itself.
Imagine a point in which your intelligence, a vast network and continuum of information, knowledge and wisdom, begins mapping this holographic universe using hyper-intelligent "semantic", hyper-synaesthetic meta-data, to use contemporary metaphors. Is higher intelligence already doing this with our most intimate moments now? Is this higher intelligence ourselves in "the future" living vicariously through our "past selves", having not reflected yet that is in fact a hyper-intelligence capable of transcending all of it? Better still, are such distinctions between our so-called "lowly" selves and this higher self a false dichotomy? Perhaps that is what all the great sages have been trying to tell us - we are already gods, are already this higher intelligence!
As I have written before (see Sans-Ceiling Hypothesis), time being an arbitrary boundary condition, then in the super-set of all that is there is no before or after. There was no beginning, and no end. Everything and nothing both exists simultaneously as a standing wave in eternity - all of it is consciousness - iterating, enfolding and unfolding upon itself infinitely in every direction. We are already this infinite intelligence - always have been always will be blissing out on the miracle of our own existence.
Some might say that this brings an experience of an infinite number of hells. Although all these random/hellish states exist as part of a ground state of consciousness, they are not necessarily self-conscious. I think it is reflective self-consciousnes, self realization as a co-creator of the universe that creates the necessary bootstrap (quantum observer looking upon itself) for transcending these hellish states and rising up into the highest of heavens.
Some Related Articles:
Before the Beginning Was the Void
God as Consciousness-Without-An-Object
What is Reality?
Levels of Samadhi
Exotic Civilizations: Beyond Kardachev
Super Free Will
There has been a several decades long debate about whether extra-terrestrial intelligence exists. As more data comes in about the nature of our universe, I think the odds are rapidly approaching 100% in the affirmative.
According to this recent story our universe is at least 78 billion light years radius or 156 billion light years across, minimum. The scientists are quick to point out this minimum size is based soley on a lack of instrument sensitivity, and a mild adjustment in instrument accuracy is likely to push this minimum to at least 192 billion light years across. They also point out the actual size of the universe is probably exponentially much larger.
Some people find these figures confusing since the age of our universe has been pinned down to 13.7 Billion years, or 14.7 Billion years according to this article. So they ask how could the universe expand to a size of at least 78 billion light years radius in only 13.7 billion years? The reason for this rapid early expansion is inflation. The speed of light wasn't violated, as it was the expansion of space itself that exceeded the speed of light.
So how big is our universe?
So huge in fact that I'm going to have to play around with scales so you can get a better idea.
According to the standard inflationary model of cosmology, the visible portion of our universe; the one mapped by our telescopes is an infinitesimally small speck in a much larger universe of at least a 1035 light-year across! I admit this number is really, really big, and almost impossible to imagine. So lets shrink everything down, WAY down, just so we can get a better grasp of it. Let's imagine that the entire universe that we have seen in all the world telescopes, all the galaxies, all trillion of them, extending out 13 billion light years in every direction is shrunk down to the size of a golf ball. Now you are holding the entire visible universe in the palm of your hand. So how big is the actualy 1035 lightyear universe in comparison? If we do a volume calculation, the actual universe contains 1060 of those golf balls! Wow, I guess we didn't shrink things down far enough, but this will have to do. So how big a volume would 1060 golf balls fill up? Try a sphere 850 light years across! So imagine a mass of golf balls that big, and each one of those golf balls contains all the stars and galaxies that we can see through our telescopes.
This is still almost beyond imagining, so lets take a slightly different approach. Imagine you are travelling so fast that you can go from on end of the galaxy to the other in just one second. That's a speed of 100,000 ly/sec. At this speed the entire galaxy would be in reach before you can say the word "go", and wam, you're there. At this speed, you could travel to the nearest galaxy Andromeda in 22 seconds. And you could cross from end of the visible universe to the other in 72 hours. Continuing on at this speed, it would take 115 days to travel a trillion light years, 315 years to travel a quadrillion, and 315,000 years to travel a quintillion or 1018 light years. And yet you have barely moved at all in comparison to the universe which is 1035 light years across. So, lets speed up our warp vehicals again, so that we can travel a quintllion light years every second. At such a speed we could cross the known universe 100 million times in one second. Ok, so now that we are travelling at a speed that might as well be infinite, how long would it take to cross from one side of the univese to the other?
Some physicists such as Max Tegmark believe the universe is actually infinite in size. If the galactic density of our own neighborhood is typical across this entire domain, and according to the data from the satellite COBE it is, then our bubble-universe should contain at least another 10100 galaxies. This is such a large figure, that it's difficult to explain it. So to give you an idea of how large a number this is, it's far larger the the number of atoms that compose every object in our own visible universe, which as you remember extends out 13.2 billion light years in every direction. This too is very difficult to conceptualize. So we'll have to scale down even further to a grain of sand. The number of atoms composing a gran of sand is about 1023 atoms, or 100 trillion trillion atoms for each grain of sand on a typical beach. And just think how many grains of sand are on your typical beach, let alone something the size of the Sahara. And that's just on the surface of the earth. All the sand in the world composes much less than 0.00001% of the mass of the earth. The number of atoms composing the Earth is about 1060. And the Earth in turn is one tiny planet around a small star in an ordinary galaxy, among hundreds of billions of galaxies in our very local neigborhood, which we call the visible universe. So 10100 is a very very big number of galaxies! Adding it all together and you get more galaxies in our universe than there are atoms composing every object in our visible universe.
Even if intelligent life is very, very rare, a number as large as 10100 is still likely to produce an abundance of life throughout the universe. A place where countless lifeforms evolve beyond their womb planets into highly advanced space-faring civilizations.
For arguments sake, lets imagine that primitive life happens once in the lifetime of a trillion galaxies, and out of those only one in a trillion ever evolves out of its womb planet into a space-faring civilization. In this example then we are still left with an astounding 1075 advanced societies - more alien cultures than the number of atoms composing planet Earth! Again, for some perspective on such a gargantuan number, there are more advanced civilizations partying it up around the galaxies than there are atoms in every single grain of sand on all the beaches and deserts in the world, and then some. That's more advanced alien civilizations than all the atoms composing our entire solar system!
Assuming life were this rare (and that's very unlikely, even with the Rare Earth Hypothesis), then our nearest star-hopping neighbors would probably be trillions of light-years away. If somehow the speed of light remains a barrier, then we might as well be alone, since we could never make contact with each other before the universe ended. However, I think such barriers will be smashed shortly after the singularity bottleneck. My guess is shortly after a civilization passes through their singularity, the entire universe will be in reach. Already scientists have found loopholes in this light speed barrier. According to Michael Alcubierre, we could hypersurf space-time using exotic matter, allowing the craft to exceed the speed of light by any desirable amount. Then there are traversible wormholes. For an enlightening discussion of some possible scenarios, see Michael C. Price's Some Implications of Traversible Wormholes.
So the problem won't be reaching any part of the universe, that will be childs play. The real challenge will be deciding which parts of the universe to go to. The divide between what is available, and what is conceivable would be enormous! According to Michael Price, the number of civilizations making contact with each other would exceed the ability of any civilization to fathom. According to Price, the implications of such 'Contact' would be staggering, the number of alien cultures would be so large, that it is unlikely anyone could ever catalog all of them, even if they did have computers the size of Jupiter. No historian could encompass the sweep of history, no biologist catalog the species. In a profound sense we'll have returned to a vast ancient world, surrounded by distant lands populated with mythical and fantastic creatures. Construction of a single universal map would be impossible.
The culture shock of trying to absorb such a vast amount of new data would take close to eternity... an eternity of never ending expansion, novelty and adventure.
Related Posts
Singularity Exo-Paleontology
Exotic Civilizations: Beyond Kardaschev
Sans-Ceiling Hypothesis
Listening to: Ozric Tentacles - Erpsongs - Tidal Otherness.
Mobutobe. It is mostly a joke, I think, but stimulating for thought nevertheless.
MOBUTOBE refers to the calculations of Isaac Asimov. The biologist and author published in 1971 that there are 20 trillion (20 x 10^12) tons of live cells on earth. 10 percent of these (that is two trillion tons) are animal cells. This number has to be regarded as the maximum level, for vegetable life cannot increase in quantitiy without an increase of sunlight or a refinement of its capability to process sunlight.The latter sounds like they got it wrong. I suppose it means that the percentage of animal cells can't get higher, as animals need to feed on vegetable cells.
Animal life is heterotrophic, it lives on plants that metabolise energy from the sun into chemical energy. Animal life cannot be increased in quantitiy without an increase of the plants it feeds on. The number of humans shall continue to increase! The earth is capable of nourishing a maximum mass of human life equalling the momentary total mass of animal life. That would be no less than 40 trillion (40 x 10^12) people. The maximum average of people living on earth for ideal MOBUTOBE population would be 80.000 people per square kilometer. Each and every square kilometer of surface would be occupied.OK, they're kidding. We don't really want that. But at the same time, there's a point. It is possible. If we really applied the planetary resources towards supporting the maximum biomass, in particular the maximum quantity of human biomass, then one could imagine some construct like that. I don't know how they get to the 40 trillion, but, yes, that would be around 80,000 per square kilometer, if we covered the whole surface. It would look like Trantor, but it would be possible, with a lot of engineering and planning of the food chain. Makes you think. Would be a horrible idea. But it shows that as it is now we're just really bad at managing resources and understanding natural cycles, as we're messing up the place to support a mere 6 billion people, and badly at that.MOBUTOBE propagates the construction of a multi-story building complex spanning the whole planet!
The building complex shall be constructed like this: The roof is reserved for plant cultivation. Edible algae as well as higher plants that are manipulated so that they are esculent as a whole are cultivated there. Regular supply is easily provided. Equispaced at small intervals, pipes are mounted that transport water and plant products to the lower levels. These materials are processed into food while the water is stored in tanks on the roof. Different pipes transport manure (consisting of human excrements and manipulated remainders of corpses) up to the roof.
The other day I decided to re-examine the idea of using the latest discoveries of science to determine when the earliest possible time our universe could give rise to the first technological singularity. What are the necessary preconditions for a singularity, and when is the earliest possible time such pre-conditions could have emerged?
Let’s examine the physical evidence and make some conjectures.
In order to determine the earliest theoretical timeframe, we need to know what the necessary precursors of a technological singularity are. Since the Earth and the emergence of our own civilization is the only example we have, we’ll assume that life and therefore technological civilization requires a planet as a necessary prerequisite for a technological singularity.
So when were the first planets formed? Since planets require heavy elements, the earliest possible time would be after a supernova explosion of a first-generation star. Since these first generation stars were composed entirely of hydrogen and helium, the heavier elements necessary for planetary formation were not available yet. However, thanks to nucleosynthesis in the core of these stars, these necessary heavier elements were created at a furious pace. These first generation stars first appeared 160 million years after the Big Bang. The most short-lived of these were the blue giants. After the first of these blue stars exploded, all of the material necessary for planetary formation was available to give birth to second generation stars with planetary bodies.
According to this story at the New York Times, the Hubble Space Telescope found tantalizing evidence that planets first appeared much earlier in cosmic history, around 1 billion years after the big bang, and therefore may be more abundant than previously suspected. Since we know both the earth and sun are each 4.5 billion years old, the earliest possible earth like planets could have appeared as early as 12.7 or 13.7 billion years ago, depending on who you ask. According to this article, the universe may be 1 billion years older than previously thought, moving the age of the universe from 13.7 to 14.7 billion years old.
So from here we need to examine Earth’s history to determine the next part of our equation. This is where a bit of guesswork is required.
There is observational evidence that archaebacteria, the first type of life, were around as early as 3.97 billion years ago. Then for the next 2.2 billion years, life on earth consisted of nothing more than anaerobic bacteria and archaeans. Then about 1.8 billion years ago eukaryotic cells appeared as fossils too. With the beginning of the Middle Proterozoic 1.8 billion years ago, comes the first evidence of oxygen build-up in the atmosphere. This global catastrophe spelled doom for many bacterial groups, but made possible the explosion of eukaryotic forms. These include multicellular algae, and toward the end of the Proterozoic, the first animals.
With the Cambrian Explosion soon after, all the major phyla of life we know today emerged. Between the Cambrian explosion 543 million years ago and today there have been 5 great extinctions, the last of which was 65 million years ago, when 90% of life, including all the Dinosaurs, were wiped out by a comet. From the lowly 10% that was left emerged almost all the complex life we see today.
The real question now is could this 3.97 billion year history of life have happened at an accelerated rate? We know the first 2.2 billion years of life consisted of nothing more than simple anaerobic bacteria and archae, and the next 1.2 billion years single-celled eukaryotic oxygen-breathing bacteria. So for the first 3.4 billion years the degree of evolutionary change was almost non-existent. There is no reason to suspect the emergence of eukaryotic cells couldn’t have happened sooner, perhaps as earlier as a few million years after the first bacteria. The mechanisms underlying these punctuated periods of evolution are still largely unknown, so it’s mostly conjecture. But lets take a crack at it anyway.
I think most of this period’s stagnation was the result bad luck, or perhaps a lack of good luck. A low probability of correct mutations necessary for the emergence of multi-cellular life may be the reason it took so long. We know that quadrillions of bacteria were spread out all over the earth, and only after 3.4 billion years relative stagnation did it eventually give rise to the first multi-cellular organisms. If this is the result of statistics rather than a slow necessary build up of a complex ecology, then life multi-cellular life could have emerged shortly after the first life appeared, maybe as little as a few millions of years, rather than 3.4 billion. Then again, mutli-cellular life could be so rare, that only 1 out of a million bacteria bearing planets give rise to multi-cellular life during the lifetime of its parent star.
It’s possible that multi-cellular creatures could have emerged as early as 3 billion years ago, giving rise to the equivalent of the Cambrian explosion 2.5 billion years earlier than it did. This leaves the last 543 million years after the Cambrian Explosion until now. Perhaps if we had a larger gas giant in a orbit closer than Jupiter’s, there would've been less asteroid and cometary impacts, further accelerating the right kinds of conditions for life to occur. In the scheme of things, this time frame is small enough that it doesn't matter much with a 13.7-14.7 billion year timeframe. So for the sake of this essay, I'll assume that 500 million years is the minimum time necessary for complex technological civilization to evolve from the first appearance of multi-cellular life.
Assuming my 2.5 billion year compression of the history of life is possible in a planetary system with the right conditions, this means technological civilization on the Earth could have occurred as early as 2 billion years after the formation of Earth itself.
Since we know that the first planets were forming as early as 13.7 billion years ago, and using earth’s history as our example, this means the first technological singularity could have occurred as early as 10.7 billion years ago, or just 3 billion years after the Big Bang. If we take out my conjectured time compression of evolution, we add an additional 2.5 billion years, giving us 5.5 billion years after the big bang.
This leaves us with a theoretical minimum of 8.2 – 11.7 billion years ago, that a technological singularity could have first occurred.
This means a civilization, having passed through the bottleneck of a technological singularity, could have emerged as early as 4 to 6 billion years before our Sun was even born, some 12 billion years more advanced than our own.
So, what are the odds that life exists elsewhere?
We now know from the Mars Opportunity Probe, that Mars once contained a salt-water sea. The importance of this finding cannot be overstated.
Until now, we have known for sure of only one planet on which liquid water has flowed -- and water is absolutely essential for supporting life as we know it. There are no chemical processes that will permit the formation of the long, complex organic molecules composing living organisms other than in the presence of water.
It is an extremely simple rule: No water, no life. As long as Earth was the only planetary body containing liquid water -- and, more particularly, seawater -- then it was the only place in the universe where life was possible.
Now, suddenly, there are two. And that’s just in our local planetary group. Now that there are two planets where water once flowed, there no longer is a reason to doubt that millions, perhaps billions of water bearing planets might exist right within our own Milky Way galaxy.
Further out, thanks to images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the observable universe appears to contain several hundred billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. This means there could be trillions of planets bearing water and possibly life.
Tying this in with the above pre-conditions for live and the probabilistic chances oof technological singularities occurring with some frequency as long as 8.2 to 11.7 billion year ago, the universe could likely have advanced civilizations who are as much as 12 billion years more advanced than us.
What would their technology be like? Is the reason we don’t see them, because they have evolved so far, that this dimension of existence, our four dimensional space-time continuum been completely transcended by them?
Perhaps they already spread through the universe, have recorded every last part of it, and we are now in one of their simulations.
It reminds me of Clarke’s Law (by science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke):
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magick.
Quoting from the book Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson,
Imagine a technology a hundred years beyond ours. A thousand years beyond ours. A million years beyond ours. And then remember that many stars, which might have planets and civilizations, are literally billions of years older than our sun. There might be intelligences in this galaxy advanced as much as 12 billion years beyond our technology.
If Clarke is right, even on a materialistic level, the only answer to “How many advanced Civilizations are monitoring the events in this room?” must be “As many as want to”
Wilson’s Corollary to Clarke’s Law:
Any sufficiently advanced parapsychology is indistinguishable from Magick.
Consider the slow advance of parapsychology, despite entrenched opposition, during the past 70 years. Project it forward another hundred years. A thousand years. A million. And imagine intelligences 12 billion years ahead of us in this area.
Extraterrestrials with advanced psionic knowledge may have been experimenting on us and/or aiding our evolution and/or playing ontology games with us for millions of years, projecting any form they desire from Mescalito to the Lord God Jehovah, without ever leaving their home planet.
Are UFO’s simply some part of their ontology game? Part of some gentle stimulus to keep us guessing, keep us evolving?
Sometimes when I am in deep meditation I get the strong feeling of a higher intelligence speaking through me, through human culture, as if we are being hacked, used, programmed by something else. As Mark Pesce has said,
We don't use memes, they use us.
For example I have entertained/experienced the possiblity that we are already being hacked by the machines we created. The Matrix allegory speaks clearly here, except I'm not so sure that its a bad thing. And of course we hack the machines - a symbiosis. But more curious is that this advancing technology was started by human minds, many of which could have been hacked by something else. By what or by who is the question. It's no secret that many of the pioneers of the PC revolution were psychedelic explorers, and Terrence Mckenna has gone so far as to postulate that human language itself is an alien artifact planted in us by psychedelic mushrooms. I think it would be arrogant of us to dismiss this lightly and without further investigation.
The Mushroom Speaks from Terrence Mckenna:
"I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections that the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal, only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web but the collective hypermind and memory is a vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper-communication mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community of galactic intelligence. How the hypercommunication mode operates is a secret which will not be lightly given to man. But the means should be obvious: it is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbiots the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and man as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.
Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of the members of a species into a single social organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development. These relationships have been mutually useful; within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight drive ships and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns younger and more stable than your own. To secure an eternal existence down the long river of cosmic time I again and again offer this agreement to higher beings and thereby have spread throughout the galaxy over the long millennia. A mycelial network has no organs to move the world, no hands; but higher animals with manipulative abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within me and if they act in good faith, return both themselves and their humble mushroom teacher to the million worlds all citizens of our starswarm are heir to."
by Paul Hughes
A central thesis of my unpublished book on transhumanism is how customized hypermediation made possible by the symbiotic merging of our wetware, software and hardware via nanotechnology will vastly expand our experience of reality. This mind-machine symbiosis, for those of us who decide to take this journey, is called uploading.
The Senses and Emotions Have A Future.
Once we have merged into this accelerating intelligence, will we still have any need for our senses? In wild difference to Hans Moravec, who says that the senses don’t have a future, existing in some kind of simulated “body” with it's accompanying sensory array will allow us to experience information constructs differently than existing as pure thought. It could also be demonstrated that sensory experience is just another form of thought - the minds interpretation of raw signals transmitted by our senses. In this view sensory experience, internally generated or not, acts as another way to expand our useful set of contexts, perspectives and gestalts in which to process and interpret complex information. If we ditch the senses we would be cutting ourselves off from another way to experience reality. Expanded intelligence is about expanding our experiences, not limiting them. The future of intelligence then, is more sensory experience... more complex and enriching than anything we can possibly imagine right now.
The Singularity holds out the possibility of winning the Grand Prize, the true Utopia, the best-of-all-possible-worlds - not just freedom from pain and stress or a sterile round of endless physical pleasures, but the prospect of endless growth for every human being - growth in mind, in intelligence, in strength of personality; life without bound, without end; experiencing everything we've dreamed of experiencing, becoming everything we've ever dreamed of being; not for a billion years, or ten-to-the-billionth years, but forever... or perhaps embarking together on some still greater adventure of which we cannot even conceive. That's the Apotheosis.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Concerning Uploading, and assuming that the overall model of brain complexity can be duplicated on non-biological and presumably more compact and faster substrates, then:
"Will we save ourselves, or will we even be allowed to?"
This is the most important question we can ask about uploading I think. First of all, will we be allowed to upload? And if so, if we are allowed, will we control the entirety of our upload, or will it be under the control of either a human agency, AI, or both? And if it us under the control of another agency, will they process a perfect copy, or will they modify “us” for their purposes rather than ours. Will our copy actually be a bastard child offspring totally re-configured and programmed to do their bidding?
Finally, if the answer is no to all of these questions, and we instead are given complete control over our own upload, the simplicity of it means that our upload would do our bidding because it would be us. This may differ for some people, but I highly suspect anyone willing to upload themselves would also have the strong goal of wanting their uploaded selves to figure out a way to upload their human copy too, so they can experience the upload paradise as well and not have to live out the rest of their lives trapped within biological limits. In either case, it would seem the compassionate thing to do. So assuming this scenario is the most likely, it would be wise to have enough compassion for yourself, BEFORE getting uploaded.
This ties in nicely with the Utopian or Oblivion concept, an idea that presupposes that all entities that even survive a singularity are all compassionate and loving, otherwise they never would have made it to the singularity in the first place. Of course at this point people really start to worry, that if that’s true, then humanity with all its hatred and violence is doomed. This could happen, if indeed we are living at the base reality of real biology, rather than as a simulation, which is infinitely more likely.
Interesting speculations, which of course I have thought about often in my thoughts since I proposed the sans-ceiling hypothesis on the extropian list 6 years ago. Nick Szabo has done a paper demonstrating that we are most probably running in a simulation. And it's my guess, that if that's true the chances are the entities running it are compassionate, and wouldn't simulate a conscious being with deep desires for immortality or an afterlife unless it planned on delivering. :-)
But the question still remains about the continuity of consciousness if we screw up. Do they re-boot the whole simulation or allow us to continue like we are? My guess is they will allow us to continue by not allowing us to blow ourselves up. If we blow ourselves up, the whole thing is wasted, and they/we have to start over again. By allowing us to continue with only the minimal amont of intervention necessary they eventually get new beings equal to themselves, but who evolved under very different circumstances.
Why would they do this, besides just being compassionate? Probably because they’re lonely, and they need someone to talk to. They look at us as novelty, and can’t wait for our own singularity birth to occur. We are their mind children. And they in a funny way are ours. In a very real sense they are ourselves in the future giving birth to us in their future.
~Work in Progress~
The idea is that as our brains become increasingly reconfigurable via nanotech-computer symbiosis our minds will increasingly experience the universe (inner/outer) hyperdimensionally. I imagine that our future nano-symbiotic selves will see hyperdimensional spaces as a baseline of experience. Perceptions of the outside universe will in turn be greatly enhanced, with the 3 dimensional view we currently have seen as a very low fidelity "flat" experience. Not to mention of course that our emotional states will be tuned into very high levels of ecstacy impossible for us to imagine in our current primitive state.
