THIS IS SCARY!
Added 2022-10-28 10:00:12 +0000 UTC
Comments
Cool
SimonSays
2022-11-05 20:46:02 +0000 UTCOkay, Bright Side, here we go again... Your narrator may make it sound like it's a nefarious, intentional thing that stops civilizations from colonizing stars. Oh honestly... Alright, so on to the three possibilities described. The first one is possible: we are among the first civilizations in our galaxy, mainly due to the strangeness of our Solar system and the requirements for complex life and technological development. In other words, the conditions were just right and actually much rarer than one would expect for complex, intelligent life to evolve in an environment suitable for technology to exist. After all, during the time of the early stars, there wasn't enough astronomical metals to even create life, let alone technology. We might be the first one, or even the only one to reach the stars. If we reach them... The second is not really a thing. In fact, given our technological development, we can actually foresee ways of rather safely traveling the stars, even at relativistic speeds. And it would have been that way for long enough that a civilization could have reached us already. So that's not really what explains the absence of detectable technological life. The third can be as simple as it is not economically viable to leave one's star system, or as chilling as the prospect of living in the Fallout universe. For the former, advanced civilizations may exist, but may not attempt to colonize the stars beyond surviving the death of their own. For the latter, in other words, there is still time for us to destroy ourselves. Anything in between is also entirely viable: planets don't remain stable enough for long enough, causing mass extinctions to wipe out civilizations before they get the chance to reach the stars. Otherwise, astronomical events, such as asteroid strikes or neighbouring super novae may wipe out life on planets. Considering that the habitable area of the galaxy is expanding, and that even in its relatively small area there should be enough stars to statistically have at least one harbour intelligent life, the third explanation, called the great filter, really is a very real possibility. It does not mean we are doomed soon, just that we may not have an incentive to leave the Sun behind for another billion years. 4D beings... Okay so there is a theory called string theory that predicts that there are 11 dimensions. The only three large enough to harbour complex things are the three we are familiar with, while the other ones are so tiny that we are entirely oblivious to them. Also, the theory does not successfully predict what we have seen, meaning it is best used as a scientific tool to study, test out and gain perspective on our observations rather than an actual explanation of the Universe. I would not worry about beings from other dimensions interacting with us. But the thought experiment of having a 4D object interacting with our own 3 dimensions is cool. Plenty of visualisations are available on YouTube as well. The false vacuum is a reference to the fact that what we consider "ground state" of the vacuum may not actually be the lowest energy state. It means that everything in the Universe may suddenly be pushed out of its current apparent minimum into a lower energy state which would be too stable for current quantum interactions to sustain atoms and chemistry. Think of Thanos' snap, but at a fundamental particle level affecting absolutely everything. The "stretch" you are talking about is literally called spaghettification. It is caused by the tidal forces: the acceleration of gravity at your head is lower than at your feet, stretching you. There comes a point where the difference is so high that your cell structures are unable to hold you together; eventually even the link between atoms is unable to hold anything together. The multiverse is nothing like what has been depicted in fiction. By its very definition and "creation", there is absolutely no way of communicating between universes. But it also brings in more philosophical questions. The biggest one is: is there actually free will, or are we "doomed" to make specific decisions in this universe? Following that, the bit about the transcension hypothesis and black hole-like environments has nothing to do with the multiverse. Rather, should a black hole-like area be safe, as we currently do not know if one can even survive past the event horizon, the intense gravity brings a number of advantages: travel forward in time, gathering of enormous amounts of materials and energy and eventual mergers with other such civilizations. Of course at that point, one may have a thought once every millions or even trillions of years to preserve energy. And sanity. I wouldn't want to wait for trillions of years in near our current timescale until another black hole came close enough to merge with ours. Of course, even such civilizations are doomed to die, as the blackholes themselves eventually will. The planet is not over populated. That's completely false. Now, we must be much smarter about how we go about it, climate change being the most pressing issue. Those abrupt changes are causing tons of extinctions already, at a much faster pace than what we encountered in the previous few thousand years. "Mother Nature" will recover, but we may drive the fall of our own civilization if extinctions bring down the ecosystems we depend on to live. But with smarter management, we could sustain a much larger population still. We just need to stop burning dinosaur juice. Yikes, Bright Side sure know how to gloss over extremely complex questions, don't they? The Fermi Paradox is the suggestion that, given the number of stars in our galaxy, one would think we should have detected an alien civilization by now. There are numerous explanations as to why that is not the case, the great filter being one. Basically what they are stating here is that the means of communication of a more advanced civilization may not intersect with ours, so we have no way of identifying a civilization's signals. It also means that those civilizations are not trying to talk to us. It could be a lack of interest, simply not noticing us at all (space is mind bogglingly vast) or even fear of aggression. Your instincts are pretty good on the simulation one. The level of processing power required to properly simulate a universe would be larger than the observable Universe. So it's pretty much unlikely. Interesting thought experiment of course. All in all, those are interesting subjects, but the Bright Side probably isn't the proper source of information on such things.
Zartren
2022-10-29 22:49:00 +0000 UTCWonder if she is going to do any Halloween cosplay or something?
Dakota Butler
2022-10-29 12:23:55 +0000 UTCI see where comic books get their ideas from. The area you pointed to that gives you that "feeling", that's indigestion, I get that too.
John Walker
2022-10-28 15:47:18 +0000 UTCYes, the filter is there alright. It's called "the speed of light". π
MΓΆlle NΓΆh
2022-10-28 14:02:56 +0000 UTC
