ALBUFEIRA

WE MIGHT BE THE ONLY INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE

(Nick Longrich/theconversation.com)

Universo

• Are We Alone in The Universe?

“The universe is astonishingly vast. The Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars, and there are over a trillion galaxies in the visible universe, the tiny fraction of the universe we can see. Even if habitable worlds are rare, their sheer number – there are as many planets as stars, maybe more – suggests lots of life is out there. So where is everyone? This is the Fermi paradox. The universe is large, and old, with time and room for intelligence to evolve, but there’s no evidence of it.” (Nick Longrich)

• Could Intelligence Simply Be Unlikely to Evolve?

“Unfortunately, we can’t study extraterrestrial life to answer this question. But we can study some 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history, looking at where evolution repeats itself, or doesn’t.”

…

“Humans couldn’t evolve until fish evolved bones that let them crawl onto land. Bones couldn’t evolve until complex animals appeared. Complex animals needed complex cells, and complex cells needed oxygen, made by photosynthesis. None of this happens without the evolution of life, a singular event among singular events. All organisms come from a single ancestor; as far as we can tell, life only happened once.” (Nick Longrich)

• Curiously, All This Takes A Surprisingly Long Time.

“Photosynthesis evolved 1.5 billion years after the Earth’s formation, complex cells after 2.7 billion years, complex animals after 4 billion years, and human intelligence 4.5 billion years after the Earth formed. That these innovations are so useful but took so long to evolve implies that they’re exceedingly improbable.” (Nick Longrich)

Fotossíntese

• An Unlikely Series of Events.

“These one-off innovations, critical flukes, may create a chain of evolutionary bottlenecks or filters. If so, our evolution wasn’t like winning the lottery. It was like winning the lottery again, and again, and again. On other worlds, these critical adaptations might have evolved too late for intelligence to emerge before their suns went nova, or not at all. Imagine that intelligence depends on a chain of seven unlikely innovations – the origin of life, photosynthesis, complex cells, sex, complex animals, skeletons and intelligence itself – each with a 10% chance of evolving. The odds of evolving intelligence become one in 10 million … (or) … intelligence will evolve on just 1 in 100 trillion habitable worlds.” (Nick Longrich)

• And Yet, We’re Here.

“If evolution gets lucky one in 100 trillion times, what are the odds we happen to be on a planet where it happened? Actually, the odds of being on that improbable world are 100%, because we couldn’t have this conversation on a world where photosynthesis, complex cells, or animals didn’t evolve. That’s the anthropic principle: Earth’s history must have allowed intelligent life to evolve, or we wouldn’t be here to ponder it.” (Nick Longrich)

• Earth’s History … (and) … Intelligent Life to Evolve.

“Intelligence seems to depend on a chain of improbable events. But given the vast number of planets, then like an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters to write Hamlet, it’s bound to evolve somewhere. The improbable result was us.” (Nick Longrich)

[theconversation.com/evolution-tells-us-we-might-be-the-only-intelligent-life-in-the universe-124706]

(imagens e texto/extractos: Nick Longrich/Evolution tells us we might be the only intelligent life in the universe/October 18, 2019/theconversation.com)

“Time is an illusion, therefore so is everything else. The universe is a consciousness hologram. Reality is projected illusion within the hologram. It is a virtual experiment created in linear time to study emotions. Our hologram is composed of grids created by a source consciousness brought into awareness by electromagnetic energy at the physical level. The hologram is created and linked through a web, or grid matrixes based on the patterns of Sacred Geometry. The hologram had a beginning and it has an end, as consciousness evolves in the alchemy of time. As the grids collapse, everything within the hologram will end as it fades to Black.” (crystalinks.com)

A UK, Canadian and Italian study has provided what researchers believe is the first observational evidence that our universe could be a vast and complex hologram.

A sketch of the timeline of the holographic Universe

Time runs from left to right. The far left denotes the holographic phase and the image is blurry because space and time are not yet well defined. At the end of this phase (denoted by the black fluctuating ellipse) the Universe enters a geometric phase, which can now be described by Einstein's equations. The cosmic microwave background was emitted about 375,000 years later. Patterns imprinted in it carry information about the very early Universe and seed the development of structures of stars and galaxies in the late time Universe (far right).

Credit: Paul McFadden

Theoretical physicists and astrophysicists, investigating irregularities in the cosmic microwave background (the 'afterglow' of the Big Bang), have found there is substantial evidence supporting a holographic explanation of the universe – in fact, as much as there is for the traditional explanation of these irregularities using the theory of cosmic inflation.

The researchers, from the University of Southampton (UK), University of Waterloo (Canada), Perimeter Institute (Canada), INFN, Lecce (Italy) and the University of Salento (Italy) have published findings in the journal Physical Review Letters.

A holographic universe, an idea first suggested in the 1990s, is one where all the information, which makes up our 3D 'reality' (plus time) is contained in 2D surface on its boundaries.

Professor Kostas Skenderis of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Southampton explains:

"Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions (and your perception of time) in fact emanates from a flat two-dimensional field. The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface, such as in the hologram on a credit card. However, this time, the entire universe is encoded!"

Although not an example with holographic properties, it could be thought of as rather like watching a 3D film in a cinema. We see the pictures as having height, width and crucially, depth -- when in fact it all originates from a flat 2D screen. The difference, in our 3D universe, is that we can touch objects and the 'projection' is 'real' from our perspective. In recent decades, advances in telescopes and sensing equipment have allowed scientists to detect a vast amount of data hidden in the 'white noise' or microwaves (partly responsible for the random black and white dots you see on an un-tuned TV) left over from the moment the universe was created. Using this information, the team was able to make complex comparisons between networks of features in the data and quantum field theory. They found that some of the simplest quantum field theories could explain nearly all cosmological observations of the early universe.

Professor Skenderis comments:

"Holography is a huge leap forward in the way we think about the structure and creation of the universe. Einstein's theory of general relativity explains almost everything large scale in the universe very well, but starts to unravel when examining its origins and mechanisms at quantum level. Scientists have been working for decades to combine Einstein's theory of gravity and quantum theory. Some believe the concept of a holographic universe has the potential to reconcile the two. I hope our research takes us another step towards this."

The scientists now hope their study will open the door to further our understanding of the early universe and explain how space and time emerged.

(texto e imagem: sciencedaily.com – fonte: Universidade de Southampton)

Physicists May Have Evidence Universe Is A Computer Simulation

The Matrix

How?

They made a computer simulation of the universe. And it looks sort of like us.

A long-proposed thought experiment, put forward by both philosophers and popular culture, points out that any civilization of sufficient size and intelligence would eventually create a simulation universe if such a thing were possible.

And since there would therefore be many more simulations (within simulations, within simulations) than real universes, it is therefore more likely than not that our world is artificial.

Now a team of researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany led by Silas Beane say they have evidence this may be true.

In a paper named 'Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation' they point out that, current simulations of the universe - which do exist, but which are extremely weak and small - naturally put limits on physical laws.

Technology Review explains that "the problem with all simulations is that the laws of physics, which appear continuous, have to be superimposed onto a discrete three dimensional lattice which advances in steps of time."

What that basically means is that by just being a simulation, the computer would put limits on, for instance, the energy that particles can have within the program.

These limits would be experienced by those living within the sim - and as it turns out, something which looks just like these limits do in fact exist.

For instance, something known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin, or GZK cut off, is an apparent boundary of the energy that cosmic ray particles can have. This is caused by interaction with cosmic background radiation. But Beane and co's paper argues that the pattern of this rule mirrors what you might expect from a computer simulation.

Naturally, at this point the science becomes pretty tricky to wade through - and we would advise you read the paper itself to try and get the full detail of the idea.

But the basic impression is an intriguing one.

Like a prisoner in a pitch-black cell, we may never be able to see the 'walls' of our prison - but through physics we may be able to reach out and touch them.

(Huffington Post UK | By Michael Rundle)