Lifeboat Foundation

This week, researchers proved empirically that life isn’t fair. Also, you’ll notice that, in a superhuman display of restraint, I managed to write a paragraph about the simulated universe hypothesis without once referencing “The Matrix.” (Except for this reference.)

Oh, so a European research team has proven that flipped coins aren’t actually fair? Buddy, life isn’t fair! Do you think the world owes you two equally probable outcomes as established by an axiomatic mathematical formalization? When I was a kid, we didn’t even have coins! We had to roll dice! It took 10 minutes to start a football game! Oh, so a coin is very slightly more likely to land on the same face as its initial position? Quit crying! It’s only a meaningful bias if you flip a coin multiple times!

Applying a recently discovered physical law, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth has contributed to the discussion about whether or not the universe is a simulation. The simulated universe hypothesis proposes that the universe is actually a simulation running on a vastly complex computing substrate and we’re therefore all just NPCs, walking through our animation loops and saying, “Hail, summoner! Conjure me up a warm bed!” and “Do you get to the Cloud District often?”

Sabine Hossenfelder investigates life’s big questions through the lens of physics, particularly Einstein’s theory of special relativity. She highlights the relativity of simultaneity, which states that the notion of “now” is subjective and dependent on the observer. This leads to the block universe concept, where past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, making the past just as real as the present.

Hossenfelder also emphasizes that the fundamental laws of nature preserve information rather than destroy it. Although information about a deceased person disperses, it remains an integral part of the universe. This idea of timeless existence, derived from the study of fundamental physics, offers profound spiritual insights that can be difficult to internalize in our everyday lives. As a result, Hossenfelder encourages people to trust the scientific method and accept the profound implications of these discoveries, which may reshape our understanding of life and existence.

As a physicist, Hossenfelder trusts the knowledge gained through the scientific method and acknowledges the challenge of integrating these deep insights into our daily experiences. By contemplating these profound concepts, we can potentially expand our understanding of reality and our place within it.

Consider the potential problems. Number one would be that any potential aliens we encounter won’t be speaking a human language. Number two would be the lack of knowledge about the aliens’ culture or sociology — even if we could translate, we might not understand what relevance it has to their cultural touchstones.

Eamonn Kerins, an astrophysicist from the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester in the U.K., thinks that the aliens themselves might recognize these limitations and opt to do some of the heavy lifting for us by making their message as simple as possible.

“One might hope that aliens who want to establish contact might be attempting to make their signal as universally understandable as possible,” said Kerins in a Zoom interview. “Maybe it’s something as basic as a mathematical sequence, and already that conveys the one message that perhaps they hoped to send in the first place, which is that we’re here, you’re not alone.”

Imagine that you have a secret decoder ring that you can use to decipher a secret message with important clues about things around you: where they came from, why they are there, and what will become of them in the future. Now imagine that the secret decoder ring is actually a sensor that can be flown in space to unravel secrets about the matter in the solar system. Where did this matter originate, how did it become energized, and how could it impact humans living on Earth and traveling in space?

The Solar Wind Pickup Ion Composition Energy Spectrometer (SPICES) is like a decoder ring for the plasma (gas consisting of electrically charged particles) in the solar system. It has the potential to reveal important information about how the sun behaves and interacts with planets and their atmospheres, and how the solar system is impacted by its own motion through interstellar space.

The universe is mostly made of hydrogen, but the elements that make up life as well as the planets, comets, and many other celestial bodies are heavier than hydrogen. In fact, these heavier elements, although not as abundant, can hold the key to understanding how numerous processes in the universe work. In our solar system, these “heavy elements”—which are called “heavy ions” when they are electrically charged—can help us trace plasma to its origin at planets, comets, the sun and solar atmosphere, and even to interstellar space.

An exploration of ten of the spookier technosignatures SETI might detect in the future.

My Patreon Page:
https://www.patreon.com/johnmichaelgodier.

Continue reading “10 SETI Technosignatures We May Not Want to See” »

This is a scientifically accurate depiction of where a select few sci-fi star systems are in our galaxy. This has been an obsession of mine for the past few months to show this visually and get a feel for where these systems are around the solar system. Also, it should be noted, that the relative positions of the stars are accurate, but their size is not.

Link to the stories I mentioned:
Star Trek: Stellar Cartography — https://amzn.to/3RN4SKz.
Project Hail Mary-https://amzn.to/3RJTzm7
Contact Carl Sagan — https://amzn.to/46oV79W
Flight of the Dragonfly (Rocheworld) Robert L Forward — https://amzn.to/3S541oL

Continue reading “The Locations of Star Trek and Other Sci-Fi in Real Space” »

To listen to more of John Wheeler’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzVlqiUh95Q881umWUPjQbB

American physicist, John Wheeler (1911−2008), made seminal contributions to the theories of quantum gravity and nuclear fission, but is best known for coining the term ‘black holes’. A keen teacher and mentor, he was also a key figure in the Manhattan Project. [Listener: Ken Ford]

Continue reading “John Wheeler — Kurt Gödel and the Closed Time-like Line” »

Have we already gone too far??

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Continue reading “What If AI Becomes Self Aware?” »

An international team of researchers has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in nature.

This new work on “assembly theory,” published today in Nature, represents a major advance in our fundamental comprehension of biological evolution and how it is governed by the physical laws of the universe. The paper is titled “Assembly Theory Explains and Quantifies Selection and Evolution.”

This research builds on the team’s previous work developing assembly theory as an empirically validated approach to life detection, with implications for the search for alien life and efforts to evolve new life forms in the laboratory.