{"id":122947,"date":"2021-05-23T17:22:46","date_gmt":"2021-05-24T00:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/origin-of-information-something-very-old-very-powerful-and-very-special-has-been-unleashed-on-earth"},"modified":"2021-05-23T17:22:46","modified_gmt":"2021-05-24T00:22:46","slug":"origin-of-information-something-very-old-very-powerful-and-very-special-has-been-unleashed-on-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/origin-of-information-something-very-old-very-powerful-and-very-special-has-been-unleashed-on-earth","title":{"rendered":"Origin of Information \u2013\u201cSomething Very Old, Very Powerful and Very Special has Been Unleashed on Earth\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/S-mkg_6jGFk?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Origin of Information \u2014\u201cSomething Very Old, Very Powerful and Very Special has Been Unleashed on Earth\u201d | <i>The Daily Galaxy<\/i>.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>\u201cHumans are strange\u2026We are the aliens,\u201d observes Columbia University astrophysicist, Caleb Scharf, noting that humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. \u201cWe also have a truly outsize impact on the planetary environment without much in the way of natural attrition to trim our influence (at least not yet).<\/p>\n<p><b>Like a Sudden Invasion by Extraterrestrials<\/b><\/p>\n<p>But the strangest thing of all, notes Scharf for Scientific American, is how we generate, exploit, and propagate information that is not encoded in our heritable genetic material, yet travels with us through time and space. Not only is much of that information represented in purely symbolic forms\u2014alphabets, languages, binary codes\u2014it is also represented in each brick, alloy, machine, and structure we build from the materials around us. Even the symbolic stuff is housed in some material form or the other, whether as ink on pages or electrical charges in nanoscale pieces of silicon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Origin of Information \u2014\u201cSomething Very Old, Very Powerful and Very Special has Been Unleashed on Earth\u201d | The Daily Galaxy. \u201cHumans are strange\u2026We are the aliens,\u201d observes Columbia University astrophysicist, Caleb Scharf, noting that humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. \u201cWe also have a truly outsize impact on the planetary environment without [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,412,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-genetics","category-nanotechnology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}