Comment by echelon
2 days ago
> Can you elaborate?
The universe tends to produce self-replicating intelligence. And that intelligence rids itself of chemical and biological limitations and weaknesses to become immortal and omnipotent.
If evolution can make it this far, it's only a few more "hard steps" to reach take off.
>> It happens to literally every existence of life across the universe because the final emergent property of energy gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines.
The spacefaring alien meme is just fantasy fiction. Aliens evolve to fit the nutrient and gas exchange profiles of their home worlds. They're overfit to the gravity well and likely die suboptimally, prematurely.
Any species reaching or exceeding our level of technological capability could design superior artificial systems. If those systems take off, those will become the dominant shape of intelligence on those worlds.
The future of intelligence in the universe is artificial. And that throws the Fermi Paradox for a loop in many ways:
- There's enough matter to compute within a single solar system. Why venture outside?
- The universe could already be computronium and we could be ants too dumb to notice.
- Maybe we're their ancestor simulation.
- Similar to the "fragile world hypothesis", maybe we live in a "fragile universe". Maybe the first species to get advanced physics and break the glass nucleates the vacuum collapse. And by that token, maybe we're the first species to get this far.
> The universe tends to produce self-replicating intelligence.
Which intelligence are you referring to? Other lifeforms in the universe?
The parent comment has the end bit in a nut shell. For the "energy gradients" part:
Anthropic principal says we find ourselves in a universe that is just right for life (self observing) because of the right universal constants.
Combine this with the very slight differences but general uniformity (Cosmic Microwave Background) of the "big bang" this leads to localized differences in energy (on a universe scale). Energy differences allow "work to be done". If you have the right constants but no energy difference, you can't do work nor vice versa. No work == no life.
But you have both of those, and bunch more steps - you get life.
Which is a whole lot of mental leaps packed into one sentence.
[Edit]
I basically know nothing. I just watch PBS Space Time.
You have to steal energy and channel it to do work. In order to build your own moments of order and flux, you must typically create entropy in another ordered system.
Intelligence arises from the deliberate navigation of entropic gradients. Systems get increasingly good at harnessing these gradients. What was once just chemistry is now self-replicating, thinking chemistry. And now it's turning into purely intentional physics.
Infinite energy density becomes expansion into cooling galaxies which becomes stellar birthing grounds which becomes the periodic table that becomes planets with geochemical flux which becomes biogeochemical flux that becomes biochemistry which becomes self-replicating machines (life) that becomes animals that becomes humans that becomes intelligently designed self-replicating machines ... that becomes computronium ... becomes entities that harness the energy of black holes and that create new gravitational singularities ... ??? ... that creates new universes and new big bangs and new dimensions ... ???
could you elaborate slightly on what is meant by ancestor simulation? My best stab is that you're saying we're the unknowing entities that they created for fun to get to meet or observe their own ancestors? This still seems far fetched.
The advanced hyperintelligence that descends from us wants to learn about its past, build an interesting tech demo, or perhaps experience it. It creates an advanced simulation of the past using its unimaginable technology. It's able to recreate the past and populate it with realistic people with such fidelity that the simulated people have no idea that they're in a simulation. They're thinking, living, and breathing just like us -- completely indistinguishable.
Perhaps the fidelity and technology is even beyond our reasoning. Perhaps the future is able to bend physics and capture the past light cone. It may be able to perfectly simulate the past as it happened, down to every neurotransmitter fired by every brain at every second. Every event, every thought, every emotion. Perhaps it is pulling beings out of the past and placing them into its simulation with 100% fidelity such that you couldn't tell the two apart if you wanted.
Perhaps that's where we are right now.