nautil.us | Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He
once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to
be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of
Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d
undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The
farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before
long they’d be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that
it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?
After all, if the cosmos holds other life, and if some of that life has
evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, we should
be considering some very extreme possibilities. Today’s futurists and
believers in a machine “singularity” predict that life and its
technological baggage might end up so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t
even realize we were staring at it. That’s quite a claim, yet it would
neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the
cosmos around us, despite the sheer number of planets it could have
arisen on—the so-called Fermi Paradox.
For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and
sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering
complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way
up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made
of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building
blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then
transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed,
perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other
civilization transcribed its world.
These possibilities might
seem wholly untestable, because part of the conceit is that sufficiently
advanced life will not just be unrecognizable as such, but will blend
completely into the fabric of what we’ve thought of as nature. But
viewed through the warped bottom of a beer glass, we can pick out a few
cosmic phenomena that—at crazy as it sounds—might fit the requirements.
For example, only about 5 percent of the
mass-energy of the universe consists of ordinary matter: the protons,
neutrons, and electrons that we’re composed of. A much larger 27 percent
is thought to be unseen, still mysterious stuff. Astronomical evidence
for this dark, gravitating matter is convincing, albeit still not
without question. Vast halos of dark matter seem to lurk around
galaxies, providing mass that helps hold things together via gravity. On
even larger scales, the web-like topography traced by luminous gas and
stars also hints at unseen mass.
Cosmologists usually assume that
dark matter has no microstructure. They think it consists of subatomic
particles that interact only via gravity and the weak nuclear force and
therefore slump into tenuous, featureless swathes. They have arguments
to support this point of view, but of course we don’t really know for
sure. Some astronomers, noting subtle mismatches between observations
and models, have suggested that dark matter has a richer inner life. At
least some component may comprise particles that interact with one
another via long-range forces. It may seem dark to us, but have its own
version of light that our eyes cannot see.
In that case, dark matter could contain real complexity, and perhaps
it is where all technologically advanced life ends up or where most life
has always been. What better way to escape the nasty vagaries of
supernova and gamma-ray bursts than to adopt a form that is immune to
electromagnetic radiation? Upload your world to the huge amount of real
estate on the dark side and be done with it.
If you’re a
civilization that has learned how to encode living systems in different
substrates, all you need to do is build a normal-matter-to-dark-matter
data-transfer system: a dark-matter 3D printer. Perhaps the mismatch of
astronomical models and observations is evidence not just of
self-interacting dark matter, but of dark matter that is being
artificially manipulated.
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