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| Interstellar Wiki: Cooper in the Tessaract |
Topics: Existentialism, Fermi Paradox, Philosophy, Planetary Science, Space Exploration
It's an intriguing hypothesis, albeit a convenient one since at this current juncture, it's kind of hard to prove experimentally or observationally. John G. Messerly said on the site Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (quoting John Smart):
The transcension hypothesis proposes that a universal process of evolutionary development guides all sufficiently advanced civilizations into what may be called “inner space,” a computationally optimal domain of increasingly dense, productive, miniaturized, and efficient scales of space, time, energy, and matter, and eventually, to a black-hole-like destination.
In essence, they've "left the universe," which as you know, is a pretty big place. There are two important questions this generates at least for me: where and how?
Where: Did the aliens evolve to some hyper-dimensional tesseract, as in the movie Interstellar? I can see now where the idea originated. Again, convenient as hyper dimensions are presently undetectable. Or, as the embed below suggests, instead of "falling in love with Siri" we'll eventually become Siri after The Singularity?
How: Another way for intelligent civilizations to be "gone" is unfortunately...extinction, which can be as we are starting to see, self-induced.
Knowing the answer to either question can be illuminating and species-extending.
Ever since Enrico Fermi questioned back in the 1950’s why, if a multitude of civilisations are likely to exist in the Milky Way, no sign of their existence in the form of probes or spacecraft has ever been detected, scientists and critical thinkers have struggled to resolve the problem by supplying a host of inventive arguments with mixed reception.
To date one of the most common answers to the Great Silence was simply that life is so rare, so widely distributed, and the scale of the universe so immense, that the probability of contact or communication between any two space-faring civilisations is almost non-existent. Needless to say an outlook which seems like a very lonely, sad and pessimistic state of affairs for intelligent life to find itself in.
BrighterBrains.org:
The Transcension Hypothesis: An Intriguing Answer to the Fermi Paradox?
Owen Nicholas
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