Song 30: And now we launch into Uncharted Seas

“The Captain and the Rag Doll” – a novel concept in three images.

Here is a scene aboard the “Vantage Point” space station orbiting Earth at the range of the Solar Gravitational Lens (547 times the distance between Sun and Earth—75.8 light hours away from Earth). The Vantage Point’s mission is to use the Sun’s Gravitational Lens as a massive natural telescope (it magnifies objects as much as 10,000,000,000 times!) to examine nearby star systems in search of habitable exoplanets, and, secondarily, to use radar to detect interstellar objects passing nearby.  Whenever an interesting object comes near enough, a small probe, and sometimes a manned ‘shuttlecraft’ is deployed to intercept it and return samples.

But there is trouble aboard Vantage Point.  Twees arrived on an interstellar sample half a century ago, and being as exquisitely adaptable as they must be to travel interstellar space and dominate the universe, they easily escaped the station’s strict sample isolation protocols.  They seemed innocuous at first, but within a few decades, they had worked their patient magic and had taken effective control of the station. As a result, human replacements were forbidden.  The last arrival and the last onboard birth were supposed to have happened thirty-five years ago.  All the remaining human crew is aged 60 and older.  The Captain is a Twee-operative Cyborg with an AI interface implant that can crudely communicate with his single-celled masters from the Great Pan-Cosmic Interstellar Empire.

In the scene shown, the Captain has just discovered this little unauthorized ‘stow-away,’ Bel Patrí, illicitly born aboard the station, and an interrogation is under way.  The radiation of space resulted in little Bel being born with 13 fingers (six on the left hand, seven on the right).

 

Seventeen years later, with the patient Twees having now infiltrated Earth itself, the planet is in chaos.  Depicted here is the defining moment of the Song of Everything’s deliberately optimistic version of the future.  This is obviously a fictional rendition, but it represents the establishment of a Human alliance with that Pan-Cosmic Empire of the Twees.  Call it a ‘Peace Treaty’ if you must, because the prime mission of the Twees—really just their natural instinct—is to dominate every planet that they colonize.  99.9 percent of the time, that means destruction of everything that resists or gets in their way, and this provides a the frightfully chilling answer to the ‘Fermi Paradox.’ 

Shown here is a scene on an exotic habitable exoplanet orbiting a rogue star that had escaped the galaxy Andromeda and was approaching the Vantage Point space station.  The alien is named ABI (Abby) and the human is none other than our little Rag Doll, Bel Patrí, who has grown up to become the senior ambassador representing all of humanity.  ABI is a Twee-constructed “Artificial Biological Intelligence,” which acts as the representative of this newly arrived Twee culture—part of its “Central Authority.”

What’s under that huge turban that Bel is wearing?  Much and more, as G.R.R. Martin is fond of saying.

And lastly, here’s the book cover, with a look at the Vantage Point Space Station itself, taken presumably with a good night-vision camera and with a whole lot of dramatic license, because at the distance of the Solar Gravitational Lens, the light from the sun is only about 1½ times the brightness of the full moon on a clear night here on Earth.

The circular portions of the massive ship contain rings of rotating magnetically constrained habitats, where the rotation creates exactly 1-g earth-equivalent ‘gravity’ through centrifugal force.  The cosmic scene is where some liberties have been taken for dramatic effect.  I doubt if the heliosheath, the ‘cloud’ in the background, produced by the solar wind, would be visible at all.  The sun would be a pinpoint, with no resolvable width to the naked eye.  A potential habitable exoplanet (orbiting another star) that is being viewed as magnified by the gravitational lens would be much, much dimmer, in general, and would be concentrated in a ring so close to the sun’s disc that the naked eye could not see it.  Only the space station’s high-quality telescope with a coronagraph to block the sunlight, and with a long, long exposure time, could resolve the details of that distant object.  But that detail would be astounding.  The telescope can resolve objects 25km across (a modest sized city) on an exoplanet 100 light years away!

For the first 29 songs of this series, we’ve been talking about the past, constrained by what we see—from our deepest origins as a universe to the origins of life. With that story on the table, it is now time to discuss the future.

Song 30 will be focusing specifically on the human story and on our potential as citizens of a vibrant Cosmic ecosystem as outlined in Song 29.

Science’s predictions about the future of our sun, of our solar system, of our galaxy (with its imminent collision with the giant neighboring galaxy Andromeda) and of the deep future of the universe as a whole are well covered in conventional literature. As always, Wikipedia, citing clearly identifying source material, is a great starting point. This Link to the “timeline of the far future” page is pretty comprehensive and a super fun read.

Prior to the Comfortable Universe series, we took a stab on this blog at exploring the human future regarding the prospects of our species expanding out into space and even into other universes. The ideas ranged widely and sometimes drifted into the realm of fiction.

Here, our Song of Everything’s story builds on that post—at the outset, here, we keep a reign on the speculation. Armed with additional time to contemplate (since writing that Utopia or Bust blog post linked in the previous paragraph), we are now offering a new perspective, which is this: Although we may never encounter ‘intelligence’ of a multi-cellular form that we can recognize and ‘talk to,’ maybe we just need to be a bit more humble, adjust our idea of what we mean by intelligence, and consider afresh what a different, far more patient form of intelligence may look like.

This will be a discussion without much embellishment regarding the potential radically profound accomplishments that versatile, hardy, and adaptable single cell organisms might have achieved, and where we could fit into their putative great Pan-Cosmic Intergalactic Empire.

In Song 29, we postulated that early-onset life, appearing within the first 200 million years of the universe’s existence, is nearly certain to exist out there. This is not fiction, but the most reasonable big-picture extrapolation of our available knowledge about the astrophysics and chemistry of the early phases of the universe. Because all the events on the statistical tail of the various distributions in the early universe (of matter, of its clustering into stellar nurseries, and of its metallicity—the concentration of the heavy elements required for life to develop) favor vastly earlier star formation in isolated pockets than the large-scale average picture that the Standard Model of Cosmology describes, logic tells us that life could have been able to establish far earlier than we might expect, and the ongoing discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope of galaxies “too old for the universe” are providing more and more evidence corroborating this picture. In this hot early, highly chaotic regime, during which most of the universe was a laboratory for conducting chemistry experiments, it seems almost inevitable that the first hardy extremophile organisms would emerge and quickly thrive.

We have called them the Twees, and posit that the peak of their activity (their ‘Civilization’) happened very long ago, soon after the time when the entire universe, wall-to-wall, was in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ of equitable temperatures in which water was mostly liquid, between 15 and 200 million years after the Big Bang. (By contrast, the universe today is 13.8 billion years old.)

What characteristics might the Twees evolve that would give them their survival advantage? Simple adaptability to a wide range of environments, and the ability to go into a dormant state for extended periods seem to be among the basics.

Then … the ability for World-hopping would be a revolutionary survival advantage (the term for this is ‘panspermia’) if it can be achieved. Wikipedia has this subject fully covered.

Our Twees, as pioneer interstellar travelers in a universe teeming with other life forms, would then evolve the ability to assimilate and/or displace any competitors on the worlds that they settle on.

This brings up the scary potential answer to the Fermi Paradox discussed in the caption to the opening image. Twees might have overwhelmed and either eliminated intelligent life forms, prevented them from ever developing our form of intelligence in the first place, or perhaps even parasitized them. This latter possibility could, potentially, lead to a symbiosis, which may not be all bad. Perhaps the ‘smartest’ Twees ‘realize’ in their slow, patient genetic-evolutionary way of ‘thinking,’ that partnering with a civilization of super smart, quick thinking multi-trillion-cell colonies, might be a very comfy way to live.

Good. Check your gut flora, ladies and gentlemen! There you might find your Intergalactic alien invaders. Or check your mitochondria! Maybe ET is living comfortably deep inside of every one of our cells!

Not quite fiction, we remind you, because we have a sound scientific hypothesis underlying this. We believe we’ve made a pretty strong case, in Songs 28 and 29, that panspermia is no fringe theory.

But we’re not finished. Now we *will* launch into speculative uncharted seas, and sail well beyond the ragged fringes of serious science. To wit: Is it possible that our Twees could find a way to transition through the mysterious portal/gateway that leads into their universe’s descendants—the proposed baby universes?

Who first said: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”?  Deeply, deeply profound words.

But what a leap! Perhaps so, but even this, we claim, is not complete fiction. More to come as we elaborate.

We’ve talked at length about the Big-V Vacuum where our universe is a mere dot among a sea of dots, each with internal rules on how to interact with the other dots, all of which they must interact with continually.

Please take serious note of one key word in the last paragraph. Interact. Universes *must* interact with the other dots, albeit in highly controlled ways as defined by their own internal rules, as we’ve tried to carefully describe in Song 27. And some of those other dots—likely to be the ones our universe most closely interacts with, would be its relatives—ancestors, children, cousins, etc.

We’ve talked about Flat World, which is the composite realm of the multiverse where related dots interact, perhaps in ways that can be strictly characterized.

Flat World.  For a comprehensive tour of all of Flat World from its very edge (see image below) to the bustling civilization encircling the blinding ‘font’ of eternal inflation at its center, please refer to “The Navel of Time,” seventh novel in the “Eden’s Womb” sci-fi series.

At the very brink of Flat World, sheltered from the howling “Death Wind” by the modest home of the ancient and enigmatic being named Eeyock, sits young Azura Timberfell and Eeyock herself.

Science accepts that the multiverse is likely to exist as a consequence of Inflation. Individual universes are bubbles that have first cooled (perhaps by condensing into black holes of every imaginable size) and then ‘re-heated’ (perhaps via Hawking radiation). The emergence of multiple universes requires that each individual entity that appears (assuming they exist) ultimately has a common ancestor. That already implies at least a one-way interaction between these entities (which we depict as separate individual universes that populate Flat World) and it implies a set of common guiding laws, at least as a starting point.

Beyond that basic family connection, the subject of interaction between universes is such a wide-open area that it is really only possible to imagine examples of ways it could happen and their consequences. (Physicists have explored wormholes and bumping universes in string theory as examples.) Beyond that, we can drift into a realm of fiction, maybe ‘science fantasy’ in which the ‘rules of magic’ by which universes talk to one another are intended to be constrained by some sort of physical system that is well beyond our ken, with constructivist-style laws that demand ‘either you must be physically possible and internally consistent or you will degenerate into useless garbage’. But it’s basically impossible to define the limits regarding how such systems could be configured. We’re just too primitive in our thinking. Imagine how a cave man would react to a device that conveys information via radio waves.

Okay. If you are willing to grant, for the purposes of a thought experiment, the idea of a Flat World in which universes can communicate and interact with one another, then we have to throw in the ‘monkey wrench.’

We have to allow the universe to play the powerful wild card of simulation scenarios (especially physically instantiated analog models, rather than digital) because it is in the deck.

If our whole Song of Everything story as presented in the preceding 29 songs is correct—in which an egg-within-egg-within-egg genealogy of universes can effectively manifest ‘something from nothing’ via the ‘magic’ of Inflation and Higher Order Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis, in which the eggs (the babies) gain complete autonomy without ever actually leaving the womb (“hatching”), with each generation being entirely self-sufficient, self-supporting, and robustly capable of evolving greater complexity than that from which it arose, and lacking any dependence on the ancestor/parent entity or on any external environment at all, except to be left alone sufficiently to function—then this story cannot easily prohibit ‘designer eggs/babies’ with any sort of *purpose-driven* agenda.

Here’s where even the tiniest seed of possibility for interaction between universes can potentially take root (if controllable, or degenerate into a cancerous chaos if not).

Consider: life, when successful, is all about controlling what is otherwise rampant chaos.

If life takes control, then the thought space for universe interaction becomes almost limitless. The possibility of being capable of creating, and then moving into, a child universe with custom-designed characteristics and with effectively unlimited resources (both of which can equal or exceed the parent’s) opens our Song of Everything to stories that just dazzle the imagination. It is life’s ultimate survival strategy.

Tell me, dear conservative and cautious scientist, that this proposed ‘pathway to practical immortality’ is categorically impossible. And please kindly provide your proof.

The Twees, being first to appear here in our universe, being far more abundant than we’ll ever be, and being far more adaptable, hardy, and resilient, would be the first to blaze this trail, and to exploit it, should it lead to the ‘promised land’.

And … *if* the Twees achieved this transcendent feat (obviously a gargantuan *if*) then here, dear reader, is unquestionably the ultimate goal of our human enterprise.

New universes await!

Shall we go on? Shall we sail on toward such exotic, remote, and unexplored horizons?

“GANDALF: The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass; and then you see it.

PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?

GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.”