We still don't know if the Universe itself isn't a living organism with us playing the role of tiny viruses that require intelligence/consciousness to fulfill certain tasks, like what gut bacteria does for us.
So yes, a universe sized lifeform could not have evolved randomly since the big bang, but you can only be confident about that if you assume that nothing exists outside the spacetime bubble we call the universe.
It's fun to kick around crazy ideas on Saturday afternoon. It could be anything. Sadly, there's no way i'll ever know. But the idle speculation is still amusing.
Does it really make sense to talk about it as being a single organism? How could it do anything in a coordinated way?
Or how about an organism that grows at say 10m in diameter per year, but signals across its body only propagate at 1cm per year? Again, how can it be considered to be functioning as a discrete organism? Surely if such a being evolved, its parts would perforce do so independently of each other? There could be no cross-organism coordination. It would have to disintegrate or devolve into local functional or operational units if it were to do anything effective at all.
Ae could be in it's stomach, where processes slow down the speed of light by a factor of trillions so that we are easier to digest.
None of these are testable hypothesese of course. But one day they may be testable.
Your comment doesn't really give accurate credit to the current state of knowledge.
Yes, quantum entanglement doesn't seem to allow for transmission of information in the conventional sense. However...
Take a universe full of particles, many of which are entangled with each other. If you consider the entanglement as primary you can think of the entangled particles as single entities that have "extensions" into space-time that can be widely separated. I don't think it's at all clear that "living" processes cannot be carried out on this "substratum" of interspersed non-local entities.
But I'm waaaay over my head here, so I'll stop waving my hands. :-)
Don't humans to a degree fulfill this role; the mass behavior of the species (recently) acting as form of brain with emerging self-awareness of the galaxy/universe; since we study it, and are also part of it?
Behavior can be influenced by others, but will isn't superceded by a crowd.
It often is by governments though. Also judging by polling on small sample sets, which often match whole population elections they do coherently aggregate; and then those governments make laws which incarcerate or penalize going against them.
Also isn't that the nature of science to provide coherent aggregation of knowledge that is agreed upon (though testable hypothesizes). Which is generally different from government policy, which usually doesn't use evidence based decision making in the scientific sense.
The whole article is predicated upon a bunch of faulty assumptions, it's like it was written by a simple minded child.
The size of the observable universe: ~93 billion light-years
Time since the big bang: ~13.7 billion years.
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/104-the-universe/c...
That doesn't mean he must be right, but I feel pretty comfortable citing him.
It seems to indicate that for a thought to happen, a signal must traverse the entire length (width?) of your brain.
That isn't how it works at all. Many thoughts are localised in the brain. Further, some signals don't need to get to the brain at all. And some functions of life don't even need signals to ever leave the localised region at all.
If you are cut, your blood cells spill out, clot, and prevent further bleeding from happening, all without anything outside of the immediate vicinity of the cut to be notified (although it's good to let other parts of the body nearby, say another finger, from exacerbating the wound).
If the organism were larger than say a planet, then why would not the brain become distributed, with the parts needed to deal with one quadrant of the planet located at that part of it?
Basically, this article is lazy. It makes a couple of very dubious assumptions, then runs full-forward on those assumptions, never stopping to think if those assumptions even make sense.
Yes, if we are to try to imagine a life form that looks exactly like a human (or other life-form that we find on Earth), but is the size of the galaxy, we start to laugh, because that couldn't work. But that thought experiment is pretty silly.
This particular nasty swipe is not only not ok on HN, there's a specific rule against it. Please (re)-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Yes, see: http://www.xenology.info/Xeno.htm
If I send you to a junk yard and say "Find my old microwave" can you do it? You'll probably start by looking for things that look like what you think a microwave looks like, right? But what if mine looks different?
We know life is probably somewhat rare in the universe, at least compared to the raw number of planets. But we know that Earth ticks all the right boxes to generate life, despite that adversity. So we look for things like Earth because it's more likely to be productive than a blind search with no bounds.
Life on larger, slower scales rapidly hits the problem that 15 billion years turns out not to be all that long when you start dividing it by thousands or millions at a time. The problem is that if you're spread out that far, you're probably mostly running at the ambient temperature, which is very cold and much slower, so not only do you need to take 3-6ish orders of magnitude of speed off for dispersion in space, you need to take 3ish orders of magnitude off for being very cold and thus chemistry being very slow. And you may need to take another 3-6+ orders of magnitude off for waiting for your very dispersed, very cold molecules to encounter each other at all, in order to do whatever reactions are supposed to be supporting you. The problem you have there is that on that time scale, the galaxy is a very active and violent place, with supernovae popping off and galactic collisions and passages through the arms and all these stars flying about far faster than you can react to them (rather than the stately procession we think we see) and all kinds of things that tends to make a sensible person thinking about this problem starting thinking that even were some magical force to create such a life form, it wouldn't subjectively live very long before being violently destroyed from its point of view.
(And there are really quite a few more factors missing from the story of how one could have such an enormous life form, like how one forms from what are, to a first approximation, hydrogen atoms with trace contaminants. The biggest "contaminant" also happens to be helium, which you're not going to be doing much chemistry on. Seems difficult to imagine what "chemistry" would be going on here. (And if you want to say "energy being", be concrete about what sort of energy it is you are talking about, and how it manages to accomplish any sort of reaction or computation. It turns out that at least in our universe, "energy being" is probably just a nonsense phrase with no possible physical referent.))
I wouldn't write the idea off perhaps as entirely as some people here have, but if such large organisms or civilizations are going to ever exist, they're going to have to exist in a later epoch of the Universe, i.e., they're still many, many billions of years in the future. Right now the universe is too young and vibrant and explosive for anything like that to exist for very long.
If these sorts of things intrigue you, and you'd like a semi-realistic treatment of some of the similar ideas, you might consider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pld8wTa16Jk . The boundary between "science fiction" and "the optimal possible engineering" is fuzzy but that video does a decent job of riding the line. One of the things I don't think he mentions is that some of the "slow" civilizations he mentions, where a thousand years literally pass like a single thought, is that they might be geographically dispersed, for at least some of their components, on this scale. As you hypothesize beings or civilizations (and honestly, from where we sit, there isn't necessarily that great a difference between the two things) that exist orders of magnitude more slowly than we do, the speed of light stops being such a bummer and "virtually" speeds up.