Hacker News Reader

Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

If so many people have experienced the same thing while basically hotwiring their brain why is the first thought you would have aliens are sending us messages? It seems way more likely that so many so the same thing because the basic structures in everyones brain is the same.

View on HN

How do you know the shrooms giving people this gateway experience are not alien bio-tech that got to Earth via panspermia?

Because it is physically impossible on physical and information theory grounds.

This is nothing more than handwaving and means nothing. Shrooms could be planted here by aliens, they also probably weren't. But 'physically impossible' is not something you can say for sure. And what does on physical and information theory grounds even mean?

I imagine that parent is referring to the ability to measure the total possible information capacity of a signal, or a signal carrier. If you compare the size of the 'message' being sent to the size of the 'envelope' it's (hypothetically) being transmitted through, parent is asserting that the message doesn't fit in the envelope.

That information analysis falls within the purview of Information Theory, and the physical complexity of the types of molecules which give shrooms their psychological effects is limited, and therefore the maximum message size they can carry is limited. That's the physical analysis.

But that's all just off the top of my head. Hope it helps.

Pretty much that. The drug would have to be some sort of key to unlock access to the alien consciousness. The key (drug) is definitely too small to encode such a complex mechanism, so the logic would have to be with the thing the key fits into, the way it interacts with our brain. But when you consider that it would have to remain stable over millions of years of evolutionary changes, or be redundantly specified strongly enough to survive such genetic drift... it really stops making any kind of sense from an information theory standpoint.

From a physical standpoint, it's just not possible that our minds could communicate with an alien consciousness when you consider the effects of speed of light on communication latency, and the speed of the nervous system. We have a hard enough time preventing VR headsets from making the user nauseous from latency, to say nothing of communicating with some sort of non-local alien entity.

If you're willing to throw all that out.. well then we're in pure fantasy land.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com