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Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? (nautil.us)
What if alien life were so advanced that its powers were indistinguishable from physics? It's the one-year anniversary of a startling article which appeared in Nautilus magazine. Long-time Slashdot reader wjcofkc writes: Caleb Scharf, astronomer and the director of the multidisciplinary Columbia Astrobiology Center at Columbia University presents an intriguing thought experiment.
"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?"
The original submitter included their own counterarguments against the idea, but the astronomer follows his proposal to its ultimate conclusion.
"Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn't just external. Perhaps it's already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence."
"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?"
The original submitter included their own counterarguments against the idea, but the astronomer follows his proposal to its ultimate conclusion.
"Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn't just external. Perhaps it's already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence."
Yesssssss. 3
1) Does this hypothesis have testable predictions,
Yes. The aliens would likely implement physics with some specific features to conserve resources. Here are some predictions:
1. To localize causality, the propagation of information will have a speed limit rather than happening instantaneously.
2. At the lowest levels, reality will be discrete, or "quantum", rather than continuous. The degree of quantum granularity will depend on the size of the floating point registers in the alien computers. Planck's Constant is 6.626e-34, which implies a binary mantissa of at least 115 bits.
3. To limit computation, reality would be held in a fuzzy probabilistic "superposition" state until it is actually observed, similar to how a GPU running OpenGL will skip the generation of hidden polygons. Since only an infinitesimal portion of the Universe is actually observed, this is a huge optimization win.
All of these are actually true of our Universe. Ergo, we are just alien puppets, and our only purpose in "life" is to provide them with entertainment.