From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Aug 17 2002 - 19:35:47 MDT
The other day, I mentioned my
> notion of the Very Fast Evolution Machine (in THE SPIKE). Amid the noise
> and propinquity of the first fractions of a second, there might have been
> time for whole constellations of life to evolve and bootstrap themselves to
> `godlike' intelligence and power over their environment, *a fortiori* if
> particle exchanges were happening very much faster than *c* in such a
> compacted spacetime.
I passed this update along to Paul Davies, who comments (and I repost with
his kind permission):
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Well, I thought of this idea in a different context about 20 years ago (and
lectured on it in Holland). Spacetime foam can have enough complexity to
evolve life and consciousness, so the universe could have become animated,
so to speak, just after the big bang. As you may know, Seth Lloyd has
computed the information processing power of the universe, and it would have
reached superbrain capabilites in the first split second. But you are right,
it would still suffer from slow-wittedness because of the finiteness of c.
If c were bigger, this cosmic consciousness would have had impressive
intellectual power. Quite what it would have done with it is another
matter...
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Damien Broderick
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