From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Aug 17 2002 - 22:11:58 MDT
Damien mentioned his
> > 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.
and got the physicist and educator Paul Davies to respond
> 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 capabilities 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...
Here is my idea from about 30 years ago. I was always marveling
at the Big Ideas and Big Conceptions about extremely tiny times
following the big bang. That is, there was the Planck Time at
10^-43 seconds, and later on there was Guth's inflation time that
kicks in at 10^-37 seconds and so on.
So I wrote a brief history of a civilization that flourished
between 10^-2,103,000 and 10^-2,000,505 which displayed
Toynbee's period three-and-one-half beat rise and fall pattern,
and which didn't finally die out entirely (due mostly from
internal stresses but assisted by barbarian invasions) until
10^-1,997,476 seconds. The only notable thing that I recall
writing about was the fierce debate among scientists concerning
the extreme future of the universe, and whether life of any
kind would be possible after, say, 10^-5,000 seconds.
It was their studied conclusion that only extremely low forms
of life could possibly exist in such a sparse and expanding
universe. Maybe they were right!
Lee
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