From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jun 10 2002 - 21:00:52 MDT
At 10:54 AM 6/10/02 -0700, Hal wrote:
>How would the galaxies look? One possibility is that the stars would be
>converted entirely into Dyson spheres or the equivalent, with as much
>of the stellar output as possible being captured.
...
>In summary we would expect the universe to be divided into living and
>non-living regions. The living regions would be spherical and growing
>at some substantial fraction of the speed of light. Galaxies within the
>living regions should look very different from those outside of them.
>We would be in a non-living region, and are about to begin our own process
>of seeding a conversion. In a few hundred million years we will be at
>the center of a newly formed bubble of living galaxies, similar to the
>others which (perhaps) exist. More speculatively, the living regions
>would contain dark galaxies whose radiation was entirely in the very
>long infrared to microwave region.
Yes; I like this idea myself. As I put it in THE SPIKE:
< But is there anything in our stellar environment that can't be accounted
for by available science? Well, there remain those mysterious cosmological
features, the vast empty voids, and the so-called Great Attractor that
appears to be dragging all the local galaxies toward a particular place in
the heavens. And dark matter, up to 90 percent of the mass of the cosmos,
remains an unsolved question. >
(Granted, that was before the latest suggestions that fractal ripples in
the earliest cosmos became the framework for all that later crystallized.)
I added:
< Re-writing the cosmic laws
Polish polymath Stanislaw Lem once made a similar suggestion. Then why
don't we find all those archaic galactic civilizations?
"...because they are already everywhere... A billion-year-old civilization
employs [no instrumental technologies]. Its tools are what we call the Laws
of Nature. The present Universe no longer is the field of play of forces
chemical, pristine, blindly giving birth to and destroying suns and their
systems... In the Universe it is no longer possible to distinguish what is
`natural' (original) from what is `artificial' (transformed)."
The primordial cosmos might have possessed different laws in different
regions (a notion common to current claims by cosmologists Fred Hoyle and
Andrei Linde). If so, only in certain remote patches might life arise.
Attempting to stabilize its environment, each early Spiked culture would
jiggle the local laws of physics to its taste, until in their hungry
expansion for living space they begin to encroach upon each other's
territories.
Vast wars would follow: `The fronts of their clashes made gigantic
eruptions and fires, for prodigious amounts of energy were released by
annihilation and transformations of various kinds... collisions so powerful
that their echo reverberates to this day'--in the form of the 2.7 degree
Kelvin background radiation, mistakenly assumed to be a residue of the Big
Bang. It is a charming cosmogony--an explanation for the birth and shape of
the observed universe--and it fits all too neatly with the colossal
intergalactic filaments and voids first detected years after Lem published
his jape...
This universe of Lem's, torn asunder in conflict over its very
architecture by titanic Exes and Powers, is saved from utter ruin by the
laws of game-theory, which ensure that the former combatants must
henceforth remain in strict isolation from each other. The chosen laws of
physics that prevail, as a result, are just those restrictive rules we
chafe under today: a limited speed of light chosen to slow conflicts, an
expanding spacetime (good fences make good neighbors, don't you know). We
live upon a scratchy board abandoned by the Gamers. The Universe observed
and theorized by science is no more than "a field of multibillion-year
labors, stratified one on the other over the eons, tending to goals of
which the closest and most minute fragments are fragmentarily perceptible
to us." >
But rather than a denuded skyscape of blighted Paschendales, I prefer the
former option: maximally efficient dark realms of life expanding into the
as-yet-unreformed light...
Damien Broderick
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