From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jan 03 1999 - 04:57:08 MST
At 10:16 PM 1/1/99 +0100, Christophe wrote:
>Perhaps we could tell the story of such beings... their friends, the friends
>of their friends, their enemies, the enemies of their enemies, their
>artifacts, their worlds, their thoughts. The great pursuits through universes
>between races at war in a meta-universe. Is the SF writer of such a
>tremendously difficult story to tell already born ;)? (i mean a good story, a
>quite complete description of such a fun and abstract world in a +150 pages
>format ;).
I'm working on it... :)
As Anders noted, this line of thought is explored briefly in THE SPIKE.
It's also implicit or explicit in various sf novels, such as Pratchett's
STRATA, Stapledon's STAR MAKER, and some of the books by McAuley, Steve
Baxter, and perhaps the latest volume of Brin's Uplift sequence (which I
haven't read). Here's a few bites from THE SPIKE (apologies to those
who've seen bits of this posted a year or two back):
========
If the prospect of the post-Spike condition sketched in this book is
correct - awesome, truly godlike powers wielded by Powers - then in another
billion years our descendants will surely have plaited the stars into
braids of their own design, if they wish to.79 Tipler and Barrow, as we've
seen, argue that an AI deity might, even must, emerge in the final
nanoseconds of the Big Crunch after its predecessors have redesigned the
dying cosmos. By reverse engineering, can we gaze outward now and see that
the stars already bear the marks of cosmic engineering?
The Very Fast Evolution Machine
Here's an even more startling conjecture. Tipler's Omega Point deity,
plunging into the forever of infinite compression, has an effectively
infinite number of discrete clock ticks within which a `god' may Do All
Things. But similar conditions existed during the initial 10^-43 of a
second when time and space were smeared together, or so Stephen Hawking
assures us. Might life of some quite different ilk have crystallised in
the strange, terrible epochs before our kind of matter settled out in the
inflation rush of the expanding cosmos?80
In the earliest zillionths of the Big Bang eruption, time was effectively
multiplied to infinite speed, but it slowed fast as spacetime expanded and
cooled. Inconceivably vast numbers of exchanges occurred almost instantly
in a densely compacted and connected spacetime where the four known forces
of physics only `slowly' decoupled from a unitary force now lost forever,
or at least until the Big Crunch at the end of the universe. Might not
there have been virtual time enough, effectively, for a superintelligence
to evolve from scratch? Even a whole bunch of them, but perhaps they would
inevitably remain merged in a swarm-mind until the cosmos was big enough
for light-transmission delays to disrupt module communication...
It is a suggestion that eerily resembles the teachings of the ancient
Gnostics, in a way. The Gnostics held that our world is not the creation
of an original supreme deity, but is the rather botched handiwork of a less
god, a demiurge. Imagine not one but many angelic demiurges, the
first-evolved minds in our cooling universe, tumbling from the furnace of
the Big Bang, cast out into the freezing dark. Perhaps placing their
impress upon the new regimes of matter and light. Yes, now there is a
god...
But, if so, that was then. What of today? Would such `angels' still have
any impact on the universe?81 Would their works persist in the fabric of
spacetime? The galaxies extend into space in colossal strings made of
billions of stars wrapped about dark bubbled gaps, an arrangement that
deeply puzzles cosmologists. Might this strange architecture be the
remnant of some ancient design of the earliest life born of the Big Bang?
More to the point, is the evolution of such `angels'remotely possible in
the light of current physics?
Could any kind of high-level structure emerge under such appallingly
volatile conditions, however many virtual steps or epochs it contains?
It's one thing for life to persist into the Big Crunch, as Tipler proposes,
using `shear energy' (the gravitational ebbs and flows of shockingly
twisted spacetime). Presumably it's quite another for complex `life' to
bootstrap into existence from nothing under the same conditions. Or is it?
Mitchell Porter agrees that the main barrier to Big Bang superintelligences
is the absence of structure in the fantastically hot primordial plasma.
`But conceivably,' he notes, `there may have been epochs of structure in
the course of the many phase transitions which are part of modern
cosmological models of the early universe, and perhaps things were evolving
rapidly enough for replicators to evolve.' That catches it exactly. The
contrast has been pointed up by Charles Stross, a British writer and
software specialist: in Tipler's scenario the pre-Omega entity deliberately
sets up oscillations in the collapsing universe, extracting usable energy.
But did the Big Bang have equivalent energy gradients, available to drive
such computational processes?
The cosmos shortly after the Bang was a homogeneous soup of radiation
looking the same in all directions, Stross notes. On the other hand, the
Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE) detected ripples in the
background radiation that suffused the universe. These are the enduring
traces of lumpiness left in the pervasive radiation residue from the Big
Bang. Recent data from the COBE satellite suggests that they are, indeed,
fractal in nature, ripples within wrinkles - perhaps enough to provide the
gradients necessary to jump-start a primordial replicator.
The earliest ages of the universe
The opening fractions of a second in this universe contained ample variety.
`GUT Age, Quark Age, Hadron Age, Nucleosynthetic Age, Plasma Age,
Fireball...' Jonathan Burns, a La Trobe University computer scientist,
suggests with a certain whimsy that, given these phases, `the blindest
watchmaker would have had opportunity enough.' He adds:
What are the odds for an intelligent ontology? On Darwinian grounds one
seems to need:
(1) A substrate stable enough for some Selfish Form to persist and
multiply in competitive variation.
(2) A phenomenon which can be coded, and decoded, into a genotype which
replicates the code.
(3) Time for enough iterations that the code space can be explored by the
population, long enough to find the breakthrough points to higher
organization.
(4) Time enough for the higher organization to explore its environment,
and exploit the opportunities for technological enhancement.
(5) A radically uncertain measure of good luck.
And Burns took up the idea of ancient demiurges with a poetic burst of his
own: `The Benefactors... skating the contours of zero tidal force... their
wingtips deep in blazing quicksand...'
Could such a selfish code-string persist though the fires of the Big Bang,
and in the cooling cosmos left as its ashes? For a selfish signal to
survive in a sea of noise, it has to perform its own noise reduction.
Emergent exotica might stabilise briefly vortices, frequency bands, phase
boundaries to form a first substrate. Efficient signal self replication
would use digital encoding, the simplest possible but sufficiently rich to
do the job. After all, we know that populations of data structures inside
computers can already evolve, exploring combinational spaces efficiently,
turning combinational complexity to advantage.
Is this kind of digital evolution plausible for the primordial universe?
`The bulk properties of Grand Unified Theory plasmas are speculative, to
say the least,' Burns notes. `Electromagnetic plasmas, yes, there are
stable structures, Alfven waves, in the right conditions. And in cold bulk
matter, we get quantized magnetic flux tubes, and liquid-helium quantized
vortices.'
Physics has only vague ideas of how quark-gluon plasmas might behave. `One
place to look for a clawhold might be at the point where the quark-gluon
plasma is breaking into clusters. In the "big bag" of the plasma, one gets
incursions of vacuum, which acts as a superconductor for colour charge.
For a sufficient epoch, just maybe the plasma is riddled with quantized
chromodynamic flux tubes in bunches. Asymmetry. Structure. Bistability.
Gates and switches. Chemistry. New tubes being generated all the time,
those which don't match our patterns discarded, the rest assembled into new
entities.'
Similarly with a conjectural breakup of the GUT plasma, or the
compactification of the hidden dimensions. Emergent novelties, as Nobel
laureate Ilya Prigogine argues, are often found at phase boundaries where
energy is being exported into the environment. But still we wouldn't
expect to find an infinite number of successive phase changes from the Bang
to very shortly afterward, the literally uncountable sort required for a
Tipler scenario. At the smallest scale we can image the universe existing
at the start of time, quantum theory tells us we would find
everything-at-once, space and time smeared together and confused. If you
can't count the ticks between one interval and the next, or determine one
place from another, it is impossible to create the structure needed for an
intelligence.
An infinite number of steps might not be required. After all, life has
evolved and flourished on Earth in less than four billion years - which is
quite a lot of separate clock ticks, but not a good deal fewer than
infinity. The ancient minds might have evolved and left their mark.
Traces of primordial engineering?
What legacy might such demiurges leave for us to find? It could range from
the very large, such as cosmological gravitational waves, or the very
small, such as strange matter in pulsars. `If the angels broke through to
the mid range, they could build just about any material structure,' Burns
comments. 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.
`If I were an angel,' Burns remarks wryly, `I'd be inclined to look out
for my own skin. Maybe I could replicate myself on the cooler, rarer
strata of the heat death. But in my epoch, the alternative of forming
exotic black holes and maybe impressing myself on a new universe, if that's
possible, would seem a lot more practical than it does to us atom-age
relics.'
Still more delightfully bizarre is a conjecture based on Tipler's
cosmological deity, advanced by Anders Sandberg:
life evolves towards the Omega Point, but in the vicinity of the final
moment `angels', life based on back-propagating causality (which Tipler's
theory seems to imply) are created and move backwards through time. They
are unobservable in the present, since they are acausal from our
perspective... and probably very thinly spread (possibly `extinct').
Eventually conditions become better and better for them, they spread across
the universe and use the shear energy to create the Alpha Point - which is
isomorphic to the Omega Point and creates `angels' moving forward in time.
Note that if the backwards-moving beings use shear energy from the
`collapse' of the universe they see, this may explain the homogeneity and
isotropy of the universe despite the chaos of the Big Bang - from our
perspective they smoothed the early universe!
In terms of scientific cosmology this entire arabesqued line of thought is
strictly unnecessary, since science does not lack in more modest
explanations for its outstanding conundrums. Still, improbable as it is,
it does bear a piquant resemblance to the issues that might arise when
Powers in a post-Spike history start to reformat their virtual and real
environments.
[...]
Re-writing the cosmic laws
Polish polymath Stanislaw Lem once made a similar suggestion.84 Then why
don't we find all those archaic galactic civilisations?
...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 Hoyle and Linde). If so,
only in certain remote patches might life arise. Attempting to stabilise
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 those restrictive rules we chafe under today: a
limited speed of light, an expanding spacetime (good fences make good
neighbours, don't you know). We live upon a scratchy board abandoned by
the Gamers. The Universe observed and theorised by science is no more than
`a field of multibillion-year labours, stratified one on the other over the
eons, tending to goals of which the closest and most minute fragments are
fragmentarily perceptible to us.'
This delicious logic was not a bid by the distinctly atheistic Stanislaw
Lem to reinstate a religious perspective in his then-communist country -
something that the triumphant revival of Catholicism has done in the
meantime, no doubt to Lem's chagrin. Nor am I seriously suggesting that
this is how our universe really began. But the scenario does sketch out
rather brilliantly just the kind of universe we can expect this one to
become, following the human Spike - and long after its advent, of course,
perhaps millions or even billions of years later.
On the other hand, it's bracing, I suspect, to acknowledge in due humility
that, for all we know, actually there are other Powers in the cosmos, right
now, who have passed through the veil of the Spike. And perhaps they do
move upon us, vast and heedless, as fire moves across the tops of a field
of cropped and stubbled wheat...85
======================
Damien
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Dr Damien Broderick / Fellow, Department of English and Cultural Studies
University of Melbourne, Parkville 3052, AUSTRALIA
@: damien@ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au
Ozlit biography/bibliography listing:
http://dargo.vicnet.net.au/ozlit/writers.cfm?id=74.0
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