[extropy-chat] FWD (UFO UpDate) Re: Limboids

Hal Finney hal at finney.org
Tue Nov 2 21:48:32 UTC 2004


Another idea along these lines is the suggestion that earlier eras of
our universe could have had life of a form which could not exist today.
In the post-Big-Bang time frame the universe went through a number of
transitions even before stars began to form.  Of course, by our standards
that time was incredibly hot, and chaotic, and violent, and it's hard to
see how any stable structures could form.  But "stable" is a relative
term and even a very short-lived structure might be considered stable
by the standards of the era.

Similarly in the far future, when matter has decayed and all that is left
are black holes, photons and the occasional electron and positron, maybe
it is conceivable that life could exist, incredibly huge and incredibly
slow, based on extremely large scale patterns and interactions built of
these elements.

The idea of super-fast microscopic life has been explored in a couple
of science fiction stories I have read.  One is Dragon's Egg by Robert
Forward, where condensed-matter beings evolve on the surface of a
neutron star.  They develop a civilization and even visit Earth but are
not detected there.  They eventually have a kind of Singularity that
takes them out of the picture.

Another is Greg Bear's Blood Music, where genetic engineering creates
intelligent cells.  They begin to explore the world and take over Earth
in a matter of days, before going through a Singularity and vanishing.

When you think of how human life has transformed the world in the blink
of an eye by geological time standards, it's kind of scary to think of
another form of life springing up that is comparably faster than we are.
No doubt it's quite unlikely to happen just at this moment, though.

Hal



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