[extropy-chat] signals or noise?

[Damien Broderick]

At 09:15 PM 2/17/2005 +0100, Serafino wrote:
>From: "Dan Clemmensen"
>
> > If you are trying to maximize the
> > information rate of you signal
> > in the presence of noise for a particular
> > transmission power, your signal ends up
> > looking like noise.
>
>Good point. Optimal efficiency, for a
>trasmission of informations, via e.m.
>radiation, and with a reasonable and fixed amount
>of power, gives rise to a radiation with a
>spectrum like the 'blackbody' radiation
>spectrum.

This topic was discussed in detail and depth 9 years ago on this list, and 
I mined that discussion in my book THE SPIKE (for newbies, `The Spike' is 
my shorthand term for `Vingean technological singularity'). Here's an extract:

=============

Again and again, our faces are pushed into a kind of cosmic paradox, 
mentioned earlier when we discussed Frank Tipler's vision of humanity's 
role in the cosmos. It's been dubbed the Fermi Paradox: `Where are they?' 
asked the great atomic physicist Enrico Fermi, looking at the silent skies. 
Alien Spiked civilizations might be sensibly close-mouthed, fearful of 
others of their kind from alien stock, or indeed from their stock mutated 
by different histories.

All flesh is grass, saith the prophet, and all grass is food. If you don't 
wish to be eaten by someone else's mouth, you're well advised to keep your 
own buttoned tight. Which doesn't mean that absence of evidence is evidence 
of absence. They might be there, everywhere. They might be here. We just 
don't recognize aliens even when we breath them in and out, or let them 
rush like a sigh through the atoms of which we are composed.

Perhaps the nearest to such a explicit perspective is the `dirt' theory 
suggested ebulliently, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, by Stephen Witham. `Any 
sufficiently advanced communication,' he proposes, with a nod to Arthur C. 
Clarke, `is indistinguishable from noise.' If, to the naked eye and naive 
ear, much of the cosmos seems like sheer random jitter and clang, that 
might be no more than you'd expect of a high-grade encryption program.

Lately there's been a lot of fuss about ciphers and secrecy on the 
Internet. Using a protocol dubbed PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, you can run 
your email or business documents or cash transaction through a preliminary 
filter and turn it into a two-part jumble of letters and numerals that 
can't be unscrambled without your private key. Others can, however, use 
your publicly available PGP key to test whether a message purportedly from 
you actually does have your seal of approval. The neatest form of such 
encryption, much prized by extropians and other net libertarians (such as 
the programmer and lingerie model Romana Machado, otherwise whimsically 
known as Cypherella) is Steganography, which hides your message in the 
background of picture files. The profile or spectrum of a well-encrypted 
message, efficiently compressed, is perfectly `white', indistinguishable 
from sheer hiss or a random scatter of pixels throughout the image you 
transmit.

Witham had a nice idea. What if the universe we see is background-coded 
with the Minds of our betters, entities that long ago Transcended or 
Spiked? This would be a theory of Cryptocosmography, and its Monty 
Pythonesque maxim might be: every grain of dirt is sacred... and perhaps 
watching you. Witham put it this way:


"We don't know we're not looking at `alien' civilizations. We don't know 
that the whole universe isn't colonized. Life evolves to become 
efficiently-encoded information, which looks like sunlight and dirt. I 
think these are the most natural developments to expect. The default 
scenario. I would expect a colonized universe to look exactly like a barren 
one. So what was the Fermi `paradox' again?"158

We should not expect to see a cosmos blazing with crude antimatter battles 
between berserkers--dedicated life-killers whose five-billion year mission 
roaming the void it to seek out strange civilizations and exterminate them. 
No, Witham's fear is `interpenetrating infections, computer viruses in the 
kernel level of physics,' a kind of `applied theology'. If that's feasible, 
it might be that we already inhabit a universe entirely colonized at all 
the interesting levels by post-Spike cultures. That would be the mother of 
all dirty goo catastrophes. Except that it's not, strictly speaking, a 
catastrophe. It's just how things are. `At most, our civilization, life as 
we know it, is the faintest ripple, the merest wisp of a breeze, on what's 
going on right in our laps. We are an insignificant perturbation not yet 
worthy of scratching, information-theory-wise.'

As you might imagine, this rude suggestion elicited baffled or angry 
responses from critics. Science already knows too much for this to be true. 
There's no room in physics for hidden gods lurking in the dirt, or in the 
atoms, or in the folded-up dimensions. Anyway, computer design is well 
understood, and data routing and bit-exchanges don't look one whit like 
noisy dirt. Get out of here!159

Others noted that, well, really we still only know a teeny part of 
everything that's yet to be known. Besides, the point is not that 
computations run to resemble noise are efficient, and therefore detectable, 
but that this masquerade of noisiness might be the only way to stay free of 
a bug-squasher able to stomp your star. (Not necessarily a big problem for 
post-Spike technology, but this is a debate for advanced game-theorists.) 
`I imagine aliens with billion-year patience would have extra slack here,' 
Witham noted, probably with a grin. And if aliens can be expected to comply 
with game theory to this counter-intuitive conclusion, maybe tomorrow's 
post-Singularity Exes and their human pets will do the same. Our immediate 
and recognizable merely human descendants, if there are any who elect to 
refuse the uploading option, might end up living in a paradisal world 
exactly like Pleistocene spring time, eating of all the trees in the garden 
except the Tree of Knowledge...

Re-writing the cosmic laws

Polish polymath Stanislaw Lem once made a similar suggestion.160 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.'

This delicious logic was not a bid by the distinctly atheistic Stanislaw 
Lem to reinstate a religious perspective in his then-communist 
Poland--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 might expect this one to 
become, following the human Spike. If so, has it happened elsewhere already?

A perspective that professional cosmologists fail to acknowledge (I can see 
their faces screwing up already) is that the observable universe, in whole 
or part, might indeed be at least somewhat engineered, but not by any known 
religion's deity. You can see why they'd have little sympathy for that 
conjecture. The Copernican Principle, which has served science well for 
centuries, tells us that the safest default assumption is ordinariness, 
mediocrity. Things just are how they seem. There's no immense neon 
advertisement in the heavens informing us of the presence (or departure) of 
cosmic civilizations.

But hang on. Certainly, we now suspect, there's been plenty of time for 
other life-bearing planets to form, hatch their brood, nurture 
intelligence, seed it into the cosmos at nearly the speed of light (or much 
slower, it makes little difference). That's a logical implication of the 
same Copernican Principle. We humans will probably follow this course 
sometime between the end of the 21st century and a million years hence. So 
why should we be unique in this respect alone?

If that's correct, our own galaxy with its 400 billion suns and at least 10 
billion year history has had many opportunities to bring forth Spikes 
aplenty in the heavens. True, the earliest stars would have been deficient 
in heavy elements, but there have been stars like the Sun for many hundreds 
of millions if not billions of years longer than our own 5 billion year-old 
star. What would galactic colonizers look like when they're at home? Let us 
look carefully not for lurid displays (which are boastful, immature, tacky 
and probably dangerous) but for clever husbanding of resources by one or 
more sublimely competent technological cultures scattering their mind 
children across the sky.

[go to the book for more]

8.58.  Posted to the extropian e-list 15 October 1996, and cited with Mr 
Witham's permission.
9.59.  See, for example, Robin Hanson's reply on the extropian e-list, 15 
October 1996.
0.60.   `The New Cosmogony', in his delightful collection of reviews of 
non-existent books, A Perfect Vacuum, Mandarin, 1991 (originally in English 
in 1979, sublimely translated by Michael Kandel), pp. 197-229.  I am 
grateful to Mitch Porter and John Redford for reminding me of this 
wonderful, funny piece.