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garoteHumans are too brief and fragile to travel the depths of space in person. We can send machines, but it's still agonizingly slow at sub-light speeds.
We can try to reach intelligent aliens with radio waves or lasers or similar, but the dialogue would still be too slow.
There must be a better way to exchange information. We can assume it's already been invented by other intelligence that evolved before us, so when we do discover this communication channel, we can assume it's stuffed with information. Perhaps so much that it looks like noise to us.
Whatever it is, it must somehow be able to transcend light speed if it's going to happen in a timely way. I mean, we could just assume humans are permanently too brief and give up, and accept that the dialogue of the universe is too slow for us to hear, but that would suck.
So we start looking at the chaos in random movements of particles at the extremely microscopic level. It's so full of noise... Perhaps that noise is communication that can be decrypted?
That doesn’t work. So instead, we make an assumption about the fundamental nature of aliens. We hypothesize that the creatures we might communicate with live on some different plane of existence. For example, in fifth or sixth dimensional space. All their dialogue is happening on some kind of side channel that isn't subject to the vast separations of distance in the universe we observe.
Perhaps these aliens observe our four-dimensional environment as we might observe the workings of an ant colony with a window installed in it: We can watch all the ants at once, and exert our influence by moving material or even ants from one area to another, or tinkering with the glass to install shortcuts or bridges.
In film, this was most recently explored in the movie Interstellar. Humanity is apparently shown how to manipulate space by being given information due to the interference of beings with power outside the constraints of our four dimensional world. They poked holes in space and sent signals from the future to the past, allowing us to collect vital information to build universe-altering technology.
A less ambitious movie from a few years previous, called “Knowing”, used a variation on this theme where aliens provided humans with a mysterious message that turned out to contain predictions about the future, which the aliens could only obtain by having some kind of extra dimensional existence, and used it to compel the humans to act in a way where samples of them (along with samples of other living creatures) could be collected and taken off the planet - rescuing them - before a massive solar flare burned it clean.
They messed with history just enough to preserve bits of us at the end, perhaps out of some kind of curiosity.
But what if the aliens communicated through some means that was simultaneously more indirect, but also more powerful? And what if the aliens were not communicating with us at all, but rather communicating with each other, and we just happened to learn how to eavesdrop on their conversation?
Let's get bigger: What if our planet, or our galaxy, or our entire universe, was actually being used by an extra dimensional intelligence to store a message, while it was being delivered somewhere else?
Like a splash of watercolor on a paper eventually drying into a shape that we can interpret, what if our entire universe is merely a drop of explosive matter, very carefully deployed so that it eventually dries into the permanent form of a message, after all this crazy gravitational business settles down at the heat death of the universe billions of years from now?
What if the whole point of everything we see around us, is to eventually arrive at this dead image, and after the message is interpreted by the recipient, this entire document - our entire universe - will be crumpled up and recycled?
We wouldn't stand the tiniest chance of understanding what the message is about. We wouldn't even stand a chance of seeing all but a tiny fraction of the message as it's being written, since light only travels so fast.
But in the meantime, if humans escaped the confines of the solar system and began to terraform and rearrange the stars in the galaxy ... followed by other galaxies ... would the aliens observe this, and interpret us as some kind of defect in the medium? Mold on the paper? A rare but annoying quality control problem?
At best we would be examined by alien engineers in order to better understand why their messaging system is corrupting data.
Assuming they care enough to even try communicating with creatures so inconsequential, wouldn’t they actually find it easier to rearrange entire chunks of our history, rather than bother engaging with any of us in actual language? Of course, even that would be too subtle for them to bother. Our own human history? Our own documents? Why would they care?
Whatever they do to us, it probably couldn't even be seen as language. You may as well try to communicate with a single molecule of ink using your pen. What could you even do but write? What could a molecule of ink do, that comes close to "understanding"?
This leads to some interesting plot twists:
1. Intelligent life used to be rampant in the universe, but the aliens applied a bunch of error correction. We're only here because of all the weird exceptions: Goldilocks zone, moon, gas giants, stable galaxy, etc. If we don't stay quiet we might get error-corrected out.
(A variation on this with in-universe aliens was recently explored in The Three Body Problem.)
2. With the right technology we can leap out of our own universe and into another, because the documents are stacked on a metaphorical desk.
3. Careful examination from nearby worlds reveals horrible astrophysical inconsistencies. This document has been used at least once already, and not completely "erased".
4. We start exploring, and find that the laws of physics bend completely out of shape just beyond our local galaxies. The light that's reaching us, showing other galaxies, is a remnant from when the document was whole. It's since been ... torn up. We're in the midst of being recycled.
5. Lots of fancypants computing and off-the-wall thinking allows us to interpret some of the message as it will eventually read when the ink is "dry" (when the universe is dead). We project it into 2d space and it turns out to be a picture of Douglas Adams.
We can try to reach intelligent aliens with radio waves or lasers or similar, but the dialogue would still be too slow.There must be a better way to exchange information. We can assume it's already been invented by other intelligence that evolved before us, so when we do discover this communication channel, we can assume it's stuffed with information. Perhaps so much that it looks like noise to us.
Whatever it is, it must somehow be able to transcend light speed if it's going to happen in a timely way. I mean, we could just assume humans are permanently too brief and give up, and accept that the dialogue of the universe is too slow for us to hear, but that would suck.
So we start looking at the chaos in random movements of particles at the extremely microscopic level. It's so full of noise... Perhaps that noise is communication that can be decrypted?
That doesn’t work. So instead, we make an assumption about the fundamental nature of aliens. We hypothesize that the creatures we might communicate with live on some different plane of existence. For example, in fifth or sixth dimensional space. All their dialogue is happening on some kind of side channel that isn't subject to the vast separations of distance in the universe we observe.
Perhaps these aliens observe our four-dimensional environment as we might observe the workings of an ant colony with a window installed in it: We can watch all the ants at once, and exert our influence by moving material or even ants from one area to another, or tinkering with the glass to install shortcuts or bridges.
In film, this was most recently explored in the movie Interstellar. Humanity is apparently shown how to manipulate space by being given information due to the interference of beings with power outside the constraints of our four dimensional world. They poked holes in space and sent signals from the future to the past, allowing us to collect vital information to build universe-altering technology.
A less ambitious movie from a few years previous, called “Knowing”, used a variation on this theme where aliens provided humans with a mysterious message that turned out to contain predictions about the future, which the aliens could only obtain by having some kind of extra dimensional existence, and used it to compel the humans to act in a way where samples of them (along with samples of other living creatures) could be collected and taken off the planet - rescuing them - before a massive solar flare burned it clean.
They messed with history just enough to preserve bits of us at the end, perhaps out of some kind of curiosity.
But what if the aliens communicated through some means that was simultaneously more indirect, but also more powerful? And what if the aliens were not communicating with us at all, but rather communicating with each other, and we just happened to learn how to eavesdrop on their conversation?
Let's get bigger: What if our planet, or our galaxy, or our entire universe, was actually being used by an extra dimensional intelligence to store a message, while it was being delivered somewhere else?
Like a splash of watercolor on a paper eventually drying into a shape that we can interpret, what if our entire universe is merely a drop of explosive matter, very carefully deployed so that it eventually dries into the permanent form of a message, after all this crazy gravitational business settles down at the heat death of the universe billions of years from now?
What if the whole point of everything we see around us, is to eventually arrive at this dead image, and after the message is interpreted by the recipient, this entire document - our entire universe - will be crumpled up and recycled?
We wouldn't stand the tiniest chance of understanding what the message is about. We wouldn't even stand a chance of seeing all but a tiny fraction of the message as it's being written, since light only travels so fast.
But in the meantime, if humans escaped the confines of the solar system and began to terraform and rearrange the stars in the galaxy ... followed by other galaxies ... would the aliens observe this, and interpret us as some kind of defect in the medium? Mold on the paper? A rare but annoying quality control problem?At best we would be examined by alien engineers in order to better understand why their messaging system is corrupting data.
Assuming they care enough to even try communicating with creatures so inconsequential, wouldn’t they actually find it easier to rearrange entire chunks of our history, rather than bother engaging with any of us in actual language? Of course, even that would be too subtle for them to bother. Our own human history? Our own documents? Why would they care?
Whatever they do to us, it probably couldn't even be seen as language. You may as well try to communicate with a single molecule of ink using your pen. What could you even do but write? What could a molecule of ink do, that comes close to "understanding"?
This leads to some interesting plot twists:
1. Intelligent life used to be rampant in the universe, but the aliens applied a bunch of error correction. We're only here because of all the weird exceptions: Goldilocks zone, moon, gas giants, stable galaxy, etc. If we don't stay quiet we might get error-corrected out.
(A variation on this with in-universe aliens was recently explored in The Three Body Problem.)
2. With the right technology we can leap out of our own universe and into another, because the documents are stacked on a metaphorical desk.
3. Careful examination from nearby worlds reveals horrible astrophysical inconsistencies. This document has been used at least once already, and not completely "erased".
4. We start exploring, and find that the laws of physics bend completely out of shape just beyond our local galaxies. The light that's reaching us, showing other galaxies, is a remnant from when the document was whole. It's since been ... torn up. We're in the midst of being recycled.
5. Lots of fancypants computing and off-the-wall thinking allows us to interpret some of the message as it will eventually read when the ink is "dry" (when the universe is dead). We project it into 2d space and it turns out to be a picture of Douglas Adams.
