6 ms·

We do. If you bothered to read the article, it makes a point that the communication speed between the components would be slow enough (even at light speed signa

We do. If you bothered to read the article, it makes a point that the communication speed between the components would be slow enough (even at light speed signaling) that the age of the universe would not have permitted sufficient time for such an organism to evolve and do anything.

paradite 9y ago
Well, maybe the age of universe is indeed "too short" for it to do anything useful yet? Your argument seems to be supporting the idea that the universe is like a baby who is still too young to do anything.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  Or that it might not be useful to conceptualize the entire universe as a single biological organism.
- banachtarski 9y ago
  I mean, before humans, there were eukaryotes, and prokaryotes before them. My argument is not supporting that the universe is a baby. It is saying that the being does not exist because it could not have evolved on this timescale, in the same way that single celled organisms are not human babies.
  - Taek 9y ago
    If we assume that the big bang was actually the conception event of some other cosmic entity, the universe could very easily be a living organism that's the equivalent of a few microsecond old fertilized zygote. So yes, a universe sized lifeform could not have evolved randomly since the big bang, but you can only be confident about that if you assume that nothing exists outside the spacetime bubble we call the universe.
    - jfoutz 9y ago
      or it could be the big bang is the relaxing of a muscle cell is some cosmic monster. Or perhaps the big bang was kinda like enzymes, breaking something hard to eat into a nice easily digestible heat bath. or it could be an edge transition of one wire of some cosmic computer. It's fun to kick around crazy ideas on Saturday afternoon. It could be anything. Sadly, there's no way i'll ever know. But the idle speculation is still amusing.
      - meric 9y ago
        Or, you can write a science fiction short story and make it true in a fictional world you invent.
    - simonh 9y ago
      Suppose an organism is born and lives for 100 years. The organism is 10 metres across. However the rate of propagation of chemicals, blood, nerve signals, etc across its body is only 1mm per year. So over the 100 years if someone touched one of its extremities, the signal for that event would only have propagated across 10% of the diameter of the organism in its lifetime. Does it really make sense to talk about it as being a single organism? How could it do anything in a coordinated way? Or how about an organism that grows at say 10m in diameter per year, but signals across its body only propagate at 1cm per year? Again, how can it be considered to be functioning as a discrete organism? Surely if such a being evolved, its parts would perforce do so independently of each other? There could be no cross-organism coordination. It would have to disintegrate or devolve into local functional or operational units if it were to do anything effective at all.
      - Taek 9y ago
        What if it lived for 500,000 years? You can solve your problem by assuming the organism lives longer. Maybe the universe is an organism that lives 10^100 years. We have no idea. And, as pointed out other places in the thread, by the time we are pondering about organisms of that scale, the very laws of physics (speed of light, spacetime, etc.) may be different. Ae could be in it's stomach, where processes slow down the speed of light by a factor of trillions so that we are easier to digest. None of these are testable hypothesese of course. But one day they may be testable.
- wellboy 9y ago
  Though most stars will have burnt out in a couple of billion years and heat death will come, where no cellular life can exist, so not sure if this is more useduo than now.
bitL 9y ago
Universe is full of particles with quantum entanglement; those can be your "immediate" messengers of information. But anyway, there are way too many assumptions in your objections about the character of such life and its requirements, as well as in the article itself. We still don't know the fabrics of the Universe, just some rough approximations in certain areas with known confidence; there likely are many surprises awaiting us in the future (like discovery of radioactivity etc. in the past).
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  As I understand it, quantum entanglement doesn't allow for affecting causality faster than the speed of light. So that doesn't solve the problem. Your comment doesn't really give accurate credit to the current state of knowledge.
  - bitL 9y ago
    Yeah, it was kinda stupid in this context; I meant to show that some actions are happening "immediately" even across huge distances and not that we need to wait for e.g. gravitational waves to move at the speed of light. Not that we can actually utilize this for conveying information immediately.
    - carapace 9y ago
      I think you're onto something. Yes, quantum entanglement doesn't seem to allow for transmission of information in the conventional sense. However... Take a universe full of particles, many of which are entangled with each other. If you consider the entanglement as primary you can think of the entangled particles as single entities that have "extensions" into space-time that can be widely separated. I don't think it's at all clear that "living" processes cannot be carried out on this "substratum" of interspersed non-local entities. But I'm waaaay over my head here, so I'll stop waving my hands. :-)
  - samstave 9y ago
    What if quantum entanglement is simple an indicator that there is another way to send information - but we haven't discovered that function of that mechanism to do so yet?
benaadams 9y ago
> Given that our brains are composed of neurons, which are themselves, in essence, specialized cooperative single-cell organisms Don't humans to a degree fulfill this role; the mass behavior of the species (recently) acting as form of brain with emerging self-awareness of the galaxy/universe; since we study it, and are also part of it?
- tomrod 9y ago
  I argue against this idea. Part of our sapience is that our neurons can coherently aggregate into specific thoughts leading to choices (and actions performed on those choices). What would the nature of supersapience be? Just sapience, so a single human brain is a holon. Behavior can be influenced by others, but will isn't superceded by a crowd.
  - benaadams 9y ago
    > Behavior can be influenced by others, but will isn't superceded by a crowd. It often is by governments though. Also judging by polling on small sample sets, which often match whole population elections they do coherently aggregate; and then those governments make laws which incarcerate or penalize going against them. Also isn't that the nature of science to provide coherent aggregation of knowledge that is agreed upon (though testable hypothesizes). Which is generally different from government policy, which usually doesn't use evidence based decision making in the scientific sense.
olegkikin 9y ago
You're presuming the speed of light is the hard limit. Whereas we know for a fact faster movement is possible - the space-time itself was expanding faster.
- Cozumel 9y ago
  ^This. The universe expanded faster than light, that's why we still can't see everything, so saying things like 'the communication speed is too slow to permit evolution' is just wrong, it also doesn't take into account things like time doesn't actually exist, it's just a biological construct. The whole article is predicated upon a bunch of faulty assumptions, it's like it was written by a simple minded child.
- andars 9y ago
  You have some misunderstandings about the expansion of the universe. I would recommend reading http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/10/13/the-universe-never-expands-faster-than-the-speed-of-light/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/10/13/the-univ...
  - jerf 9y ago
    In addition to that, positing a 'life form' that exists in the presence of space continuously and literally pulling it apart doesn't seem likely to be a net positive for our galaxy-sized life form.
  - olegkikin 9y ago
    No, it's you who gets incorrect information from some random blogs. The size of the observable universe: ~93 billion light-years Time since the big bang: ~13.7 billion years. http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/104-the-universe/cosmology-and-the-big-bang/expansion-of-the-universe/616-is-the-universe-expanding-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-intermediate http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/104-the-universe/c... https://phys.org/news/2015-02-fast-universe.html https://phys.org/news/2015-02-fast-universe.html
    - 9y ago
philovivero 9y ago
I bothered to read the article, and I don't buy that premise at all. It seems to indicate that for a thought to happen, a signal must traverse the entire length (width?) of your brain. That isn't how it works at all. Many thoughts are localised in the brain. Further, some signals don't need to get to the brain at all. And some functions of life don't even need signals to ever leave the localised region at all. If you are cut, your blood cells spill out, clot, and prevent further bleeding from happening, all without anything outside of the immediate vicinity of the cut to be notified (although it's good to let other parts of the body nearby, say another finger, from exacerbating the wound). If the organism were larger than say a planet, then why would not the brain become distributed, with the parts needed to deal with one quadrant of the planet located at that part of it? Basically, this article is lazy. It makes a couple of very dubious assumptions, then runs full-forward on those assumptions, never stopping to think if those assumptions even make sense. Yes, if we are to try to imagine a life form that looks exactly like a human (or other life-form that we find on Earth), but is the size of the galaxy, we start to laugh, because that couldn't work. But that thought experiment is pretty silly.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
We don't. How do we know that the big bang wasn't part of the internal activity of another organism? There are just some things we will never know.
dang 9y ago
> If you bothered to read the article This particular nasty swipe is not only not ok on HN, there's a specific rule against it. Please (re)-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

paradite 9y ago

Well, maybe the age of universe is indeed "too short" for it to do anything useful yet? Your argument seems to be supporting the idea that the universe is like a baby who is still too young to do anything.

dwaltrip 9y ago
Or that it might not be useful to conceptualize the entire universe as a single biological organism.
banachtarski 9y ago
I mean, before humans, there were eukaryotes, and prokaryotes before them. My argument is not supporting that the universe is a baby. It is saying that the being does not exist because it could not have evolved on this timescale, in the same way that single celled organisms are not human babies.
- Taek 9y ago
  If we assume that the big bang was actually the conception event of some other cosmic entity, the universe could very easily be a living organism that's the equivalent of a few microsecond old fertilized zygote. So yes, a universe sized lifeform could not have evolved randomly since the big bang, but you can only be confident about that if you assume that nothing exists outside the spacetime bubble we call the universe.
  - jfoutz 9y ago
    or it could be the big bang is the relaxing of a muscle cell is some cosmic monster. Or perhaps the big bang was kinda like enzymes, breaking something hard to eat into a nice easily digestible heat bath. or it could be an edge transition of one wire of some cosmic computer. It's fun to kick around crazy ideas on Saturday afternoon. It could be anything. Sadly, there's no way i'll ever know. But the idle speculation is still amusing.
    - meric 9y ago
      Or, you can write a science fiction short story and make it true in a fictional world you invent.
  - simonh 9y ago
    Suppose an organism is born and lives for 100 years. The organism is 10 metres across. However the rate of propagation of chemicals, blood, nerve signals, etc across its body is only 1mm per year. So over the 100 years if someone touched one of its extremities, the signal for that event would only have propagated across 10% of the diameter of the organism in its lifetime. Does it really make sense to talk about it as being a single organism? How could it do anything in a coordinated way? Or how about an organism that grows at say 10m in diameter per year, but signals across its body only propagate at 1cm per year? Again, how can it be considered to be functioning as a discrete organism? Surely if such a being evolved, its parts would perforce do so independently of each other? There could be no cross-organism coordination. It would have to disintegrate or devolve into local functional or operational units if it were to do anything effective at all.
    - Taek 9y ago
      What if it lived for 500,000 years? You can solve your problem by assuming the organism lives longer. Maybe the universe is an organism that lives 10^100 years. We have no idea. And, as pointed out other places in the thread, by the time we are pondering about organisms of that scale, the very laws of physics (speed of light, spacetime, etc.) may be different. Ae could be in it's stomach, where processes slow down the speed of light by a factor of trillions so that we are easier to digest. None of these are testable hypothesese of course. But one day they may be testable.
wellboy 9y ago
Though most stars will have burnt out in a couple of billion years and heat death will come, where no cellular life can exist, so not sure if this is more useduo than now.

bitL 9y ago

Universe is full of particles with quantum entanglement; those can be your "immediate" messengers of information. But anyway, there are way too many assumptions in your objections about the character of such life and its requirements, as well as in the article itself. We still don't know the fabrics of the Universe, just some rough approximations in certain areas with known confidence; there likely are many surprises awaiting us in the future (like discovery of radioactivity etc. in the past).

dwaltrip 9y ago
As I understand it, quantum entanglement doesn't allow for affecting causality faster than the speed of light. So that doesn't solve the problem. Your comment doesn't really give accurate credit to the current state of knowledge.
- bitL 9y ago
  Yeah, it was kinda stupid in this context; I meant to show that some actions are happening "immediately" even across huge distances and not that we need to wait for e.g. gravitational waves to move at the speed of light. Not that we can actually utilize this for conveying information immediately.
  - carapace 9y ago
    I think you're onto something. Yes, quantum entanglement doesn't seem to allow for transmission of information in the conventional sense. However... Take a universe full of particles, many of which are entangled with each other. If you consider the entanglement as primary you can think of the entangled particles as single entities that have "extensions" into space-time that can be widely separated. I don't think it's at all clear that "living" processes cannot be carried out on this "substratum" of interspersed non-local entities. But I'm waaaay over my head here, so I'll stop waving my hands. :-)
- samstave 9y ago
  What if quantum entanglement is simple an indicator that there is another way to send information - but we haven't discovered that function of that mechanism to do so yet?

benaadams 9y ago

> Given that our brains are composed of neurons, which are themselves, in essence, specialized cooperative single-cell organisms Don't humans to a degree fulfill this role; the mass behavior of the species (recently) acting as form of brain with emerging self-awareness of the galaxy/universe; since we study it, and are also part of it?

tomrod 9y ago
I argue against this idea. Part of our sapience is that our neurons can coherently aggregate into specific thoughts leading to choices (and actions performed on those choices). What would the nature of supersapience be? Just sapience, so a single human brain is a holon. Behavior can be influenced by others, but will isn't superceded by a crowd.
- benaadams 9y ago
  > Behavior can be influenced by others, but will isn't superceded by a crowd. It often is by governments though. Also judging by polling on small sample sets, which often match whole population elections they do coherently aggregate; and then those governments make laws which incarcerate or penalize going against them. Also isn't that the nature of science to provide coherent aggregation of knowledge that is agreed upon (though testable hypothesizes). Which is generally different from government policy, which usually doesn't use evidence based decision making in the scientific sense.

olegkikin 9y ago

You're presuming the speed of light is the hard limit. Whereas we know for a fact faster movement is possible - the space-time itself was expanding faster.

Cozumel 9y ago
^This. The universe expanded faster than light, that's why we still can't see everything, so saying things like 'the communication speed is too slow to permit evolution' is just wrong, it also doesn't take into account things like time doesn't actually exist, it's just a biological construct. The whole article is predicated upon a bunch of faulty assumptions, it's like it was written by a simple minded child.
andars 9y ago
You have some misunderstandings about the expansion of the universe. I would recommend reading http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/10/13/the-universe-never-expands-faster-than-the-speed-of-light/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/10/13/the-univ...
- jerf 9y ago
  In addition to that, positing a 'life form' that exists in the presence of space continuously and literally pulling it apart doesn't seem likely to be a net positive for our galaxy-sized life form.
- olegkikin 9y ago
  No, it's you who gets incorrect information from some random blogs. The size of the observable universe: ~93 billion light-years Time since the big bang: ~13.7 billion years. http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/104-the-universe/cosmology-and-the-big-bang/expansion-of-the-universe/616-is-the-universe-expanding-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-intermediate http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/104-the-universe/c... https://phys.org/news/2015-02-fast-universe.html https://phys.org/news/2015-02-fast-universe.html
  - 9y ago

philovivero 9y ago

I bothered to read the article, and I don't buy that premise at all. It seems to indicate that for a thought to happen, a signal must traverse the entire length (width?) of your brain. That isn't how it works at all. Many thoughts are localised in the brain. Further, some signals don't need to get to the brain at all. And some functions of life don't even need signals to ever leave the localised region at all. If you are cut, your blood cells spill out, clot, and prevent further bleeding from happening, all without anything outside of the immediate vicinity of the cut to be notified (although it's good to let other parts of the body nearby, say another finger, from exacerbating the wound). If the organism were larger than say a planet, then why would not the brain become distributed, with the parts needed to deal with one quadrant of the planet located at that part of it? Basically, this article is lazy. It makes a couple of very dubious assumptions, then runs full-forward on those assumptions, never stopping to think if those assumptions even make sense. Yes, if we are to try to imagine a life form that looks exactly like a human (or other life-form that we find on Earth), but is the size of the galaxy, we start to laugh, because that couldn't work. But that thought experiment is pretty silly.

ZenoArrow 9y ago

We don't. How do we know that the big bang wasn't part of the internal activity of another organism? There are just some things we will never know.

dang 9y ago

> If you bothered to read the article This particular nasty swipe is not only not ok on HN, there's a specific rule against it. Please (re)-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.