5 ms·

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

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.

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.