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Interesting thought experiment, but untestable with current tech. I’ve wondered if dark matter/dark energy couldn’t be organized into life. There’s 80% of mas
by shireboy 4y ago
Interesting thought experiment, but untestable with current tech. I’ve wondered if dark matter/dark energy couldn’t be organized into life. There’s 80% of mass we know next to nothing about. Any reason that can’t be organized into dark matter planets with dark matter people running around?
Interesting thought experiment but my 2c is physics limits space travel such that it can never be what we see in sci-fi. Any civilizations elsewhere - phosphorus based or otherwise- have just as hard a time getting off their rock as we do, if not harder (larger gravity wells). If they do, they have an even harder time getting off their star. Certainly getting beyond their galaxy is physically impossible. Makes lousy sci-fi but fits observations.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Loughla 4y agoMy thoughts are that if we can measure [Thing A] sufficiently precisely, we can figure out a way to impact/harness [Thing A], regardless of what it actually is. Therefore, it's just a matter of developing appropriately advanced technology to be able to impact the base laws of physics. I think it's harder to get to that point than anyone could ever imagine just because of the natural tendency for species to destroy themselves. I think that Ringworld had that part right - any species that is sufficiently advanced to be interstellar travelers would absolutely have to be able to identify, and nullify, naturally selected traits about themselves.
- Sakos 4y agoThe core issue is that we have no idea how consciousness sparks into being. Everything we know indicates that you need something brain-like, which requires a particular set of environmental stimuli and developmental history to form. Maybe there's another way to create consciousness, but we'll probably never find out.
- CuriouslyC 4y agoThere's no evidence that consciousness "sparks into being" at all. Self awareness probably needs something brain-like, but that's a different matter.
- Sakos 4y agoI just mean consciousness as opposed to no consciousness. We don't know what causes it or where it comes from.
- trinsic2 4y agoYeah that's an interesting idea. If we were destined to get off our planets and stars systems why are there such strong gravity wells hampering our ability to do so?
- tuatoru 4y agoNobody destined anybody. There's just the universe, no sky father.
- wcoenen 4y ago> Any reason that can’t be organized into dark matter planets with dark matter people running around? Yes, there is a reason why this can't happen. Dark matter doesn't clump.
- snowwrestler 4y agoDark matter does not seem to interact electromagnetically, so that rules out all of chemistry.
- shireboy 4y agoRules out chemistry that interacts with regular matter, but is it ruled out that there are forces that govern dark matter internally? Dark electromagnetism? Or can we tell from interaction with gravity that dark matter doesn't interact with itself in any way?
- aflag 4y agoWe are not even sure it exists, so anything is possible. All we know is there something we can’t see or detect in any way, except that it affects on how fast the galaxies spin. But it could be that our models are just wrong.
- TechBro8615 4y agoIs dark matter some tangible "stuff," or is it more of an artifact of gaps in our observation? Why do physicists, when confronted with the lack of observational evidence for the "dark matter" that their models predict, assume that "dark matter must exist?" Couldn't the model be wrong? At what point does the unproven prediction of dark matter call into question the many otherwise proven predictions of the Standard Model? How much of the experimental evidence supporting those predictions has an implicit dependency on the same invalid assumptions leading to the prediction of dark matter? I remember reading an HN comment that described the Standard Model as a sort of legacy codebase with technical debt and strange abstractions to fix earlier errors. That resonates with me, and in fact seems applicable to the entirety of the human epistemological "tech tree." I sometimes wonder, what secrets might we uncover if we could start fresh, speed running different paths through the tech tree?
- shireboy 4y agoMy (completely unqualified, armchair level) understanding is that most think dark matter is actually real substance that interacts with gravity but not any other force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evid... "Tangible" might be the wrong word since our regular-matter senses and sensors could not "touch" it. Theories do exist that our model of gravity is just wrong at large scales. This falls under Modified Newtonian Dynamics, but has problems that don't match observation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics#Outstanding_problems_for_MOND https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics#Ou...