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Robert Forward wrote a series of sci-fi novels about life on the surface of a neutron star. The first was called Dragon's Egg [1] and is a decent, if tropey, re

Robert Forward wrote a series of sci-fi novels about life on the surface of a neutron star. The first was called Dragon's Egg [1] and is a decent, if tropey, read. Some of the same issues are addressed in his books, of course making a ton of assumptions about the properties of neutron star matter (we still don't know the equation of state for neutron stars). The idea is very simply that combining abundant energy with something capable of holding structure in such an environment could in theory produce a persistent store of information. A leap, sure, but a fun one. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg

ThemboMcBembo 3y ago
I've actually been reading this over the last two days, and it's a fascinating read.
ghaff 3y ago
There was also a sequel called Starquake which I remember as being less interesting. An ST:TNG episode also very much riffed off of Dragon's Egg.
praptak 3y ago
Stanisław Lem wrote a story about a trio of scientists who recreate Sun's environment in a lab and discover it supports life & evolution which goes zero to sun-worm in the time it takes for the experiment to blow up, implying existence of lifeforms inside the Sun so advanced that they just don't bother to communicate with humans.
Intralexical 3y ago
> The idea is very simply that combining abundant energy with something capable of holding structure in such an environment could in theory produce a persistent store of information. A leap, sure, but a fun one. Hardly? We know that structures on the sun are capable of being (somewhat) persistent, and not only that, but even doing something vaguely resembling computation. Solar magnetic fieldlines are long-lived, producing visible sunspots that not only last for potentially several months, but show variations in frequency over a largely stable 11-year clock/cycle (during which the entire solar magnetic field flips/behaves as a binary oscillator). Magnetohydrodynamics is famously complex and capable of metastable configurations, and we don't know exactly what happens under the photosphere, but I don't think anybody could really argue that there isn't enough physical space and raw energy to swallow up every personal and animal on Earth. Really, for all we know, I think the sun itself might be alive/sentient. Or maybe it contains not physically embodied life, but isolated engrams and memes styled after Boltzmann brains, something analogous to crystal structures (which self-proliferate/grow) but with more complexity. The question is whether there's any way to decode/decrypt the information that definitely is there— complex heterogeneous distributions over time in field strength, temperatures, convection patterns, etc.— into any form that isn't just repetition plus random noise. I guess the issue is that you don't really know why you're conscious. If you had never seen a brain before, you would just think it was a useless blob of chaotically arranged fat. And even if you did know why you're conscious, you still wouldn't be able to say that that's the only way your specific form of consciousness can arise, nor that there aren't any other completely alien but equally conscious types of minds. Hell, homomorphic encryption means that it can be mathematically impossible to know whether any given complex system is just random noise, or contains someone's memories, experiences, desires, a soul. So given any system of adequate complexity, without knowing enough about it to put definite constraints on what it can do, I don't see how you could say for sure that it isn't "alive"/sentient. When I hit my early teens, the example I thought of was n-body gravitational perturbations in something like the asteroid belt, and something like crystal grain structures in regular solid matter. …Sucks for the lack of opposable thumbs, I guess, if it is alive. The information which may or may not be encoded in the sun may have unknown complexity and meaning, but I feel much more confident in saying that the amount of precision carried out by the solar wind and solar radiation will never allow it to shape and navigate the world around it like we can ours.
- queuebert 3y ago
  One generally accepted feature of life is maintaining a localized entropy anomaly, at the expense of dumping excess heat to an outside reservoir. There is no evidence that the Sun is doing anything like that. All of its MHD processes follow normal laws of thermodynamics, where structures will persist at a variety of scales and durations according to universal power-law spectra. The gravitational dynamics of the asteroid belt definitely doesn't exhibit any entropy peaks not explained by Jovian perturbations, etc. I think you are confusing statistically improbable, but completely normal, patterns with meaningful ones, which is probably the primary flaw of the human brain. That said, it's also improbable that our meat brains can comprehend every possible form of life in the universe.

ThemboMcBembo 3y ago

I've actually been reading this over the last two days, and it's a fascinating read.

ghaff 3y ago

There was also a sequel called Starquake which I remember as being less interesting. An ST:TNG episode also very much riffed off of Dragon's Egg.

praptak 3y ago

Stanisław Lem wrote a story about a trio of scientists who recreate Sun's environment in a lab and discover it supports life & evolution which goes zero to sun-worm in the time it takes for the experiment to blow up, implying existence of lifeforms inside the Sun so advanced that they just don't bother to communicate with humans.

Intralexical 3y ago

> The idea is very simply that combining abundant energy with something capable of holding structure in such an environment could in theory produce a persistent store of information. A leap, sure, but a fun one. Hardly? We know that structures on the sun are capable of being (somewhat) persistent, and not only that, but even doing something vaguely resembling computation. Solar magnetic fieldlines are long-lived, producing visible sunspots that not only last for potentially several months, but show variations in frequency over a largely stable 11-year clock/cycle (during which the entire solar magnetic field flips/behaves as a binary oscillator). Magnetohydrodynamics is famously complex and capable of metastable configurations, and we don't know exactly what happens under the photosphere, but I don't think anybody could really argue that there isn't enough physical space and raw energy to swallow up every personal and animal on Earth. Really, for all we know, I think the sun itself might be alive/sentient. Or maybe it contains not physically embodied life, but isolated engrams and memes styled after Boltzmann brains, something analogous to crystal structures (which self-proliferate/grow) but with more complexity. The question is whether there's any way to decode/decrypt the information that definitely is there— complex heterogeneous distributions over time in field strength, temperatures, convection patterns, etc.— into any form that isn't just repetition plus random noise. I guess the issue is that you don't really know why you're conscious. If you had never seen a brain before, you would just think it was a useless blob of chaotically arranged fat. And even if you did know why you're conscious, you still wouldn't be able to say that that's the only way your specific form of consciousness can arise, nor that there aren't any other completely alien but equally conscious types of minds. Hell, homomorphic encryption means that it can be mathematically impossible to know whether any given complex system is just random noise, or contains someone's memories, experiences, desires, a soul. So given any system of adequate complexity, without knowing enough about it to put definite constraints on what it can do, I don't see how you could say for sure that it isn't "alive"/sentient. When I hit my early teens, the example I thought of was n-body gravitational perturbations in something like the asteroid belt, and something like crystal grain structures in regular solid matter. …Sucks for the lack of opposable thumbs, I guess, if it is alive. The information which may or may not be encoded in the sun may have unknown complexity and meaning, but I feel much more confident in saying that the amount of precision carried out by the solar wind and solar radiation will never allow it to shape and navigate the world around it like we can ours.

queuebert 3y ago
One generally accepted feature of life is maintaining a localized entropy anomaly, at the expense of dumping excess heat to an outside reservoir. There is no evidence that the Sun is doing anything like that. All of its MHD processes follow normal laws of thermodynamics, where structures will persist at a variety of scales and durations according to universal power-law spectra. The gravitational dynamics of the asteroid belt definitely doesn't exhibit any entropy peaks not explained by Jovian perturbations, etc. I think you are confusing statistically improbable, but completely normal, patterns with meaningful ones, which is probably the primary flaw of the human brain. That said, it's also improbable that our meat brains can comprehend every possible form of life in the universe.