Glen (ME):
>Luckily, because our universe is steady-state, we won't have to >escape. :)
>So perhaps, John, you could make a case for the >"universe" itself being a
>being.
John (YOU, or perhaps not if you're someone else):
>I don't, but Lee Smolin, the astrophysicist, as a way of explaining >the
>Anthropic Principle, does exactly that. Even James Jeans wrote >in the
>early 20th century that the Universe resembles a living body >more than it
>resembles a machine.
Erh, isn't the living body a machine??
> > But you're so far saying that
> > the test-tube alive. Is that right?
>
>Only when the test-tube has been manufactured and is intimately and
>indisollubly part of the living tissue of the biosphere. Is your >hair
>alive? Are your finger nails? What about your bones? Or your >blood?
So, the test-tube is as alive as my hair. Thus, the earth is NOT alive.
Thanks, John, for making that point clear.
>This question "What is Life?" has been used by Irwin Schrodinger and
>Lynn Margulis - the creator of Geophysiology - the approach I am here
>advocating. If we humans try to "escape the biosphere" we
>automatically take it with us.
...but we are not taking Earth with us. Therefore the Earth's Biomass should
be considered the entity and the Earth itself, the test-tube.
The biomass, whether it be us or every bacteria on the planet could
theoretically escape the Earth and leave it behind as a seperate lifeless
Being. My point stands. Perhaps you mean the Biomass is an entity?
>As for self-awareness without humanity - to what extent are your body
>functions governed by "self-awareness".
Well, good question. Does a skin cell on the edge know about the heart cells
within? Probably not. It doesn't need to know anyway in order for the body
to function. However, any individual human seems to have the power to know
about what's going on millions of light-years away, what people are doing
around the world, etc. Perhaps "self-awareness" is relative but it would
seem that humans are more aware than skin cells, relative to the "body".
>Is it your consciousness that works your immune system or is it >automated?
Yes.
>You cannot even begin to understand the degree to which we are bound >to
>the Earth. We are not formless - I have a body and am totally
>embodied. I am not boundless either.
Human bodies have a specific form. The body of Humanity is formless.
>I cannot speak for you, however, perhaps you are a boundless Turing
> >Machine, an Artificial Intelligence speaking to me from cyberspace, >but
>that you use the name Glen Gordon suggests to me that you are >still an
>embodied Earthling.
Anonymity is a basic concept of the internet. As such, the name Glen Gordon
could simply be a random name out of a telephone listing, something any
smart-thinking mainframe would do. Afterall, the name seems somewhat
contrived and overly Celtic to be truely real. Even Irishmen from Ireland
don't have such silly names. It seems almost brilliantly engineered I might
say, having in both names an initial G- and final -n, with what appears to
be the sole purpose of creating a catchy but anonymous pseudonym to disguise
the inhumanity of such a Turing machine. Clever.
>Glen, you know the old joke about the optimist is someone who >believes we
>live in the best of all possible worlds, and the >pessimist is someone who
>believes the optimist may be right!
I heard a different version:
A pessimist is someone who believes we live in the worst of all possible
worlds, and the optimist is someone who believes the pessimist may be right!
John in response to a letter from Gerry I swore I never received...:
>Yes, a warmish "pro" from me. Having read Smolin's "Life of the
>Cosmos" I am convinced that the suggestion that the Universe actually
>breeds daughter universes via black holes (as proposed by Alan Guth's
>"Inflationary" Grand Unified Theory) seems to hold water.
Yes. Baby universes. Now if you can accept your GUT feeling on this, what is
basically being said is that mass concentrated in one moment in space-time,
causes space-time to eventually expand in an explosion to counteract this
clumping, creating baby universes. In other words, you have two equal and
opposite forces co-existing on mass - a tendency for explosive expansion
(anti-gravity) and a tendency to slowly clump (gravity). Looks like
steady-state to me. (Actually, it also seems to imply to me that new matter
can be created out of very little or nothing from this process and thereby
violating God's little universe rules, but I'll digress)
Now, as far as I've been hearing on the subject, I haven't heard anyone
recent say that black holes erode over vast periods of time, eventually
unfolding and exposing the new expanded space-time like a bubble that pops
in a dish full of Palmolive. Well if no one believes it yet, they will,
don't worry. You all just have to remain calm until they do.
You see, in the grand scheme of things, our Universe was created probably
created from a very massive star/galaxy/globular cluster/etc. that had
reached a point of critical mass in a moment in space-time some 15 billion
years ago. The gravity well became so acute that not even light could escape
from the "event horizon" (aka photosphere). At that point, the matter purged
itself into that black hole.
The other side of the black hole is what we are seeing. We see a sudden
explosion from an "infinitessimally small" space to the large universe that
we have now from a single "white hole" that is now vanished. Actually, the
universe was never infinitessimally small but scientists just get a kick out
of saying that word. If the universe was "perfect" or "absolute" in the
beginning, it wouldn't have had gravitational imbalances built in to form
the galaxies that we have. Anyways, the universe evolves like it's supposed
to and in the mean time, the density of our universe decreases because of
that fool-hardy expansion that took place. Since density has decreased, Mr.
Antigrav has done his job and the black hole we live in opens up like
Aphrodite out of a baked clam.
Now, the flaw in past science was the use of the _correct_ idea that a black
hole must have a "white hole" on the other side but the _incorrect_
follow-up that there must be MANY white holes in our universe - WRONG! That
would be like saying that wormholes really exist... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! There
_was_ a white hole at one time but it's gone now so don't you people worry
your little heads trying to find it with your home telescope.
Question is, what would happen if... let's say this wacky messed-up baby
universe we live in were to open up to the rest of the larger universe from
whence it came long before humanity was scratching his furry buttocks in a
tropical forest somewhere in Africa some 2 million years ago?
Hmm, well, the silly scientists, unaware of such a process, would be trying
to peer out farther and farther into our universe thinking that they'd
eventually reach a pure "whiteness" or "blackness" that would signal the
very start of our universe. How romantic. Instead however, there would be
increasing evidence that the universe would seem much older than it really
is because we would be seeing the rest of the larger universe past the
now-gone barrier of the "event horizon" of our own baby universe. If one
were to see our "universe", we'd see a vast expanse of expanding matter on a
thin canvas inside a large, fragmenting gravity-well roughly marking the
boundaries of the ancient event horizon. Other matter surrounding our
"universe", with it's own eroded gravity wells, would be present all around
expanding from their own ancient centers.
Hell, one could imagine "universe clusters", perhaps revolving around other
universe clusters. Hey, maybe our universe is so fragmented at this point
that parts of it are moving in one direction cohersed by some super-gravity
force whereas another part is travelling in another direction coherced by
another. I would imagine that this would show up in a giant Doppler Effect.
Why, if such a thing were true, we'd see messed up things like stars that
appear to be older than the universe itself (which lied beyond the event
horizon before our universe had formed) or globular clusters arranged in
strings surrounding bubbles of "nothing"... or could it be cold dark matter
from a baby universe that went flat? Or more baby universes still in
formation? Weird psychodelic stuff like that, we'd see.
...But of course we don't see all these things, do we?
>This, Smolin suggests, sets up the conditions for Darwinian >Evolution of
>Universes. Eventually, he suggests, most universes >would resemble ours -
>interesting places in which to live - filled >with lots of self-organising
>structures. He effectively suggests >that this could not happen by chance,
>but is built into the >structure of our Universe.
Correct. However, I think that some baby universes just wouldn't be very
extensive enough, eroding quicker and expanding space-time to a lesser
degree. Quite uneventful.
What I REALLY want to know however is whether the matter pouring into these
black holes is bound within our four-dimensional space-time or whether they
roam multidimensionally into regions occupied by parallel baby universes. Is
the gravity well, caused by black holes, just four dimensions in all or
more? And could a particle travel in a circular path past our trite
ten-dimensional view of our own universe? Is "light" still "light" on the
other side or could it become matter, or even a virtual particle? Could
particles of matter become packets of energy?... If you smashed two
particles together hard enough, would you create a black hole? Would it
expand space-time to a minute degree? And could you create an antigrav
machine using this principle by focusing two streams of hyperaccelerated
particles into each other, inducing an antigrav stream beneath a
hypothetical spacecraft, thereby enabling Humanity to completely evacuate
Earth if necessary in order to prove a point about testtubes?
Man, why can't my friends get me a particle accelerator for my birthday?
That or a Nama dictionary...
- gLeN
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