Scientists Say They Can’t Tell Alien Life and Advanced Laws of Physics Apart

Just how advanced are certain alien civilizations that live out in our cosmos compared to human life? Even with the most modest estimations, they’ve had billions of years of evolutionary time to advance – their technology, their consciousness, and even their physical forms. Scientists have long argued over exactly what constitutes extra-terrestrial life, but with a recent admission, they say they can’t tell the difference between alien life forms and our most advanced laws of physics.

Alien life may be indistinguishable from advanced laws of physics.

Alien Life by 2025, or Already ‘Discovered’ Billions of Years Ago?

NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan recently said there were “strong indications of life beyond Earth” that would likely be obtained by 2025, but if we can’t even understand aliens in the most simplistic material terms, what is to say they weren’t discovered’ a very long time ago – like billions of years ago?

Caleb Scharf, an astrophysicist at Columbia University, recently published an article admitting that the Universe is so strange, the rules of physics and alien life might simply be interchangeable – wherein alien life simply disappears into the fabric of space/time.

On the quantum level, it is possible that an intelligence has reduced itself to function within photons. Scharf attests, “What better way to ensure survival, by leaving a physical local system, and moving to exist within light itself, and to be everywhere in the universe at any given moment.” This is often referred to as the singularity principal in advanced quantum physics.

In science fiction, the term quantum singularity is used to refer to many different phenomena, which often approximately resemble a gravitational singularity in the scientific sense in that they are massive, localized distortions of space and time. The name invokes one of the most fundamental problems remaining in modern physics: the difficulty in merging Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (which includes singularities within its models of black holes) and quantum mechanics.

Are Physical Laws Simply Alien Intelligence?

Truly, are physical laws simply an alien intelligence? If alien life truly is so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics, there really would be no way to realize their overt presence with our currently limited consciousness.

Scharf explains,

“For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world.

These possibilities might seem wholly untestable, because part of the conceit is that sufficiently advanced life will not just be unrecognizable as such, but will blend completely into the fabric of what we’ve thought of as nature. But viewed through the warped bottom of a beer glass, we can pick out a few cosmic phenomena that—at crazy as it sounds—might fit the requirements.”

He thinks even dark matter, or black holes might be illusions of the same kind,

“For example, only about 5 percent of the mass-energy of the universe consists of ordinary matter: the protons, neutrons, and electrons that we’re composed of. A much larger 27 percent is thought to be unseen, still mysterious stuff. Astronomical evidence for this dark, gravitating matter is convincing, albeit still not without question. Vast halos of dark matter seem to lurk around galaxies, providing mass that helps hold things together via gravity. On even larger scales, the web-like topography traced by luminous gas and stars also hints at unseen mass.

Cosmologists usually assume that dark matter has no microstructure. They think it consists of subatomic particles that interact only via gravity and the weak nuclear force and therefore slump into tenuous, featureless swathes. They have arguments to support this point of view, but of course we don’t really know for sure. Some astronomers, noting subtle mismatches between observations and models, have suggested that dark matter has a richer inner life. At least some component may comprise particles that interact with one another via long-range forces. It may seem dark to us, but have its own version of light that our eyes cannot see.”

He suggests,

“If you’re a civilization that has learned how to encode living systems in different substrates, all you need to do is build a normal-matter-to-dark-matter data-transfer system: a dark-matter 3D printer. Perhaps the mismatch of astronomical models and observations is evidence not just of self-interacting dark matter, but of dark matter that is being artificially manipulated.”

Truly, we, as a society, have continued to assume that the cosmos is physical in nature – and therefore, all its ‘life’ and sentience must also take a similar physical form.

For example, complex life is thought to only be possible in 10 percent of all galaxies, but again that assumes a limited, 3-D, physical form of life.

What if, as some have suggested, that not only do planets, stars, and moons contain life, but are also life-forms themselves, and as an extrapolation of recent theories, even light and thought are also forms of life?

For example, there are phenomena in plasma physics that imitate the vortices you see at the edge of streams, that exhibit some of the attributes associated with life.  Persistent, organized structure, recovery from deviation, and even certain kinds of reproduction.

The Mystery of Photonic Light

Others have asked whether photonic light exists as a separate entity within all atoms or are they created at certain energy levels for the purpose of absorption, or emission, or do they exist omnipresently in the fabric of the universe?

The answer we have thus far supports Scarf’s assertation that alien life is so advanced, we may not even be able to recognize it.

As Dave Kornreich a PhD astronomer from Cornell explains,

“Strangely, a photon doesn’t seem to ‘come from’ anywhere. The universe must put the extra energy somewhere, and because electrons in atoms are electromagnetic phenomena, a photon is born with the required energy. In a weak-force interaction, say the decay of a neutron, that energy goes into a neutrino particle which is also instantaneously created. Each force has its own carrier particles, and knows how to make them.

That’s really all we can say about it. There are many interpretations of what this and other phenomena in quantum mechanics mean on a deeper level, and whole libraries worth of books which argue points of view on the matter. But my personal philosophy is that of the famous physicist Richard Feynman, who said: “Shut up and calculate.”

Clearly, we aren’t able to ‘calculate’ an advanced society billions of years ahead of us. We have a long way to go and much to learn in this grand, possibly infinite, Universe of ours.

Photo credit: StringsatAR