I’m obsessed with this question “where are they?” The idea is that if there were some higher-order beings, then they would have left us a message we could interpret, informing us of their existence. I’ve heard this applied at different scales. Like the ancients and their pyramids, statues, and other world-level structures. And also about aliens, “why don’t we see them in space or other evidence that they’ve been around?” And then about the supernatural, ghosts and/or God’s, entities that we haven’t technically confirmed to exist, but “obviously” could have left us a sign that they were here.
But when we really open up the model for “I was here” beyond some anthropomorphic symbols that first strike us as intuitive, we start running into moments of “there they are!” Take Olympus Mons and Tharsis Montes on the face of Mars. It looks like a pretty precise sketch of a triangle at the scale of a planet. Not only a planet but our closest planet. But yeah yeah, I know, we are very good at converting noise into symbols and meaning, I just can’t help but imagine an alien spaceship leaving Earth, passing by Mars, and signing their signature on Mars with some technology that creates volcanoes in the symbol of their choosing.
Another signal is the cosmic microwave background radiation that came with the Big Bang. A signature of the universe at conception in a language our science has begun to understand. We really shouldn’t expect God to have left a message for us in English or any other Earth-centric language so why wouldn’t God speak this language?
We can’t prove anything about these conjectures, whether these symbols potentially have some relationships with higher-order beings in a way that inspires awe, or whether they even need to have tangible relationships with higher-order beings to inspire awe are questions worth exploring, they may even be the same thing. But the theories are unfalsifiable from our perspective given our current technological capacity, which leaves us in the realm of philosophy. So to say aliens left that triangle of volcanoes for us to see, or that God’s message to us is literally in the mathematics of our universe, describing our reality to us in a universal language, is all theory. Maybe greetings themselves are unique to our world, and aliens or a God wouldn’t even think about saying hello or goodbye. God might just say “this is omniscience” and data dump the entire description of reality, with no expectation of discovery, but just leaving things available for us to discover. But it does seem clever to leave omniscience as a discovery at the beginning of the universe. Or at least it would be a nice start to any creation myth!
And then to arguments like Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, which begin to touch the infinities inside of our reality. The infinities that we see in the positive feedback loops at the center of expressions like fractals, natural selection, paperclip maximizers, capitalism, black holes, and ideologies. In Bostrom’s simulation-based infinity loop, the idea is that if a civilization (us) gets to the point of being able to run simulations of universes as real as ours, then in theory they (we) will run many of those, which will generate universes and civilizations that generate simulations of universes ad infinitum. If we demonstrate this reality to be possible by doing it ourselves, we create the statistical situation where being the prime mover as far as we can tell also means being the prime mover and not in a child simulation becomes extremely unlikely.
The debate over our status in a simulation then obsesses over trivial details instead of the real fruit born of the thought experiment, usually orbiting around what “real” means. But it’s easy, reality is relative to your layer of existence, whether that happens in a type of computer as we think of it, or if it’s in a type of computer that runs simulations on what we consider to be our ground truth of “physics.” Following this common pattern in many deep philosophical truths, it doesn’t matter either way. One can know what it’s like to touch a chair, whether the chair is simulated or real, but nothing fundamental to their experience would change except for their meta-level description of that action, which moves to a new language architecture. “There is a higher order to things.” Already true anyway. What we are really focused on here is whether we are the first species, the ground floor of a Ponzi of simulated universes, the true host of all future simulations. We want to be the Gods but it’s also important to us that we know if we aren’t the Gods.
From a design perspective, if you were going to run a simulation of the universe, and you wanted it to be highly efficient, some things you would think about would be how long it would take for you to run simulations to gather data. In this case, we’d obviously want the most data possible in the least amount of time. What’s the best version of that? Something like infinity universes starting and finishing instantaneously would be an ideal model.
In this context, we look at our own universe, which seems to have some interesting properties like expanding faster than the speed of light. We, subjects to space-time relativity traveling slower than the speed of light, experience a phenomenon called time. But photons, particles of light traveling at the speed of light, give us an informative model here in regards to another way to think about time. Imagine a photon, leaving the sun and traveling toward earth. It will take about 8 minutes to reach us. But this is the human-centric metric, specific to our experience that is grounded in the passage of time as we experience it, so the question shifts to how much time passed for the photon. The answer is that the photon instantaneously arrives at its destination. This means that if there were something that it was like to be a photon, there would be no sense for the passage of time, and perhaps nothing that it was like at all, the photon would simply always be where it was. Whether that was leaving the sun, or arriving at the earth, it was instantaneous for the photon itself. It’s really hard to imagine existence being like anything at all without access to the experience of time passing. More on this in another post.
So then what might a universe expanding faster than the speed of light look like in terms of time from an outside creator that is not subject to the internal experience of time? It might be analogous to an instantaneous simulation. Everything effectively happens all at once from the perspective of that simulation. The beginning and the end, experienced from the outside are like the photon leaving and arriving at the same moment due to its rate of travel. One intriguing part here is that this is also represented in the materialist ideas of atomic determinism. The idea is that the past, present, and future of every atom can be run backward and forward if the location of all atoms were all known at any moment in time. Effectively, the atoms combined with the laws of physics are determined based on the starting position of those atoms, that starting position always being maintained and represented by all future states of those atoms as well, effectively running on the rails of our laws of physics in the context of time.
Imagine the creators of our universe being a group of engineers. They run simulations of universes, using tools that harness the speed of light to their advantage, spontaneously generating vast pools of knowledge based on data returned from the complete life cycle of universes that were instantaneously started and finished. This is an incredibly sharp model, a technology any civilization would greatly benefit from, a model we can even imagine humans pursuing in our lifetimes. A universe from nothing that is instantaneous, creating the opportunity for billions and trillions of years worth of opportunity that might result in experiences like our own, all possible because the agents inside that instant simulation are subject to that universe’s laws of relativity, and those on the outside are not.
Again, all this speculation is based on a rough understanding of some natural phenomena in nature as described by some experts from different fields. But the main takeaway in these kinds of thought experiments is not a bunch of truths to believe in, but that we have all of these signatures in nature that could fit into robust, reality-based models for meaning and value, that get the brain thinking about potential origins and ultimate destinations, that are inherently motivating to investigate because the nature of reality is so mysterious and enticing. Ideas that are way bigger than a single human life, but in a way that is closer to the human experience and views philosophy and science as a method for communicating with an entity that fits the build of “God.” I think our institutions are designed to segregate different areas of thought from one another, and even select against certain types of thought being present at all. To me, it’s obvious that keeping certain ingredients out of an idea factory will have a cost to it, and in this case, the cost could be our lacking a deeper library of theory at this level of interpretation. More generally, our notions of God, or higher-order beings are still in the early days, but more and more we see philosophy and science merging with religion-born memes and I think the synthesis of these two areas of thought has the potential to radically reshape the world.