Why can't we see aliens?

I want to try and throw out a potential hypothesis that won't require having to estimate all the terms in the Drake equation, to simply arrive at a probability of aliens existing. I want to look at this in a much more fundamental way. I'll have to lay out some base assumptions I have that everyone may not agree with, before I answer the question directly.

Before we can get to aliens, we have to dive deep to the Planck length and perhaps even beyond. It is my very strong intuition that the most fundamental thing in the universe is a bit. With a binary operator, you can achieve infinite upward complexity just by combining bits together to form bit strings. A smaller thing, a unitary operator, can't be the most fundamental unit because there is no way to create anything but the operator itself and we know what that looks like; the nothing that our universe is encapsulated in. Information theory is being used more and more in most fields of science and appears to be fundamental in physics and chemistry. I personally believe that the next big physics revolution will come once we prove the Mass-energy-information equivalency, but I digress. Back to aliens.

The cool thing about bits is that everything can be represented by a bit string.

This means "Lex"

01001100 01100101 01111000

The reason we can convert bit strings into subjective language and vice versa, is that we came up with a coding scheme that's universally accepted for which string of numbers stand for what symbol. This is very important because this will help us explain why something could be right in front of us without us knowing.

Since everything can be represented with a bitstring, and a bit is the most fundamental unit in the universe, you can think of the universe as one very long, objective bit string. In the example above where we spelled 'Lex', we knew what the bit string represented because we agreed upon a way of repressing each symbol. So to us, that string of bits makes sense because we have interacted with it. We essentially took an objective part of the universe and made it subjective for our purposes.

Now let's reframe what might happen with natural selection at the most basic level. You have some process/observer/subjective entity interacting with a small part of this very long universal bitstring. As you interact with this bitstring, there are more and novel interactions to be discovered. Complexity in this sense is just being aware of and interacting with wider parts of the bitstring/universe. Let's move a billion years ahead to when we get humans. We have uncovered quite a bit of the bitstring. Here's the catch though, we uncovered certain parts with natural selection being the reason we see certain parts of the string and not others. Furthermore, there is a subjective component to this. If we receive binary code as in the example above, only humans will know that it spells 'Lex', because only we have interacted with that bitstring in such a way that we know what it means. An animal hasn't interacted with that part of the universal bitstring and just considers that arrangement of 0's and 1's pure noise.

The reason we can see and interact with so many animals and parts of the biosphere on this planet, is because there are so many species that have overlapping interest on the same part of the bitstring. The part of the bitstring that's glucose makes sense to every organism that requires glucose. If there is competition or interaction on the same part of the bitstring, you're also very likely able to be aware of that thing. Dogs don't understand what a rocket launch is because dogs only have a very limited interaction with the bit string that aggregates to the concepts and things involved in launching a rocket; they interact with the bit string that is the photons bouncing off the body, the smell of it, etc. but they might as well be oblivious to the rest. They can only be aware of the parts of the rocket, where our interaction with the universal bitstring intersects.

So now imagine that we send a message with those same bits as above into space. Let's assume that there is an alien life Form out there that also has radio telescopes and so forth. To that life form, our bitstring spelling Lex will be completely random and will mean nothing so they dismiss it as noise. The same goes for us. If we imagine then that there is a life form that grew up interacting with completely disconnected parts of the bitstring, we would never be able to be aware of them or see them until our interaction with the bitstring intersects. Of course we'll see plenty of carbon based species, because our utility functions mostly overlap so we care about the same parts of the bitstring.

Because we are a very young species and because you can 'subjectify' the objective bitstring in many interesting ways, we are likely not able to see a cosmos very much alive with entities we literally cannot imagine, because they are occupying a completely different part of the universe's bit string.

Submitted February 03, 2022 at 06:37AM by dunnolol123 https://ift.tt/HpKyE7iFP