Humans will expand to the rest of the universe. The sun will rise tomorrow. Both statements are more than 50% likely but not guaranteed. Another 50%+ likelihood is that we'll discover how to exploit zero point energy by the end of this century. This will allow space vehicles to travel to nearby star systems in about 5 years on average. The current diameter of the universe is about 15 billion light years. In 10% of the age of the universe, mankind could spread all the way to every star system in the current universe. Like a billion fireflies radiating away from a lamp at 99% the speed of light, the spread of humans over various star systems across deep time would turn each "firefly-like" group into species as different physically and socially as we are from owls.
If this migration does happen then, according to Special Relativity, all of these children of ours who spread to the ends of the universe exist NOW concurrent with our present, but simply "forward" in the fabric of eternally existing spacetime. All of these species will have one thing in common. Ultrahigh levels of consciousness that enable the exploitation and rapid self evolution of technology and non-synthetic technique. With this, humans and our down-line species will merge technology with instant non-local psychic communication. This will eventually result in non-local universal computation. Take binary computation as an example. Let's say that person A exists here on Earth in 10 years and person B exist four light years away on a teraformed satellite of our nearest neighbor star, Alpha Centauri. Let's say that we have evolved techniques, physiological alterations and mechanical and computational devices that allow telepathic information to be exchanged at high resolution and massive bit rates. Picture an imaginary merging of technology and psychic ability. Now imagine that we establish this instantaneous non-local psychic but technologically enhanced link and begin exchanging a enormous torrent of binary data between us that cannot be processed or perceived by our conscious minds. This exchange is not moving at the speed of light. It's instant. Person B's local technological interfaces would then compute the data received from Person A on Earth and then send the new data back via the telepathic instant connection four light years away. Now imagine 1 billion of these psychic-techno nodes on every star system of the universe in the deep future. We now have a universal "neural network", a universal scale instantaneous processing computer (if the computation at the local sites is also instant).
All this may be possible. Imagine that if you took a survey of 1 million humans to rank its
plausibility on a scale of 1 - 10, the results would track linearly to
age. The older someone is, the less
likely they will rate the plausibility of the above story. What does this mean for those of you who rate the
plausibility high? Well, for one thing,
it means that you need a broader definition of what life is. If the universal instant computational system
above had the ability to be creative and to think and had free will would it be
alive? And of course, the very word
"alive" is based on old paradigm definitions and different scientists
have different opinions on its exact meaning (although there are consensus
views).
And finally, if 1 billion highly conscious evolved
species on each one of 10^32 planets in the universe acted as computational
nodes and gateways on such a strange instantaneous computational system, could
they interface directly with the highest order level of computational
awareness, creativity and knowledge that mentioned above? Could they interface in two general
ways: (1) full submersion interface,
where they literally become (for those chosen moments) the collective
consciousness of this universal computational intelligence. And (2) partial
submersion, where they spend moments interfacing with the collective
intelligence while synthesizing it with a portion of their own biological
and/or synthetic intelligence.
Of course, some believe there already exists a
universal computational intelligence and that we interface with it to differing
degrees throughout the day and to differing degrees from person to person. There may be no reason that we cannot use technique
or synthetic technology to make full 100% full submersion interface with this
collective consciousness. It's for our future.
The inevitable advancement of non-synthetic technique and synthetic technology
will bring us to this point.
The most logical source of this
collective consciousness is may be staring us right in the face. It's humans.
If this happens like mentioned above, it started someplace first. It could be Earth first. That doesn't mean it can't start somewhere
else afterwards or that it hasn't already started somewhere else. But there's an eerie enigma... As far as we
have seen, about 100 billion species have existed on Earth in 3.5 billion
years. And only once has one gone
"techno-exponential" and obtained the ability to hijack its own
biological evolution, colonize other star systems and question the origin of
the universe. Modern SETI (search for extraterrestrial
intelligence) experiments have been going on non-stop since 1960. And we have not heard any peep of intelligent
life anywhere in the universe from this slice of spacetime where we are back to
just after the Big Bang. And we've
looked all the way to the end of the universe at the edge of the 15 billion
light year horizon. However, we DO know
that exponential high technological life exists in the universe starting right
around the year 1900 or 1968 when we went to the moon or right around the time
we invented the Internet (you pick a point).
We can now leave the planet and the enabling technologies to do so are
exponentially increasing.
An interesting and logically self-consistent possibility
of the source for a universal collective consciousness could be us as the
Genesis event that spreads into deep spacetime and then loops back non-locally
to connect and interact with us and perhaps even act as the substrate or ground
of all reality. Ponder that for a while.
