September 26, 2012
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Today's Exercise In Comprehending Your Insignificance
Here's the latest ultra extreme awesome deep field scan from the Hubble.
Remember, folks. Each of those tiny little blurs and dots is a *galaxy* containing hundreds of billions of stars, or more -- some may contain trillions of stars. There's 5500 galaxies in that image, more or less.
From what we've discovered in the last decade the vast majority of those stars have planets orbiting them.
And this is only a tiny section of the sky, a thin sliver. Best current estimates are ~350 billion large galaxies (hundreds of billions of stars or more, each) and 7 trillion "dwarf" galaxies, with "only" a few billion stars. That's the estimate of the "visible universe". There's evidence that up to 90% of the universe could be beyond our ability to see, or, in other words, we might want to be adding a '0' to all those numbers.
It's fortunate that we are neurologically incapable of comprehending this, except in the most abstract way.
Comments (6)
Awesome! Sometimes when I am in the right frame of mind, i feel maybe.. i can almost comprehend the magnitude of the universe. It's a humbling and chilling thing. I will add that our "visible" universe may be only a fractional sliver of the entirety of the multiverse, and I wonder sometimes if there isn't perhaps a being somewhere with a bird's eye view of it all?
@skeptic42 - I suppose that if an entire galaxy were converted to jovian brains, and some method of communication between them at FTL was established in order to create a galaxy-wide shared consciousness in real time, you might create an entity capable of understanding the universe. However, words like "entity" or "being" are pretty meaningless; not only would something like that be beyond our comprehension, we can't even comprehend how far beyond our comprehension it is. Any word, term, phrase, or description carries with it far too many assumptions. Any metaphor is invalid. There are no terms that could describe the relationship between it and us; even the idea of there being a relationship, any point of comparison or evaluation, is foolish. What is pi to the power of carrot? How many feet long is last Thursday?
See also (if you haven't already), The Last Question.
@lizard_SF - hm.
Just one quibble: I don't think FTL communication would be strictly necessary for a network of Jovian brains. It would still be able to think "big" thoughts by virtue of its processing power and storage capacity, it just wouldn't be able to do it quickly.
@emamid - Could it form a single mega-super-ultra-consciousness when the lag time from one end of the galaxy to the other is thousands of year, but the speed of each brain's internal thoughts are effectively instantaneous? (We assume such things would be made of superconductors and think at lightspeed, though if they're dyson spheres around a star, you'd still have a long trip between the most distant sections of the mind. Just thinking about it is giving me a headache. I mean, let's assume the human brain is hardly the most efficient platform for consciousness, with all that meat and goop cluttering up the works. I do not think it unreasonable to assume you could shrink the human mind by a factor of 100 or more if you built it of something other than meat. Now consider that we're talking about something ultimately millions of times larger than the Earth, as a collective of minds each 1/100th the size of human mind (possibly even smaller)... that's, what, trillions of brain-equivalents working as a single mega-consciousness? Gah.)
ISTM that without some means of near-instantaneous communication between the jovian brains that are in separate systems, you'd have something more akin to committee or study group, not a single entity. The more I study the brain, the more I become aware that consciousness is not just a static pattern of nerve connections, but a continual flow of communication that is highly iterative and self-modifying; thoughts in progress send out signals and get signals back that change them even as they're developing. It's like multiple overlapping ripples in a pond, with the waveforms strengthening or disrupting as they overlap.
Thinking about this is like thinking about googolplexes. You can describe one (10^googol power), but you can't *imagine* one, given you literally -- and I mean literally, not figuratively -- couldn't write it down within the known universe.
I see your point about "study group", but the result might instead be something like what happens to someone who has had a cerebral commissurotomy (severing of the nerves that connect the two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex). Such persons do have problems, but they're still able to more or less function. In the galactic uber-brain scenario, we have many Jovian brains instead of two hemispheres, and the connection isn't completely severed, just much slower than within the individual parts. Also, you can look at it differently depending on which speed you consider to be the baseline: many brains with relatively very slow connections between them, or a big brain with many relatively very fast areas within it. If we were able to somehow radically speed up a few small areas within our existing brains (fx. by replacing them with electronic components) without increasing the communication speed between the parts, would the result no longer be a single brain?
Mostly, though, just pondering your idea and seeing how well it would work if we dinna break the laws o' physics.