Comments by "Brandon" (@gravoc857) on "Is Oumuamua An Alien Spaceship?" video.
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@idgaf2461 It is possible that the cosmic speed limit (the speed of light) isn’t actually speed at all. The speed of light is the flow of time. Which is why faster than light travel is unlikely.
Quantum physics is quite amazing and challenging all of our perspectives of classical physics. The speed of light being the speed of time explains how photons can exist in both a particle and energy state at the exact same time. Something classical physics cannot explain.
Why this matters: While the speed of light is undathomably fast to humans. It’s incredibly slow on a cosmic time scale. If humans are forever restricted to the speed of light. Then we are doomed to extinction. If humanity unlocked speed of light travel today. Then 94% of our observable universe is already beyond reach and is forever lost to humanity. Every second that passes increases the % of the observable universe that is unreachable. The longer time goes on, the faster cosmic inflation becomes. The longer we wait, the faster that 94% grows.
Science speculates and theorizes that there is more universe beyond the observable universe & it’s probably full of a lot of the same stuff. If humans achieve x100 the speed of light today. We would still never reach the most distant objects in our observable universe, let alone anything beyond.
So unless we discover something much faster than x100 the speed of light, or teleportation or traveling between multiverses. We’re restricted to our local cosmic neighborhood. That’s great for a species looking to survive millions of years. That’s bad for a species looking to survive to the end of the universe & colonizing the entirety of it.
Humanity will be unlikely to survive long enough to see a new era of the universe. We certainly won’t make it to the heat death where civilizations would survive around brown dwarf stars and black holes.
The ideal time to be a living being would have been the early universe. A few million years after the Big Bang, everything was a lot closer and denser. The ambient temperature of the entire universe was similar to warm bath water. There was no stars and little to no planets back then. Hell, primordial black holes were likely a rarity back then. If life existed, it existed as beings that survived on cosmic dust and the heat from the rapidly cooling universe. It’s unlikely complex life or intelligent life could have formed. But simple forms such as single celled beings could have formed. This period would be ideal because this life would have traveled more of the universe via cosmic filaments than humanity will likely ever travel. These beings could still exist today. They were nurtured in an ideal environment and had billions of years to evolve biological machinery that gives them resistance and durability to the elements of space. It’s possible that all life in the universe could be seeded by these elementary and early forms of cosmic life.
It’s possible that complex and intelligent life could have formed on primordial exoplanets. Whether or not they could have become a stellar or interstellar species without star light is up for debate. At least in our observable universe it does not appear that any primordial intelligent forms existed. Of were successful. They would have existed during an era of the universe where it would have been much easier to colonize other stars and galaxies. A successful species from the primordial planet and star creation days should theoretically have colonized thousands, to millions to possibly even billions of galaxies.
We just don’t see that anywhere. Maybe we don’t know what we’re looking for and there is signs of intelligent life all over our universe. We can’t rule that possibility out, but we have a pretty good idea what we should be looking for. We don’t see mega structures. We don’t see artificial dimming of star light. We aren’t detecting signs of energy emissions required for intergalactic structures to move at or beyond the speed of light. What we instead see is an empty universe where everything that happens has a natural explanation, rather than artificial.
It could be that intelligent life (us) formed too late. Or it could be that we’re early. While the early days of the universe was ideal for expansion into the cosmos. The increased density of the universe back then made it undesirable for sustainable life. The universe was exceptionally violent during the star and planetary formation era. We know it took life on Earth 4.6 billion years of evolution to go from single celled to complex & intelligent life like us. 4.6 billion is an exceptionally long time to go without having a cataclysmic event that exterminates all life. Earth has had major extinction events but nothing that exterminated 100% of life. Maybe that’s why we’re lucky to be early to the cosmic game of life.
One positive consequence that comes from the expansion of space time and the passage of time, is that the universe becomes more gentle. Time allows for solar systems & galaxies to stabilize their orbits & eject or destroy any rouge planets, comets, asteroids, stars, etc. This will allow future planets to have decreased odds of total extinction. The expansion of space time affects all objects, even gravitationally bound objects. Gradually, the distance between all objects grows greater. This also decreases the chances of total extinction events. The later universe will also have less mega stars, supernovas, pulsars, etc. Star production will slow and produced stars will be made smaller. This is also ideal as smaller stars last longer and are more stable.
Intelligent life in the later stages of the universe might be restricted to their galaxy, their solar system or even their planet. They’ll look up into the night sky and see a pitch black universe with no stars. They won’t articulate the concept of cataclysmic extinction from asteroids, their sun, etc. These species may believe their world or stellar neighborhood is the universe & may believe it’s eternal. This era of the universe is likely to be the most hospitable era for life. It’s likely there will be complex and intelligent life everywhere, but everything will be so far apart that none of them will know about each other. It could be that this is intentional. When major sources of matter are so far apart that no being restricted to the laws of nature will ever be able to reach. We might as well have mini universes within our universe. It could be that the purpose of all of this is to create an environment ideal to foster isolated life & we are an outlier that exists at an era of the universe we shouldn’t. Our consequence being existential dread about cataclysmic extinction or the fact we can see but never reach 94% of our observable universe. The reward for existing at an unintended time is we see what was not intended to be seen. We know there is more out there. Therefore we may attempt to reach it. We see the larger mechanisms of the universe and we may attempt to hack it in order to do what we cannot within the natural laws of the universe. We may ascend higher, or we may be stopped if a higher creation does not intend for us to do what we set out to do.
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