Possibly the most challenging question LP will ever encounter.

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    • #1498
      Daniel
      Blocked

       
      Due to the nature of this forum query, I’ve decided to not take the usual ‘direct’ route (getting straight to the point) and do a little… elaborative introduction.

      Evolution has established itself as the auditor of life, shaping species to the form that would ensure their survivability in the environment by means of natural selection. From survival comes propagation, multiplying their populations into sizeable social groups starting from isolated tribal societies of simplicity into unified civilizations of sheer complexity in the span of thousands of years. At this ‘Civilization-stage’ they’ve surmounted their environment that nurtured and tormented them for millennia, learning how to bind it to their will and empower them even more towards the final frontier of space.

      Life. This mystical animating force is responsible for evolution itself. Anything it inhabits (be they organic or synthetic) is distinguished from others, the ‘living’ can learn, grow and propagate the way their forms instructed.

      But the question is… is it only exclusive to the tangible? Is such blessing only allowed for Matter alone?
      Nay.

      The Planck epoch, the earliest and non-expanding phase of the Universe. The temperature in this high-energy state was inconceivably high that the four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravitation, weak nuclear interaction, and strong nuclear interaction) are one. The cosmic inflation and subsequent cooling had gradually broken them into the individual parts that we know today.

      Now to get to the bottomline of this question.

      What if life evolved in this period and onward?

      Of course such thing is impossible given that this era is the precursor of everything. But you forget that life is not only restricted to Organics or any other Matter.
      Life is also possible in Energy (As LP had revealed the existence of Energy beings in the PV). Categorizing such beings as ‘alive’ is definitely beyond difficult since most of us are used to the traditional definitions of ‘life’.

      But adding to the difficulty is that their evolution takes place during the Planck epoch of the Cosmos, an environment where the fundamental forces are unified and the entire place is infinitely hot and dense.

      Since evolution is all-about environmental adaptation to promote survivability and sophistication, how do you think it would go?

      Title of the query: Planck-epoch energy lifeforms.

      PS: Like i said, possibly the most challenging question LP will ever encounter, It may even split his head in thinking!
       
       

      Banned.

    • #1501
      Logical Premise
      Keymaster

      This isn’t really a hard question. It’s more of a “er, what?” type of thing.

      TL;DR, no.

      There can certain be life based on a subset of information stored in an energy field, as I have stated. However, all of these life forms evolved from biological origins.

      There’s no evidence — nor any form of framework — for any kind of consciousness or information storage without a physical matrix. Asking “well what if there was” isn’t particularly useful, it’s akin to asking “well what if fire didn’t burn?”

      Life. This mystical animating force is responsible for evolution itself. Anything it inhabits (be they organic or synthetic) is distinguished from others, the ‘living’ can learn, grow and propagate the way their forms instructed.

      I’m not sure where you got this, but life is not a mystical animating force. An AI, no matter how life-like it seems, is not alive. Technially, viruses aren’t ‘alive’.

      I know there is this popular concept that life is some kind of energy field, but let’s leave that with the siari nuts, shall we? Bluntly put, life is:

      the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.

      So. Growth, reproduction, functional activity, continual change, and of course, death.

      Energy cannot ‘grow’. It cannot ‘reproduce’. While it may constantly change, it certainly cannot ‘die’. Ergo, the first problem with any being of ‘pure energy’ without a biological origin is that it isn’t life.

      When people talk about energy beings they are actually talking about one of two things:

      1) Beings who, via technology and evolution, have shifted all of their physical mass into a higher dimensional state, in essence compacting their presence in three dimensions to an infinitely small point, which allows them only to interact with the universe we can see with matter to energy manipulation.

      2) Beings who, via technology alone, ‘upload’ their critical information states and interactions into an energy lattice created in higher dimensions, with technologies to allow them to keep absorbing energies (usually solar) to maintain their existence. In this case they have ‘physical bodies’ simply converted to energy that is in a degenerate state in a higher dimension to allow it to retain organization and form.

      In both cases a physical component was and IS present. It is not tangible in our limited capacity of detection, but it still remains.

      ‘Pure’ energy — be it gravitational, plasma, electrical, nuclear or whatever else — cannot be ‘alive’, as it does not react except through chemical, particle, or atomic reactions with matter and through heat transfer of energy.

      To be fair, the problem is our language. There isn’t any such thing as ‘pure energy’ any more than there is pure momentum or pure charge – the idea doesn’t even make sense.

      It’s like a work of art that is ‘pure beauty’ , or a song of ‘pure music’. The interaction between energy and matter (or any physical system) is like the relationship between various forms of measurements — of distance, for example. You can convert feet into yards, or into meters. Both have a defined ‘length’. But there is no ‘pure’ concept of how long something is — it’s all by comparison.

      In the Planck-era, not only were all higher dimensions so highly curved as to theoretically have negative space, but energy itself as we understand it wasn’t consistent.

      All forms of information storage at the very least require consistency. The Planck era literally had none. Chalking it up to ‘evolution’ does not work. Evolution is NOT merely ‘adaptation’ — it is adaptation to genetic traits and inherited information as a reaction to long-term ongoing environmental changes.

      The only way this would work is in the ekpyrotic universe model, which by it’s nature implies that there is no multiverse or parallel realities, which flies in the face of the PV.

      Setting all that aside:

      The answer is simple: assuming we ignore that it couldn’t have happened, if it did, all such life would have immediately died when the conditions of the universe changed almost immediately after the cooling. Such beings simply could not maintain energy integrity with additional forces being drawn into place without a high level of heat.

      TL;DR, no.

      Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.

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