Sentient Universe

[Butters]

Hi all. This is kind of a shameless request for ideas. I'm writing a science fiction novel, part of a series in fact. The basic premise is that each star sends out a coded gene sequence in an eleven year cycle that, when created in a lab forms a sort of dark substance that then encircles the star in a dyson sphere. This substance allows for the transmission of radiation output in a narrow focus to other stars. ie, the stars are brains that act as neurons on a galactic scale and humans are the cells that create the neural links between these giant stars. This is why there is apparently so much matter missing from galaxies. The stars are obscured by dyson spheres, and the dark matter uses dark energy as its power source. So far, so unbelievable. The story focuses on humans with technology only a few hundred years from ours, and I have avoided inventing any magical new forces or fields that allow us to violate physics.

 

My problem is, it's supposed to be about infinite complexity in both directions. So beyond the vibrating strings there is something even smaller we cannot detect. It's why quantum particles seem to appear from nothing, and at the other scale, galaxies form single neurons in a universal consciousness and these combine in a multiverse etc etc...

 

But not violating the speed of light is a problem when linking the galaxies together as the space between galaxies is expanding faster than that. So my idea was that the supermassive black holes at the centre of the galaxy are actually wormholes that allow the transit of the maser information that the stars are sending into it. It doesn't allow for physical objects to pass through, but it does allow the transmission of information. Anything else would be torn to pieces long before it got close.

 

This is all viewed from the point of view of humans, with limited ways of observing this event, so the way they infer it is basically that they see that the transmission of all the star neurons is towards the centre of the galaxy and there are none trying to leave it. Then they detect amounts of either negative energy or exotic matter from the galactic core, which leads them to decide that this is to keep open the wormholes that allow the transmission of information between galaxies.

 

So, after all that set-up, which I hope made some sort of sense, I was just wondering if anyone can think of a better way to give such a large and very 'sci-fi' idea a more plausible edge, or indeed if anybody can think of other problems I might need to address (bearing in mind it would have to be something that humans could observe- there is no omniscient narrator in the book). Is it possible that negative energy or exotic matter would form naturally towards the centre of the galaxy. What the hell are either of those things anyway?!? Besides which, I think it's an interesting topic to speculate on!

Edited November 11, 2010 by Butters

[lemur]

How would the dyson spheres contain all the radiation from the stars they contain without expelling it detectably?

[Butters]

They actually do expel it, but they do so via large 'spikes' on the surface of the sphere that point towards other dyson spheres. It's expelled as microwave laser energy so it has a very focused beam and it is only sent towards other spheres, which earth is not in the vicinity of.

[lemur]

They actually do expel it, but they do so via large 'spikes' on the surface of the sphere that point towards other dyson spheres. It's expelled as microwave laser energy so it has a very focused beam and it is only sent towards other spheres, which earth is not in the vicinity of.

Interesting. Where does all the energy eventually end up?

[Butters]

Ultimately it is all transmitted to the supermassive blackholes at the galactic core. I was working on the assumption that most of the energy was used to maintain the wormholes/blackholes that make this possible, and the rest was the information stream that communicated with the other galaxies.

 

 

[vordhosbn]

This is a really interesting idea, but I have a question:

Why there are so many stars that die (observed end of star life) - supernovae, white/brown dwarf, red/blue giants, neutron stars, black holes?

[Ophiolite]

Butters, I have nothing to contribute other than an observation. This is about the tenth or twentieth appeal for help on a sci-fi novel I have seen appear in a science forum. This is the first one that has made me sit up and say 'I want to read that'. I do hope when you complete the story and get it published, you let us all know what to look for.

 

Good luck with the project,

Ophiolite

[Butters]

Hey. The reason that there are observed star deaths is because they are necessary to create the heavier elements that form us. I guess the analogy with a human brain does not hold up completely, but it's not supposed to be an exact simulacrum of a human brain, it's just another form of brain. So as neurons can die, so can stars, but there are ultimately enough to survive, and the others are instrumental in creating the matter that forms the spheres, and the organisms that build them.

 

As for the novel, it's actually a series. The first one is already finished, although it is self-published on lulu.com.

 

If you want to have a look, just go to www.lulu.com and then type

 

ergo sum &/or Simon Cutting as a search. I would send a direct link, but it seems to be dynamic and the link doesn't work twice.

 

They do print on demand stuff, but I make it available as a free pdf file. I'm not really out to make money from this, I just want people to read my stuff. Feel free to have a look and tear it to shreds if necessary!

Edited November 13, 2010 by Butters

[md65536]

But not violating the speed of light is a problem when linking the galaxies together as the space between galaxies is expanding faster than that.

Does it have to have a human time-scale? If not, why not accept the limit of c in the simplest way? If stars are tens of lightyears apart, then a single thought might take thousands of years. It would be like discovering a giant that is hidden in plain sight due to it being inconceivably large, and so slow that its movement is undetectable. In a human lifetime it would be like the brain is paused mid-thought. Humans might need to do some kind of computer simulation to discover "what thought is the galaxy currently thinking?" The buildup to an answer could be quite interesting!

 

Where the space between "neurons" is growing too fast, this could represent "individuals" that are disconnected from each other and have independent thoughts.

 

On the other scale, it might be discovered that tiny quantum fluctuations on such a small scale might represent the equivalent of billions of years. Perhaps in the brief flashes of an LHC collision, a universe is born, and it appears tiny only from the outside, yet inside it billions of years seem to pass, and galaxies form, and intelligences evolve and try to figure out the meaning of their universe... yet to us it all appears and disappears in a flash as their universe suffers heat death and becomes just a bug on the windshield of the collider detectors.

[Butters]

Oh yes. The thoughts of a single star are definitely on a massively slow scale and the humans that discover them have no real way of discerning those thoughts because they occur so slowly from our point of view. That is already the case in the novel, but it also focuses on the idea that there is infinite complexity in both directions on the scale. So although the neurons in the brain of a galaxy are constrained by light speed, that is not an issue at all, as this is more than fast enough for the suns to think. But it is important that galaxies are in some way linked even beyond the observable universe because it also implies that the universe itself is a single neuron in an even larger multiverse. So using the wormhole-like structures at the galactic core is a good way to link them without violating the speed of light.

 

In the book in fact there is debate about whether the stars are actually 'thinking' at all, as we cannot detect any repeatable patterns within their messages. Which makes sense, because the scale is so large that to find any kind of repeating thought processes would take millions of years, if they occur at all.

 

But the first book doesn't really explore the small scale yet, apart from through a tacit assumption that a similar thing is happening in the other direction. I will definitely be using the idea of the relative sense of time at each scale though and the possibility of expressing all of existence as a single fractal equation so that any amount of magnifcation is possible.

 

 

[Butters]

Just an addition to that, I have been researching the most plausible methods for stable wormholes, but of course so much of it is up in the air. The idea that appeals to me most is that the vast amounts of energy that the stars send to the centre of the galaxy is used by rings of the substance to create negative energy and hold open the mouths.

 

But this feels counterintuitive. Even if the addition of vast amounts of energy could make the substance somehow transmute to an exotic matter with a negative mass, how could adding energy create negative energy? Probably couldn't I suppose.

 

Is there some other way they could use vast quantities of energy to create stable wormholes? I read something about a ring rotating at nearly light speed, but the details were a bit sketchy and I had trouble finding anything that suggests its more than a vague idea with no real science behind it.