Lifeboat Foundation

Is time an illusion? If not, what is time? Why does time flow forward? You are watching this video. Your brain cells are firing in anticipation. A story is unfolding. Time is moving forward. Or is it? What if I told you that nothing is happening. There is no story unfolding. The story has already been told. The video has already been uploaded and seen by others. You are just watching it one second at a time, so there is a story unfolding for you only. What if your entire life was like this video upload, like a DVD. The story of your life is already on that DVD. The only difference is that you don’t have a forward and reverse button. You are forced to experience your DVD one moment at a time. There is some strong scientific evidence that this may be the true nature of reality. If so, that could mean that everything you think you know is utterly an illusion. Einstein’s theory of relativity supports something called the block universe, which is really a four dimensional space time structure. This means that every event has its own coordinates not only in space but in time. So for example, wherever you are right now corresponds to a location in 3 dimensions, like London, England — and a location in time, 2PM on Feb 2, 2019. But just like the space 10 feet ahead of you is as real as the space 10 feet behind you, so too is the moment 10 minutes into the future and 10 minutes into the past. In other words, the past and future exist just as much as the present. MIT physicist Max Tegmark says we can view the universe as a three dimensional space where stuff happens, or four dimensional block universe where nothing happens. If it is the latter, he says, then change is really an illusion, because nothing is changing. It’s all there – past, present and future – like a DVD. A drama maybe unfolding in the movie recorded on the dvd, but nothing about the DVD is changing in any way. We may have the illusion, at any given moment, that the past already happened and the future doesn’t yet exist, and that things are changing. But the only reason we may have a past is that our brain contains memories of the past. If we did not have any memories, would we have any sense of the past, or of a sense of time at all? Is it possible that time doesn’t actually exist except through our perception of it? Physics doesn’t help us when it comes to the arrow of time – it is time-agnostic. If time was running backwards, all the equations would still be valid. So mathematically, physics does not say that time goes forward or backward. It just says that time Time can not be zero, but it can run either forward or backward without violating any laws. Time is symmetric. But this is counterintuitive. Reality seems to be telling us that time does exist, and that its arrow points in only one direction — forward. Why doesn’t the arrow of time flow backward, if physics says it is equally likely. It would have been possible if it were not for one aspect of physics, and that is the law of entropy. Entropy is a measure of the disorderliness of the universe. Things always get more disorderly. You can scramble and egg, but you can’t unscramble it. This is entropy increasing. Entropy appears to be the only reason the arrow of time is what it is. But why is Entropy always becoming higher? Why doesn’t it become lower? There doesn’t appear to be any fundamental reason for that. Alan Guth, professor at MIT, who pioneered the idea of cosmic inflation, may have solved this riddle. He argues that information and entropy are almost the same thing. In order to know your past, you have to form memories. Adding memories means adding information. Adding information increases entropy. Therefore a conscious system can only be conscious in one direction – when entropy increases, which allows information to increase. This implies that we are conscious because we live in a universe of increasing entropy. Consciousness cannot exist in a universe where entropy decreases. So if entropy has been increasing since the beginning of time, it means that the universe must have started at the lowest possible state of entropy at the beginning…at the big bang. Why then did the universe start off this way, resulting in forward time? Alan Guth says that if the universe is infinitely large, then the total potential entropy of the universe is infinite. If that is the case, then any entropy you start with is low entropy. The entropy will increase from any given starting point he says. This means that it doesn’t matter what the entropy of the big bang was, it would always be the lowest entropy, because there will always be a larger entropy number that the universe can flow to. And seemingly, we exist because time has flowed in a favorable direction for causality to occur, namely, it has flowed forward in our universe. But what about the block universe, are we living inside a DVD?…watch the video for the answer.

I found this on NewsBreak: SETI Institute Claims They’ve Successfully Communicated With a Whale.

I found this on NewsBreak: Decoding the Mysteries of Life and the Cosmos: A Journey Through the Last Decade of Science.

By: Jason St Clair.

It’s worth reflecting on the scientific breakthroughs that have shaped our understanding of the universe and ourselves from 2010 to 2019. From the creation of synthetic life to the first glimpse of a black hole, these discoveries remind us of the indomitable human spirit and our unending quest for knowledge.

Continue reading “Decoding the Mysteries of Life and the Cosmos: A Journey Through the Last Decade of Science” »

What should we look for when trying to find life beyond Earth? Should it be the familiar green and blue colors that we see thriving on our small, blue planet, or something else entirely? This is what a recent study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how identifying purple colors on other worlds, as opposed to the aforementioned green and blue on Earth, could serve as an optimal method in the search for life beyond Earth since many bacteria exhibit purple pigmentation. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the criteria for identifying life beyond Earth, and specifically life as we don’t know it.

“Purple bacteria can thrive under a wide range of conditions, making it one of the primary contenders for life that could dominate a variety of worlds,” said Dr. Lígia Fonseca Coelho, a postdoctoral associate at the Carl Sagan Institute (CSI) and lead author of the study.

For the study, the researchers analyzed a myriad of purple sulfur and purple non-sulfur from various oxygenated and non-oxygenated environments with the goal of ascertaining how their physical properties compared with reflectance data derived from several Earth-sized exoplanets. In the end, they produced a data base that can be used to potentially locate purple-colored life on other worlds throughout the cosmos, including Earth analogs, water planets, frozen planets, and snowball planets. The goal of this data is to improve algorithms and additional search methods to identify purple colors instead of green, with the latter being the traditional search baseline.

A new study is shaking up what scientists thought they knew about distant objects in the far reaches of the solar system, starting with an object called the space snowman.

Researchers from Brown University and the SETI Institute found that the double-lobed object, which is officially named Kuiper Belt Object 486,958 Arrokoth and resembles a snowman, may have ancient ices stored deep within it from when the object first formed billions of years ago. But that’s just the beginning of their findings.

Using a new model they developed to study how comets evolve, the researchers suggest this feat of perseverance isn’t unique to Arrokoth but that many objects from the Kuiper Belt—which lies at the outermost regions of the solar system and dates back to the early formation of the solar system around 4.6 billion years ago—may also contain the ancient ices they formed with.

Should We Send Messages into Space to be Received by Aliens? And would they be able to decode them? Posted on BigThink, link from my website:

How optimistic.

First, a little background. With 200 billion trillion (ish) stars in the universe and 13.7 billion years that have elapsed since it all began, you might be wondering where all the alien civilizations are at. This is the basic question behind the Fermi paradox, the tension between our suspicions of the potential for life in the universe (given planets found in habitable zones, etc) and the fact that we have only found one planet with an intelligent (ish) species inhabiting it.

One solution, or at least a way of thinking about the problem, is known as the Great Filter. Proposed by Robin Hanson of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, the argument goes that given the lack of observed technologically advanced alien civilizations, there must be a great barrier to the development of life or civilization that prevents them from getting to a stage where they are making big, detectable impacts on their environment that we can witness from Earth.

Continue reading “New Solution To The Fermi Paradox Suggests The Great Filter Is Nearly Upon Us” »

If the deep laws of the universe had been ever so slightly different human beings wouldn’t, and couldn’t, exist. All explanations of this exquisite fine-tuning, obvious and not-so-obvious, have problems or complexities. Natural or supernatural, that is the question.

Free access to Closer to Truth’s library of 5,000 videos: http://bit.ly/376lkKN

Continue reading “Lee Smolin — Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life and Mind?” »

US space scientists unveil NASA’s mission to investigate Jupiter’s moon Europa for signs of alien life. The spacecraft Clipper, set for launch in October, aims to study Europa’s icy surface and assess habitable conditions. Despite challenges, scientists are optimistic about discovering potential life beyond Earth.