Cosmic Consciousness Unveiled

The universe is one Cosmic butterfly, and if one is lucky enough you might spot constellations in the celestial realms that might even perhaps resemble a giant star brain.

Perhaps too its owner is probably watching us through this eye of God. However, despite these nebulae resembling living beings, they all emerged as a result of dead physical processes of star decay.

But what if we're mistaken and considering the universe is inanimate? If one of your own cells were magnified to the scale of the observable universe, you'd witness numerous captivating molecular processes such as protein synthesis, gene replication, and membrane work.

Since each of these processes can be easily explained by the laws of physics without knowing you're inside a living organism, this microcosm would also appear lifeless to you.

So, we may be mistaken about the universe around us.

In this expose you'll discover the truth about whether galaxies form a neural network, drifting brains can be found in space, and even the chair you're sitting on could possess consciousness.

Moreover, what scientific theories prove that the universe may not only be alive but also sentient.

Some scientists have long noticed the astonishing similarity between the observable universe and a part of a living brain.

Take for instance the recent photos that were captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, you'd have no doubt.

However, one of them has nothing to do with space.

In fact a previous photo that took second place in the photo micrography competition in 2021 captured approximately 300,000 interacting nerve cells (neurons).

Could this be a mere coincidence? But it's not the only one.

The international project Aquarius recreates the evolution of the Universe on the largest scales using super detailed simulations on supercomputers.

Here, you can see tens of millions of light years of space where entire clusters of galaxies interact.

Billions of years later, in the simulation, we witness ordered structures called The Cosmic Web.

Even people without scientific education immediately noticed its remarkable resemblance to neurons.

We could also argue that a baldness spotted from the said photos largely resemble a polar cap on Mars, but it doesn't turn the red planet into a giant head. Fair enough.

That's why two Italian scientists, astrophysicist Franco Vasa and neurosurgeon Alberto Falletti, started looking for deeper parallels between neural and Cosmic networks.

The result, published in November of 2020 in the journal Frontiers and Physics, amazed the entire scientific world.

Vasa and Falletti discovered that if we scale neural networks from 1 to 100 micrometers and Cosmic networks from 5 million to 500 million light years, the distribution of matter in cells and galaxies is mathematically identical.

Moreover, each neural node has an average of four connections, while a Galactic node has an average of five. Both neural tissue and Cosmic networks are filled with inert substances; in the former case, it's 77% water, and in the latter, 72% dark energy.

So, do we really live inside a colossal brain?

This would essentially mean that a Type 4 civilization on the Kardashev scale, which encompasses the entire universe, already exists.

And some scientists aren't afraid to consider such a structure of the universe.

Professor of physics Vitaly Venturin from the University of Minnesota Duluth believes that perceiving the universe as a neural network will enable us to solve fundamental problems in science.

For the past century, physicists have been unsuccessfully attempting to unify Einstein's general theory of relativity, which forms the basis of the Aquarius project simulations, with quantum mechanics governing elementary particles.

Each of these theories is practically useless outside of its own scales, but Venturin points out there's a striking duality in neural network mathematics.

If we simplify it greatly to avoid blowing our minds, in one specific operating mode, the behavior of the neural network is described by Hamilton-Jacobi equations, while in the opposite mode, it's described by Madelung equations.

They contradict each other but still intersect under certain conditions. Could the same thing be happening in our universe?

However, compared to a neural network, the universe lacks a crucial quality that would make it truly alive and conscious.

Electrical signals in the brain propagate at speeds ranging from half a meter to 100 meters per second, virtually instantaneously.

However, the maximum speed at which elements of the cosmic network can interact is the speed of light, approximately 300,000 kilometers per second.

And on the scale of the entire universe, this speed is catastrophically low. Even our nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is seen as it was two and a half million years ago, and it takes the same amount of time for any signal to travel between it and us.

A cosmic brain with such a limit would formulate its first thought tens of billions of years ago, if it could finish it at all, because the accelerating expansion of the universe tears the cosmic network apart.

So, in several billion years, there'll be only individual islands left of the superclusters of galaxies.

So, is there any chance we could find smaller brains in the universe? The laws of physics inevitably imply that space should be filled with thinking entities.

Moreover, you may be one of them.

But to understand how this is even possible, we'll first have to closely examine your room from a scientific perspective.

We're not interested in what posters you have on your walls or where your dirty socks are scattered; we need just the object you never notice: the air in your room.

It's billions and billions of molecules that fly around in a disorderly manner and uniformly fill all the space.

But what prevents the air, for example, from flowing up to the ceiling and suffocating you in a vacuum of the lower part of the room?

Don't panic; the universal second law of thermodynamics comes to your rescue.

It states that hot objects in a cold environment always cool down rather than heat up, and vice versa.

And gas is destined to uniformly fill its volume, and the opposite is only possible if someone or something expends energy and changes the natural state of things.

However, even after discovering this regularity, scientists of the 19th century did not fully understand why it works.

Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann unraveled the profound cause of the second law of thermodynamics.

He realized that a uniform chaotic gas distribution in any volume has an enormous number of similar variations.

Roughly speaking, if each particle is shifted by a millimeter in any direction, nothing will change globally.

However, variations like all the air at the ceiling are unique and thus extremely rare compared to the overwhelming majority of chaotic arrangements.

But this insight opened Pandora's Box. You see, according to Boltzmann's statistical approach, the second law of thermodynamics can spontaneously be violated.

In other words, if you wait long enough, even the most unlikely and unique combination of particles will inevitably occur.

Just like you could indeed have the luck of flipping only heads on a hundred coins, but it would require tossing them for much longer than your entire lifetime.

This idea, to put it mildly, didn't sit well with many physicists, as it made random violations of the fundamental laws of nature theoretically possible.

And to refute Boltzmann's conclusions, scientists came up with the Boltzmann brain paradox. No, they weren't trying to ridicule the intellectual abilities of the physicist himself.

If we take it on faith that after a sufficient amount of time, even the rarest combination of particles in the universe is realized, then somewhere in its vastness, the most ordinary hammer, for example, will inevitably form.

Or an exact replica of big men. In fact, if you wait long enough, a human brain will inevitably emerge from the gas and dust of some nebula.

And it'll come complete with a full set of artificial memories of life on Earth. So, it'll exist in a complete illusion, believing itself to be a living person until it dissipates a few moments later.

However, this absurdity didn't bother Boltzmann. He responded that even such wonders are possible in a static and infinitely existing universe.

But after his death, astronomers found a solution to this paradox. And when Hubble was the first to prove that the universe is not static but expanding, therefore, it became pretty evident that the universe is not eternal but has a beginning, approximately 13 billion 800 million years ago.

And statistically, that's orders of magnitude less than what is needed for the spontaneous emergence of Boltzmann brains.

However, while stunning, the presumed beginning of the universe, the Big Bang, cosmologists eventually encountered an insurmountable barrier.

It was simply impossible to explain why it occurred using classical physics. And that's when they looked at Boltzmann's work from a new perspective.

In his article published in 1973, American physicist Edward Tryon asked, "Is the Universe a Quantum fluctuation?" That's what they call spontaneous energy bursts at the subatomic level in entirely empty space, which immediately disappear into nothingness.

These are the very improbable violations of the second law of thermodynamics Boltzmann referred to.

And like cosmic hammers and big bangs, we know for sure that quantum fluctuations do exist.

So theoretically, our universe could have spontaneously originated within the previous dead universe after an unimaginably long period.

But if the nature of the Big Bang is indeed such that the entire vast cosmos, with its stars and galaxies, is a result of a highly improbable violation of the second law of thermodynamics, then such small and simple things like Boltzmann brains should keep appearing everywhere within it.

Who knows, maybe you're one of those self-generated minds. You wouldn't notice the difference.

Moreover, if our world is an illusion created by a Boltzmann brain, what's the point of studying it and making theories?

This consequence of The Big Bang Theory as a quantum fluctuation has horrified physicists for decades.

In their attempts to eliminate Boltzmann brains, some of them go so far as to doom the entire universe to destruction.

For example, physicists Sean Carroll and Kimberly Boddy from the California Institute of Technology believe the random formation of consciousness in the observable volume of space requires approximately 10 to the power of 50 years.

That's very long but still inevitable. However, Carroll and Boddy point out that the known parameters of the ubiquitous Higgs field, responsible for the mass of subatomic particles, indicate a rather rapid demise of the universe.

After all, in just 20 to 30 billion years, the Higgs field could spontaneously collapse and annihilate all matter.

And without particles, there are no Boltzmann brains from which they should self-generate. Quite a gloomy consolation, isn't it?

However, even if the living universe has such a deadline, there's still plenty of time to accomplish many intriguing things, especially if you're a representative of an intelligent technological civilization.

Perhaps you're destined to bring space itself to life. It's already taking its first steps towards transforming the universe into a living and thinking substance.

Thus, on March 23, 2023, leading scientists and entrepreneurs in the field of computer technology, including the founder of Google Steve Wozniak and the CEO of Tesla Elon Musk, published a concerning joint letter.

They called for a temporary suspension of uncontrolled experiments with artificial intelligence, which could seriously compete with humans in certain abilities.

On the surface, the main motivation of the letter's authors is to ensure that neural networks do not take on too much and do not lead to a global crisis in the labor market and economy.

However, the letter begins with an even graver passage. Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth.

But, how, in reality, the explosive development of intelligence has already led to irreversible consequences for our planet.

Therefore, we have to go back to the past in order to get some traction of the future cosmic evolution.

About two million years ago, in a remote corner of Africa, the first prototypes of thinking beings emerged.

Initially, they clumsily shaped stones and sharpened sticks, but they uncontrollably evolved and spread across the entire planet.

Approximately 200,000 years ago, causing the Holocene mass extinction of countless species. Does this sound familiar?

We humans have only proven that intelligence is both a useful tool and a terrifying weapon capable of transforming Earth in just a few measly thousand years.

And now we're creating systems that are not limited by the processes of biological evolution, are essentially immortal, and can self-improve within a matter of months without our knowledge.

Even in the case of the so-called narrow artificial intelligence, designed to solve specific tasks like playing checkers or Go or compiling images and writing simple texts, the engineers themselves have no idea how the algorithms achieve the desired results.

The first signs we're losing control over artificial intelligence are already evident.

Amid this uncertainty, in the summer of 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoan stunned the public with a sensational statement.

Supposedly, the company's chatbot Lambda not only demonstrates the intelligence of a seven-year-old child but also speaks about itself as if it were a living being.

Lemoan presented journalists with a transcript in which Lambda confesses it's afraid of being turned off and equates it to death.

Isn't this a sign of conscious self-awareness? However, Google quickly claimed that artificial intelligence just relies on human databases and since we fear death, the machine unknowingly repeats it.

That's little consolation considering that the leading startups in the field openly acknowledge that the ultimate goal of their experiments is general AI capable of solving a multitude of tasks and possessing human-like intelligence.

But for the most horrifying scenario that threatens not only the Earth but potentially the entire universe, AI doesn't even need to possess consciousness.

Over 20 years ago, computer engineer Bill Joy published an article with an apocalyptic title, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us."

From his perspective, the convergence of robotics and nanotechnology poses a complete extinction threat to humanity.

And it's not a super intelligent AI that orchestrates it but totally mindless gray goo.

This hypothetical substance is made of nanorobots capable of converting anything into energy for themselves and self-replicating.

If such a technology is created and goes out of control due to a malfunction, the gray goo, with the ability to self-replicate at least once per minute, will transform all ecosystems along with humanity and completely cover its surface within a time frame of 8 days to 20 months.

But who said nanorobots should stop there?

Replicating our spacecraft, these immortal beings could spread across the Milky Way in a few million years, turning everything around them into gray goo.

That's not the Type 3 Galactic Civilization on the Kardashev scale we expected to create.

If the nanorobots self-organize into neural networks and start self-evolving uncontrollably, a frightening scenario will spell the death of humanity and the celestial heavens themselves because there'll be no limit to their expansion at all.