For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.
Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either “alive” or “dead”. Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.
For example, if a cell is “alive” but has less than 2 “alive” neighbors it “dies” by under-population. If the cell is “alive” and has more than three “alive” neighbors it “dies” from over-population, etc.
Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.
It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles… life.
There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!
The concept of emergence blows my mind.
We have this property in our universe where simple things with simple rules can create infinitely complex things and behaviours. A molecule of water can’t be wet, but water can. A single ant can’t really do anything by himself, but a colony with simple pheromone exchange mechanisms can assign jobs, regulate population, create huge anthills with vents, specialty rooms and highways.
Nothing within a cell is “alive”, it’s just atoms and molecules, but the cell itself is. One cell cannot experience things, think, love, have hopes and dreams, or want to watch Netflix all day, but a human can.
The fact that lots of tiny useless things governed by really simple rules can create this complexity in this world is breathtakingly beautiful.
Kinda ties into your example :)
Reminds me of the statement that you can’t dissect a rabbit to find out why it’s cute
Won’t stop me from trying [joking]
Don’t, rabbit necropsies are the worst smelling thing you’ll ever encounter.
How come? Why rabbits specifically?
Not sure why, just that I was in a building when one was being performed and it stunk up the whole place to the point I almost went home because I was going to vomit. My boss put out a bowl of liquid that neutralized the odor, thank god.
Ok what was the liquid? That sounds useful.
Just like the trillions of parameters that make up machine learning models that can speak or create images
Indeed , more is different:
https://cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf
Evolution as a concept; not just biological. The fact that you can explain the rise of complex systems with just three things - inheritance, mutation, selection. It’s so simple, yet so powerful.
Perhaps not surprisingly it’s directly tied to what OP is talking about cellular automata.
DNA still blows my mind. Some weird simple molecules that just happen to like to link together have become the encoding of how complex biological systems are constructed. Then mash two separate sets of DNA together, add a little happenstance, and you have another new being from those three things you mentioned.
There’s something interesting in here about the persistence of legacy systems that I can’t quite put my finger on. Rest assured I will be consumed by the thought for the remainder of the day.
There are plenty things that we could talk about legacy systems from an evolutionary approach. It’s specially fun when you notice similarities between software and other (yup!) evolutionary systems.
For example. In Biology you’ll often see messy biological genetic pools, full of clearly sub-optimal alleles for a given environment, decreasing in frequency over time but never fully disappearing. They’re a lot like machines running Windows XP in 2023, it’s just that the selective pressure towards more modern Windows versions was never harsh enough to get rid of them completely.
Or leftovers in languages that work, but they don’t make synchronic sense when you look at other features of the language. Stuff like gender/case in English pronouns, Portuguese proclisis (SOV leftover from Latin in a SVO language), or Italian irregular plurals (leftovers of Latin defunct neuter gender). It’s like modern sites that still need animated .GIF support, even if .WEBM would be more consistent with the modern internet.
Galaxies are not evenly distributed in space. Instead, when you look at the universe, galaxies are grouped in giant strings that look like a neural connections in a brain.
It blew my mind when I learned that we’re in a relatively dark, empty part of space compared to what’s out there. It really put into perspective for me how difficult space travel will be for us as we continue to advance.
Space is incomprehensibly big and its getting larger over time. We will never have meaningful travel outside the solar system. If humanity started traveling in space from the moment we evolved, we would be able to travel the length of the milky way around two times. Space is basically a boondoggle. Our solar system still contains lots of resources though, so its not totally worthless.
Yea … like Star Trek, with warp speed and everything, is basically all limited to our single Galaxy … and that’s not unrealistic given their technology.
Like in that space-faring future, the galaxy is basically the new continent and the inter-galactic divide the new great ocean that no one has ever crossed.
Tom Paris and the Cochrane have entered the chat
Yea because gra-- woahhh
And here’s the other thing I try to visualize:
Matter - both dark and “normal” - falling like water into these gravitational canyons that we see as giant strings, while the empty spaces in between expand and accelerate. The dynamics of this thing are mind-breaking.
The scale of the universe. It’s an incomprehensible amount of emptiness.
Highly recommend the browser game Orbity.io
I just played it, such a fun game. Not exactly what I thought it was going to be when it come to the infinity of space
It honestly pisses me off lol. I was so into space as a youngin but as Ive gotten a better grasp of the scale and what is actually possible in physics Ive realized its a massive boondoggle. Real pretty though
I still refuse to believe that we can’t overcome the limit of the speed of light. Maybe it’s something like “warpspeed”, maybe it’s something like evolving beyond the need for a physical body, but I believe that at some (far) point in our future we will solve that problem.
Speed of light is a bit of a misnomer, its really the speed of causality; the least amount of time it can take for one thing to interact with another. It will never be possible to overcome that limit unfortunately
Nah, it’s impossible with our current understanding of the nature of the universe and it’s rules. Every time that has been true of something, humanity has eventually either solved the problem or rendered it moot. This one may just take a while.
Respectfully disagree. The math speaks for itself
How shortsighted.
Its shortsighted to trust math?
You should look into the effects on causality of going faster than the speed of light. If you can send information faster than the speed of light all kinds of wacky paradoxes show their heads. I used to believe what you did, that with time and knowledge we could overcome the speed of light. But after learning more about our universe I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I enjoyed this video on the topic https://youtu.be/an0M-wcHw5A
A fact I’ve recently enjoyed spreading around: all of humanity’s radio communications have traveled about 200 light years from Earth. The diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is ~100K light years. So (in the worst case) we’re like 0.2% of the way to even being a “blip on the radar” of any alien life within our galaxy.
all of humanity’s radio communications have traveled about 200 light years from Earth
Also interesting is that because the energy of those signals is spreading out as they move away from their point of origin they become less detectable as they travel. Most signals would fall below practical detection limits before making it halfway to the nearest star. At the extreme, the Arecibo Message, transmitted with a ridiculous ERP, will be detectable to reasonably sized receivers for tens of thousands of light years, assuming they are located along the path of the beam.
People working together to solve problems without personal profit as the main incentive.
Open source software
Dear God, it’s beautiful. (And genuinely seriously important)
It kills me how much more of it there’d be, and how much better off we’d be in general, if we weren’t forced to spend so much of our lives working for other people.
Now we’re at a top 3 idea which haunts me. We have everything to make life so amazing now, but we just can’t let go of these defunct paradigms that drag us down into a lower common denominator existence.
BitTorrent. I only need to share a file once and it could potentially reach millions of people. It’s old tech now but it feels like magic to me.
One of the best pieces of software ever. And it actually works, that’s the crazy thing!
Part of the beauty and awe I get whenever I reread that famous excerpt from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot is the sense of how ephemeral and delicate our existence, and even the very human concept of “existence”, is. We are infinitesimally small and yet, through no fault of our own, our days, how we fill them, and the people we know hold some measure of importance to us. And it will all be gone - eventually. It’s a very somber note yet it makes me feel a certain sense of peace.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
This is a beautiful quote—thank you for sharing.
Thermoses. They keep hot stuff hot. They keep cold stuff cold. No touchscreen or controls whatsoever. How does it know?
On the chance you’re not just making a funny - The walls of your house keep inside stuff inside and outside stuff outside. A thermos is just a wall for heat, whether that heat is trying to get in or out.
Are you saying I live in a thermos?
I suppose you could model the Earth as a thermos, or some type of vacuum flask.
How little food intake is enough to sustain extensive (physical) activity.
The little birds running on the beach with every wave, eating mini things. How can those be enough to sustain that much running? And it’ll have to sustain them when they’re not eating too.
A human can not eat for several days and still stay active. An incredible adaptation. I food conversion, storage, and priority dissolution in a complex system.
A human can not eat for several days and still stay active.
I’m looking at my bulging waist and feeling incredibly guilty right now!
I’m looking at my plentiful plate of lasagna with another eyes rn.
I think about this a lot too! It feels wrong that so little material can allow so much work to be done. Feels like moving a mars bar should take a significant amount of the mars bars energy to move stuff around, but you could do a lap around the block and still not deplete what it gave.
- Free software
- Group theory, Church notation and Lambda Calculus making many things in Math under one roof
- Design of CPU and Operating Systems. Both fields are made by geniuses.
I was kinda oblivious to the world of FOSS until simultaneously switching to Lemmy and also resuscitating an old computer by installing Linux. It took a long time for me to wrap my head around the fact that people are just cranking out parts of OS’s, or pw managers, or file zip utilities for shits and giggles in their free time, and not even charging for it. A game or two as a passion project I could understand, but who sits down after work and plods through a zip utility?
After years and years of “if the service is free, you’re the product” it really takes some time to rewire my brain. It’s almost enough to make me wish I went into software instead of mechanical, so I could pitch in on something.
You could design parts or projects for 3D printing
It would have to be Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Such a beautiful proof that shakes mathematics to its core.
The science communicator Veritasium made a nice video about it: https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo
I first learned about it in Douglas Hofstaedter’s masterpiece Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/HeQX2HjkcNo
https://piped.video/HeQX2HjkcNo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Second the Gödel Escher Bach recommendation. Don’t really hear about that one these days.
thermodynamics. it sets hard physical boundary to what happens spontaneously and what can’t, how much energy you need to pump in or can recover from process, but not only that - it’s very broadly applicable, including large parts of chemistry, biology, information theory and more, like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system
The butterfly effect. The phenomeon that tiny seemingly insignificant changes can result in massively different outcomes. Someone out there could read this post and get distracted and leave home for work/school/shopping a bit later than they would’ve and avoid a major accident. But conversely, someone could also get distracted by this post while crossing the road and… you know… die…
Fascinating, yet terrifying at the same time.
I think the butterfly effect is much more interesting when you think about incredibly far reaching effects that are essentially impossible to predict. Someone running late and getting into an accident might actually be relatively easy to predict.
Instead: someone reading this post is running late. Because of this a different car following behind them gets caught at a red light they shouldn’t have gotten caught at. As they hit the brakes for that light, their passenger lurches forward and accidentally sends a nonsensical text to their friend. Their friend reads that nonsense text, and in their confusion spills their coffee on the floor. A person walking by slips on the coffee, hits their head, and dies.
The person running late just killed a person miles away, and they have zero idea that it even happened.
The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester, specifically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur–Vaidman_bomb_tester).
Next, that I can buy and program a computer for 0.30 USD that’s half the size of a grain of rice (ATtiny10). There are cheaper too, but that’s the one I like.
Finally, on to the horrifying: Boltzmann brains. The idea that given a reasonable interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics, and long spans of time, the most common form of brain in the universe ought to be one that forms due to random fluctuations. It exists for long enough to have exactly one thought (e.g. recall a false memory), then dissipates.
This ought to be by far the most common form of conscious mind in the Universe. In a sense, you could say it ‘blows’ the general case of minds.
Since you are a mind, statistically, you ought to be a Boltzmann brain. You may not be, but are unable to prove otherwise, even to yourself. So either we have some things left to learn about thermodynamics, or the most probable outcome at all times is that you cease to exist immediately after having your current thought (although I hope you don’t). Sleep tight!
Black holes and the uncertainty of what lies behind the event horizon. The possibility that inside a black hole, a whole new universe could exist without us ever knowing. When tripping through life taught me one thing, it is that many things can be seen as part of a huge fractal, and that view fits right into the interpretation that black holes are nothing else than universes in universes. After all, our big bang might just be another ordinary black hole, reaching critical mass.
Of course I can not prove it, but I love thinking about it.
Anyone able to ELI5 why wormholes and dimensional pockets are prevailing theories on black holes?
Like, I’ve got a lot of sci-fi under my belt and I need to figure out the sci part of it.
Anyone able to ELI5 why wormholes and dimensional pockets are prevailing theories on black holes?
Like, I’ve got a lot of sci-fi under my belt and I need to figure out the sci part of it.
I think the only reason those specifically are most well known, is because they capture popular imagination.
Basically, because it’s impossible to see inside black holes to know what’s going on, there’s very few ways to validate ideas. Therefore, outside of a select number of external observational techniques (like radio signals and gravitational waves) to place some limitations, ideas about what happens beyons the event horizon are in the realm of pure math, which people don’t care about unless it either A. Verifiable, or B. Just sounds really cool.
Black Hole hypotheses therefore tend to go one of a few ways:
Scenario 1
Scientist A: Hey if you use this math, black holes can do this thing
Scientist B: That requires this other thing which isn’t true, to be true, and/or breaks this fundamental law
Scientist A: This hypothesis is my precious brain baby and if you talk shit about it I will shatter your knees
Scenario 2
Scientist A: Hey if you use this math, black holes can do this thing
Scientist B: That requires an assumption we can’t, or have yet to, verify is true (almost always somehow related to string theory)
Scientist A: This hypothesis is my precious brain baby and if you talk shit about it I will shatter your knees
Scenario 3:
Scientist A: Hey if you use this math, black holes can do this thing
Scientist B: Okay the math checks out as one of X number of possibilities with that same math, but there’s know way to tell which, if any of these would be true (equations with multiple valid solutions, almost always related to spacetime topology)
Scientist A: Heehee numbers do funni
ETA: The specific subcategories of hypotheses you mentioned also have an inherent advantage of not having to deal with singularities. Why that’s good: Einstein’s theories say infinite density impossible. With singularity, can’t connect quantum theory to relativity theory. No quantum gravity make math bb’s big sad. Solution? Instead of squoosh matter really tiny, just send it somewhere else! They aren’t the only frameworks that avoid singularities, but definitely the coolest sounding and least complicated
Thank you! I love this breakdown. I had a suspicion it was like this all along but lack the astrophysics background.
Not sure why astrophysicists are so quick to pull a Tonya Harding, though.
They hate to admit it, and it’s definitely less in-your-face most of the time because of the expected formality of the scientific community, but physicists, and specifically those trying to make advancements like we see around black holes, are SUPER arrogant. For the first 2 scenarios listed, they usually only make a formal paper out of the discovery to later defend the drawback as something they can “work around”. Either by “oh we’ll definitely eventually figure out how to emperically verify this haha. Look how well it works, you’d be crazy not to believe in this”, or the more extreme “This obviously constitutes a whole rewrite of our understanding of physics because my solution is so elegant except for the parts where it literally doesn’t work”
That last one is less prone to arrogance because topology is working with an insane amount of unverifiable possibilities already, so they don’t really tend to get too attached to any given solution.
I can’t remember if it was a youtube video or a paper or an article or what, but I saw something explaining that, based on one interpretation of Einsteins equations, past the point of singularity, space and time invert. This would mean that the longer the black hole exists around in “our” universe (in absolute terms), the larger it becomes on the inside, and the larger it gets on the outside, the longer the inside universe would persist. I feel like you would have liked it, if only I could remember what it was. :(
The thing I saw postulated both that the universe would reuse the matter the black hole absorbed, and that there would be infinite branching universes since each would develop their own black holes, but then you have an issue with regards to running out of matter at some point. Though I guess that could be solved if you assume every black hole must converge at the end of their containing universe’s lifespan, and all matter would be reused in whatever blackhole absorbs the blackhole containing that parent universe? Oh hey, we’re back to fractals again!
Personally I’m a fan of the idea of black holes as topological stars that fall in line with string theory, but there have been so many hypothetical frameworks coming out in recent years that are just fascinating to think about.
