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Complex Numbers #1011143 added June 2, 2021 at 12:04am
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Survivor
This one's been hanging out in my queue for a long time, not being deleted. It's a miracle!
Because if the planet had been destroyed, we wouldn't be here to note it?
This is known as an observer selection effect, and the same sort of bias might apply not only to perforated planes, but to whole worlds as well.
"Might?" It's also a type of survivorship bias, and kin to the Anthropic Principle.
When I was a kid, lo these many aeons ago, it was common for us to ride around in the backs of cars or pickups without car seats, or even seat belts. I did it, and I'm still alive, so obviously from my point of view, that was a perfectly acceptable practice.
If, of course, you don't look at childhood death/injury statistics from that era.
It could be that we’ve been shielded from these existential threats by our very existence.
Rarely have I seen a more perfect reversal of cause and effect. It's remarkable, really.
As Sandberg and his co-authors Nick Bostrom and Milan Ćirković write, “The risks associated with catastrophes such as asteroidal/cometary impacts, supervolcanic episodes, and explosions of supernovas/gamma-ray bursts are based on their observed frequencies. As a result, the frequencies of catastrophes that destroy or are otherwise incompatible with the existence of observers are systematically underestimated.”
In other words -- as I interpret this, anyway -- we've been lucky so far, but might not be so lucky in the future. Based on the next few paragraphs in the article, I think I got it right.
If this is true, it might explain why our radio telescopes have reported only a stark silence from our cosmic neighborhood.
Or maybe it's because -- and yes, I know I've said this before -- what we're looking for is artificial signals, but evolution doesn't require the eventual emergence of technology-capable life. All it requires is fitness for survival, which takes many different forms; those qualities needed to build radios and rockets are irrelevant to species survival. Sure, one could argue that it allows for species survival through dispersal to other planets, but that's an effect, not a purpose.
One of the leading interpretations of this quantum weirdness is that all of the possible realities for the particle that were winnowed away in this act of observation actually are realized somewhere in branching-off parallel universes, by observers in parallel universes—parallel universes just as real as the one in which we happen to live. Though the universe may be infinite in distance it may also be infinitely divergent in this sort of ontological zoo.
Quibble: not actually infinite. But might as well be from our limited perspective, since the numbers involved are so freaking large.
This condition of eternal torment, where one might survive arbitrarily long by subjectively navigating the narrowing tributaries of the many-worlds time lines, staying alive through increasingly—and eventually astronomically—unlikely life paths, is known as quantum immortality, or quantum hell.
I comment on these things as I read them, not after (usually). I was just going to bring up the concept of quantum immortality. But I like "quantum hell" better.
“And eternal inflation implies an infinite universe. If there’s an infinite universe then yeah, if we wipe ourselves out there will still be plenty of life in the universe somewhere. And plenty of humans ... and plenty of Peters and plenty of Anthonys sitting in offices.”
This is a common misconception about infinity. The concept of infinity doesn't mean that there's definitely another "you" somewhere. Consider the set of positive integers, which is an infinite set. Never, not once in that entire set, does an number repeat. Sure, individual digits appear in different numbers, but there's only one 1, only one 42, only one 10100. Infinity doesn't imply duplication.
Of course, the quote I quoted above was from someone far smarter than I am, so take my comment as you will.
To summarize, the article is worth contemplating, but I have to stress that it's all speculative. Philosophical, even. When I consider how many times I've come close to dying, but didn't, sometimes I wonder if the many-worlds hypothesis holds true, and the universe split into one containing alive-me and one containing dead-me.
But no, this is literally what Occam's Razor was invented for: "Never multiply entities unnecessarily." The many-worlds hypothesis may be compelling to physicists, but it's currently both unverifiable and unfalsifiable, and it literally, actually multiplies entities unnecessarily, when a more elegant answer is that we're only around to talk about this sort of thing because nothing has happened to prevent it. |
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