04 Mar 2019 22:29
I think for us to be able to expand outward into space, especially to other solar systems not only will require a huge technological leap, but also a cultural/economical/societal one. Our current political/economical systems will be considered quite archaic, primitive, wasteful and out of date by our descendants who finally do it.
About intelligent life taking so long to evolve on Earth, maybe if we didn't have all those pesky mass extinctions it would have happened much earlier. Imagine if the K-T event hadn't happened, with dinosaurs or their descendants evolving intelligence (they were already beginning to) we would have gotten a 65 million year head start!
I think there should be at least a half dozen space-faring civilizations in each galaxy, but there would be no reason for them to want to come here, we are in the rural part of the galaxy.
Some of them might not even be organic or may exist in interstellar space as opposed to on a planet or be composed entirely of energy or exist on the quantum scale- we would not be able to detect most of these!
Wat, direct interstellar travel may be impossible, but besides the Alcubierre Drive if we ever are able to construct traversable wormholes Kip Thorne style, we may find a way around it. Also, perhaps paradoxes can be resolved by use of MWI, instead of creating paradoxes you simply branch off into a different timeline of the same universe. In other words, if you for some inane reason want to kill your own grandfather, he wont be the same grandfather who was your ancestor, he will be from a different timeline.
Stellarator, I like the hypersphere idea also, and the fact that it could also resemble a toroidal shape. About other universes being somewhat similar (especially if they are adjacent), I can only refer to Alpha Centauri A being similar to our sun. Perhaps being adjacent means a similar environment can create a similar universe (with the obvious caveat that it's a multiple star system so there would obviously be some differences. I just see photons as something that should exist in every universe since light is so basic to everything we know.)
About time before the Big Bang, Stephen Hawking had some interesting ideas with his Imaginary Time, which solves the singularity problem by extending the time line back before the Big Bang and making it more of a Bounce than a Bang (like the Origin point of a Cartesian coordinate system- thats actually where I got the title for my Origin series.)
As far as other universes even cursorily interacting with ours, there may be hints of that in the CMBR. I agree about other universes being superpositional, thats what I meant by adjacent, not the border thing (not like the border between two nations at any rate lol.) What about particle universes? The idea that any "particle" we can imagine is actually a whole new universe unto itself and that our universe is just a particle in another universe?
My favorite numbers are pi, 15, 42 and 137! I truly loved this discussion of mathematics- it proves our universe is mathematical and numbers like pi mean something on the cosmic scale too! It's interesting you mentioned magic numbers- dont we also have this with newly discovered chemical elements that are created in the lab and certain ones with magic atomic numbers and masses exist on islands of relative stability?