Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 204 posts

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#111

Post by thibauts »

eljimmy wrote: post #50
tsunamifury wrote: post #39

It's answer of "No" is predicated on two assumptions: that the lifeform is not colonial in nature and that time is not a localized phenomenon. While on the surface that later assumption might sound absurd, our universe could very well be a Local Bubble of time. Time could even be a biological function of a higher dimensional being that is the size of the universe. There is also no way to disprove that without observi…

Thinking about what exists outside the universe always makes my brain feel weird. It seems impossible for your thoughts to imagine anything because your thoughts themselves are bound by the universe itself.

I think it feels weird because we define universe as having neither outside nor boundaries. There's a contradiction in terms. It ceases to feel strange as soon as you update the concept to something that has a boundary either in its spacial extension or through some kind of extra dimension.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#112

Post by Baeocystin »

thibauts wrote: post #111
eljimmy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking about what exists outside the universe always makes my brain feel weird. It seems impossible for your thoughts to imagine anything because your thoughts themselves are bound by the universe itself.

I think it feels weird because we define universe as having neither outside nor boundaries. There's a contradiction in terms. It ceases to feel strange as soon as you update the concept to something that has a boundary either in its spacial extension or through some kind of extra dimension.

The analogy I use to explain this to people is simply how it is impossible to go further south than the South Pole.

There is no physical barrier stopping you from moving in any direction, but due to the shape of the Earth you have reached the southernmost point.

It is likely the same with our universe, and its inherent morphology, too.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#113

Post by philovivero »

banachtarski wrote: post #7
bitL wrote: post #2

We still don't know if the Universe itself isn't a living organism with us playing the role of tiny viruses that require intelligence/consciousness to fulfill certain tasks, like what gut bacteria does for us.

We do. If you bothered to read the article, it makes a point that the communication speed between the components would be slow enough (even at light speed signaling) that the age of the universe would not have permitted sufficient time for such an organism to evolve and do anything.

I bothered to read the article, and I don't buy that premise at all.

It seems to indicate that for a thought to happen, a signal must traverse the entire length (width?) of your brain.

That isn't how it works at all. Many thoughts are localised in the brain. Further, some signals don't need to get to the brain at all. And some functions of life don't even need signals to ever leave the localised region at all.

If you are cut, your blood cells spill out, clot, and prevent further bleeding from happening, all without anything outside of the immediate vicinity of the cut to be notified (although it's good to let other parts of the body nearby, say another finger, from exacerbating the wound).

If the organism were larger than say a planet, then why would not the brain become distributed, with the parts needed to deal with one quadrant of the planet located at that part of it?

Basically, this article is lazy. It makes a couple of very dubious assumptions, then runs full-forward on those assumptions, never stopping to think if those assumptions even make sense.

Yes, if we are to try to imagine a life form that looks exactly like a human (or other life-form that we find on Earth), but is the size of the galaxy, we start to laugh, because that couldn't work. But that thought experiment is pretty silly.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#114

Post by jfoutz »

Taek wrote: post #45
banachtarski wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, before humans, there were eukaryotes, and prokaryotes before them. My argument is not supporting that the universe is a baby. It is saying that the being does not exist because it could not have evolved on this timescale, in the same way that single celled organisms are not human babies.

If we assume that the big bang was actually the conception event of some other cosmic entity, the universe could very easily be a living organism that's the equivalent of a few microsecond old fertilized zygote. So yes, a universe sized lifeform could not have evolved randomly since the big bang, but you can only be confident about that if you assume that nothing exists outside the spacetime bubble we call the univer…

or it could be the big bang is the relaxing of a muscle cell is some cosmic monster. Or perhaps the big bang was kinda like enzymes, breaking something hard to eat into a nice easily digestible heat bath. or it could be an edge transition of one wire of some cosmic computer.

It's fun to kick around crazy ideas on Saturday afternoon. It could be anything. Sadly, there's no way i'll ever know. But the idle speculation is still amusing.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#115

Post by philovivero »

mcappleton wrote: post #82

Look, the vast majority of a galaxy is empty space. A living creature is obviously not empty space, so all that space would have to be filled with the creature's matter. Well, if you put that much matter so close together, it will all collapse on itself and create a black hole. So no, you could not have a living creature as big as a galaxy.

Uh. The vast majority of what constitutes YOU is empty space.

Sometime go look up the amount of space between the protons, neutrons, and electron cloud in an atom.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#116

Post by barrkel »

alansammarone wrote: post #69
Swizec wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Universe is our local observable space-time So if we observe something beyond what is currently observable, would that not become observable and thus part of the universe?

Yes, but it might also be the case that we don't observe something outside of it, but rather infer the existence of something outside of it through some other phenomenon (which is much more probable - observing something outside of the visible universe as we know it would violate relativity). In that sense, it would be there, but would never be visible.

All observations are inferences from indirect phenomena.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#117

Post by Consultant32452 »

stareatgoats wrote: post #88

The question is not correctly formed: what we really want to know is if there are life-like beings that could operate on a totally different scale than ours (both time and size wise, including viruses and whales here). Self centered thinking, i.e. restricting our inquiry to only include protein-based lifeforms or other qualities required on our scale obviously prevents us from having the required open minded mindset.

There are more bacterial cells in your body than there are human cells. Where exactly do you draw the line between what constitutes "you."

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#118

Post by delecti »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #117
stareatgoats wrote: post #88

The question is not correctly formed: what we really want to know is if there are life-like beings that could operate on a totally different scale than ours (both time and size wise, including viruses and whales here). Self centered thinking, i.e. restricting our inquiry to only include protein-based lifeforms or other qualities required on our scale obviously prevents us from having the required open minded mindset.

There are more bacterial cells in your body than there are human cells. Where exactly do you draw the line between what constitutes "you."

A zoo is still a zoo if there aren't any animals in it, but it wouldn't stay in business very long. No matter how important the animals are to the long-term viability of the zoo, they are not the zoo.

My gut bacteria may be vital to my survival, but they are not me. I don't find placing that line to be difficult at all.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#119

Post by ordu »

komali2 wrote: post #67
eljimmy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking about what exists outside the universe always makes my brain feel weird. It seems impossible for your thoughts to imagine anything because your thoughts themselves are bound by the universe itself.

Well even worse, our thoughts are bound by some maximum distance of comprehension. We can abstract the stellar scale but we can't understand it like we understand the distance across the street or whatever. I find this frustrating :(

> we can't understand

Understanding is just a psychological phenomena. Its your brains who choose what ideas they mark as 'understood'. Thus its under your control what you understand and what you are not.

Once beeing a drunk teenager I felt myself understaning all the things in the whole Universe. Its pretty hard I'd say, because I never felt like this thereafter. Though I didn't tried to repeat it. Probably alcohol is not the best fit for it, maybe there are some drugs that can make you to understand.

I believe that somewhere in the brain there is some special spot, and all you need to understand everything is to thrust an electrode in that spot.

If you live your brain as I do and prefer not to control your brains in possible harmful way, than (I'm pretty sure) if one get some special training on this he could come eventually to everything-understanding state of mind. Maybe it even allow to switch by volition between that state of mind and state of mind of Socrates, who used to claim that he understands nothing. I didn't try it myself because I'm not sure about arbitrarily control option, and generally prefer Socrates' way of thinking.

But if you don't like to cheat, there is honest way to start understanding a very large distances. In general mind mark as understood all the things it is used to. You may train yourself at imagining large objects through some sort of succession. You should do all sorts of mental work with those objects in your imagination -- moving them, rotating, colliding, flying by or through them... Try to use different and constant kind of objects for every order of magnitude -- it might be really helpful. It will take time, but its still possible.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#120

Post by knome »

delecti wrote: post #118
Consultant32452 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more bacterial cells in your body than there are human cells. Where exactly do you draw the line between what constitutes "you."

A zoo is still a zoo if there aren't any animals in it, but it wouldn't stay in business very long. No matter how important the animals are to the long-term viability of the zoo, they are not the zoo. My gut bacteria may be vital to my survival, but they are not me. I don't find placing that line to be difficult at all.

The only part of the flesh which is "you" is the nervous system. Everything else can be hacked off or replaced without a loss of identity.
Post reply on HN