The comparison about surface areas is wrong. A creature could drastically increase its surface area by having many tendril-like appendages (i.e. hairy surface) and limiting the core body to consist of thin shapes. A fractal web of tendrils would dissipate energy far more effectively.
Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?
151–160 of 204 posts
Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?
#152When thinking about such things, you've got to ask yourself: under what circumstances would such a creature appear and under what circumstances could it die? What does it need? What constitutes a good or bad thing for it. How does it learn? How does it perceive? How does it act out its intentions? Does it have a self preserving instinct?
It doesn't make much sense for a creature the size of the galaxy. If it did, it would be extremely slow and alien to us.
A more plausible way would be if a human-scale civilization would create self replicating probes that would spread in the galaxy and bootstrap some sort of large biological or AI civilization.
Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?
#153Sort of tangentially related is the physicist Geoffrey West, who decided to try to apply the thinking of a theoretical physicist to biological systems. His book Scale is excellent, and this is one of the most interesting podcasts I've ever heard:
Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?
#154It's a thoughtful article, and I love the reference to Burroughs' Soft Machine. But it doesn't distinguish clearly enough between self-conscious organisms and the rest. It's true that consciousness and evolution thereof likely crap out when latency goes over a few hundred milliseconds.
However, I see no limit to the size of zero-gravity organisms like the honey fungus. Fungi are filamentous, so there's no unsurmountable problem with heat dissipation.
And even for self-conscious organisms, I can imagine hierarchical organization, such as Rajaniemi's "metaself" or Watts' Bicameral Order.
Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?
#155Hmm, but what if the living creature had a density of neural circuitry similar to ours, and mainly interacted with things inside itself, and had slow propagation of knowledge? Not sure I understand this except under the hidden assumption of having a similar number of neural circuit elements
Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?
#156If anyone is interested in a sci-fi novel series that explores these kinds of themes for intelligent life, I highly recommend Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. (I've left the statement above intentionally vague to avoid excessive spoilers.)
Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?
#157Why only as big as a galaxy? Why not the entire universe?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com/infinite.htp
(Geoffrey Landis, the Melancholy of Infinite Space)
Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you believe its possible for a computer, more specifically an Artificial General Intelligence, to be "alive" (if one such thing ever gets built)?
Conscious? Yes (possibly). Alive? No.
I'd say It differently.
Intelligent? Yes
Conscious? Probably not.
Does intelligence imply life? I'd say no.
Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of stuff is fun to think about. In my opinion identity is based on behaviour, not composition. So long as an entity matches a given behaviour profile, then for all intents and purposes that entity IS the thing that the behaviour is normally attributed to. Kind of like Duck Typing: "If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck." So my response to your car example is that both veh…
So if an alien abducted you, created a clone to replace you while you are experimented upon, you'd still agree that you are living normally, and nothing happened to "you"?
Conversely, people usually go through profound behavioral transformations several times in their lives. Does that mean they are not "themselves" anymore?
Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?
#160The 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."
I guess you are just an ever changing object, referenced by a name, created by your parents and affected by your environment.
Human myName = new Human(mother, father, environment, spacetime); Location birthPlace = myName.mother.getCurrentLocation; location bithTime = myName.myMother.getCurrentBirthTime; myName.removeAllLimbs(); myName.upgradeAllLimbs(); CloneUtils.cloneHuman(myName, 'myClone') AssertEquals(myName, myClone) //false