Specified complexity is what we should be looking for in signals from intelligent beings — orderly patterns that hold meanings not found in inanimate nature.
Tag: Caleb A. Scharf
Astrophysicist: If there really are extraterrestrials, what difference would it make?
Scharf: “Eventually it might all just be a bit of a relief. We’ll neither be alone, nor surrounded by anything particularly extraordinary. Copernican mediocrity will be somewhat restored, and we can go back to worrying about everything else that can go wrong on our speck of rock and water as it sails through the cosmos.”
At Scientific American: Maybe aliens live too fast or too slow for us to recognize
Even on Earth. And that is why we don’t see them, astrophysicist suggests: For example, could the messy chemistry we see in fossil fuels on Earth – a smorgasbord of organic reactions, a seemingly tarry chaos – be simply a short-term view of a living system that functions across hundreds of millions of years? Or Read More…
Astrobiologist: Why time travel can’t really work
Recently, cosmologist Carlo Rovelli, author of The Order of Time, argued that time travel, especially into the future, can work. However, astrobiologist Caleb A. Scarf sees an insurmountable barrier, which he calls the “spatial problem”: Let’s take the Earth’s motion around the Sun. A month of orbit corresponds to moving in an arc of approximately Read More…