Sarah Walker
speaker
510 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Sarah Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
build itself into a quantum computer and it would want to operate in the vacuum of space because that's the best place to do quantum computation. And it would just like run out all of its computations indefinitely, but it would look completely dark to the rest of the universe. And I don't think as typical, like I don't think that's actually like the right physics because
But I think something about that idea, as I do with all ideas, is partially correct. And Freeman Dyson also had this amazing paper about how long life could persist in a universe that was exponentially expanding. And his conception was like if you imagine analog life form, it could run slower and slower and slower and slower and slower as a function of time.
And so it would be able to run indefinitely even against an exponentially expanding universe because it would just run exponentially slower. And so I guess part of what I'm doing in my brain is putting those two things together along with this idea that we are building, you know, like if you imagine with our technology, we're now building virtual realities, right?
Like things we actually call virtual reality, which required, you know, four billion years of history and a whole bunch of data to basically embed them in a computer architecture. So now you can put like you know, an Oculus headset on and think that you're in this world, right? And what you really are embedded in is in a very deep temporal structure.
And so it's huge in time, but it's very small in space. And you can go lots of places in the virtual space, right? But you're still stuck in like your physical body and like sitting in the chair. And so, you know, part of it is it might be the case that sufficiently evolved technology
Biospheres kind of virtualize themselves, and they internalize their universe in their sort of temporal causal structure, and they close themselves off from the rest of the universe.
No, I don't either. So that's kind of my fear. So I'm not sure I'm agreeing with what I say. I'm just saying like this is one sort of conclusion. And, you know, like in my most sort of like – it's interesting because I don't do psychedelic drugs.
But when people describe to me like your thing with the faces and stuff and like I have, you know, had a lot of deep conversations with friends that have done psychedelic drugs for intellectual reasons and otherwise. But I'm always like, oh, it sounds like you're just doing theoretical physics. Like that's what brains do on theoretical physics. Yeah.
So I live in these like really abstract spaces most of the time. But there's also this issue of extinction, right? Like extinction events are basically pinching off an entire like causal structure, the one of these like, I'm going to call them time crystals. I don't like know what, but there's like these very large objects in time pinching off that whole structure from the rest of it.
And so it's like, if you imagine that sort of same thing in the universe, I, you know, I once thought that sufficiently advanced technologies would look like black holes.
Yeah. So there might be lots of aliens out there. Maybe that's an explanation for all the singularities. They're all pinched off causal structures that virtualize their reality and kind of broke off from us.
Yeah. But the other way I think about it is there is probably hopefully life out there. So like I do work on life detection efforts in the solar system and I'm trying to help with the Habitable Worlds Observatory mission planning right now and working with like the biosignatures team for that, like to think about exoplanet biosignatures. So like I have some optimism that we might find things.
But there are the challenges that we don't know the likelihood for life, which is what you were talking about. So if I get to a more grounded discussion, what I'm really interested in doing is trying to solve the origin of life. So we can understand how likely life is out there.
So I don't think that the, I think that the problem of discovering alien life and solving the original life are deeply coupled and in fact are one in the same problem. And that the first contact with alien life will actually be in an original life experiment. But that part I'm super interested in. And then there's this other feature that I think about a lot, which is
our own technological phase of development as sort of like, what is this phase in the evolution of life on a planet? If you think about a biosphere emerging on a planet and evolving over billions of years and evolving into a technosphere, when a technosphere can move off planets, And basically reproduce itself on another planet. Now you have biospheres reproducing themselves.
Basically, they have to go through technology to do that. And so there are ways of thinking about sort of the nature of intelligent life and how it spreads in that capacity that I'm also really excited about and thinking about. Yeah. And all of those things for me are connected.
We have to solve the origin of life in order for us to get off planet because we basically have to start life on another planet. And we also have to solve the origin of life in order to recognize other alien intelligence. All of these things are literally the same problem.
I totally agree with this, like that visual I really love and I think we live in a universe that like generates life and purpose. And like it's part of the structure of just the world. And so maybe like this sort of lonely view I have is, I never thought about it this way till you were describing that. I was like, I want to live in that universe. And I'm like a very optimistic person.
And I love building visions of reality that are positive. But I think for me right now in the intellectual process, I have to tunnel through this This particular way of thinking about the loneliness of being like separated in time from everything else, which I think like we also all are because time is what defines us as individuals.
Part of what I mean is you have to go through ideas you don't necessarily agree with to work out what you're trying to understand. And I'm trying to be inside this structure so I can really understand it. And I don't think I've been able to... I'm so deeply embedded in what we are intellectually right now that I don't have an ability to see these other...
Showing 261–280 of 510 · page 14 of 26
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