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Wolf 359?
Courtesy of The Nattering Naybob
For my friend… We noted lessons learned from our familiar in One Man's Best Friend Part 2 and that feisty feline's seeming ability to leave us clues regarding a potential hereafter in Believe It or Not. Which we followed up in A Ticket to Ride? and now following up on and concluding Fermi's Paradox?…
With a current estimate of 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and assuming that most of them are like ours, as in 200 billion stars etc. That means 36,000 planets in the observable universe of which we can assume 42% (5.82/13.82) existed after the 8 billion year incubation period, leaving a little over 15,000 possibilities spread over the last 5.82 billion years.
"Coexistence? Over that time span and distance, for all those ET's, UFO's, grays and little green men, good luck out there." – Fermi's Paradox?
Hypothetical: let's say that guesstimate above and the question that Fermi's paradox begs, where is everybody?, are true. If so, we could be one of the EARLY intelligent life forms. Suns now have a longer life span, with most all the necessary elements for creating life — i.e., [suppose there are] greater chances of intelligent life and its surviving long enough to develop the technology necessary.
We could be coming into the golden age of intelligent life with the persistence and technology. Given that scenario, it could also be possible that we are in a sim, created by aliens or ourselves, not in the past or present, but in the FUTURE. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!
There are many tricks we can use to reduce the computational power needed to simulate a universe to a degree we can handle. The most obvious being: Don’t render anything no-one is looking at. If you feel a slight tingling sensation in your body, this might be because you are familiar with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the observer effect. Modern physics tells us reality is such that the state of the smallest particles is dependent on whether they are being observed.
Next trick you could use: Make the universe seem vast and limitless even though it isn’t. This one is actually used quite a lot in video games. By reducing the details on far away objects you can save huge amounts of computational power and generate objects only when they are discovered.
Last but not least: Add basic physical principles that make it amazingly hard or impossible to reach any other planet and keep the simulated beings stranded in their own world (speed of light and exponentially expanding universe — cough, cough). – We Might Live in a Virtual Universe – But It Really Doesn't Matter
The place, or here and where, and the time, as in then or now, really doesn't matter. Neither does if we are in our sim or dream, someone else's, or a reality nested within another, just that our "physical" bodies are a corporal form or vessel and an ethereal essence seems to occupy that body, for as long as it lasts, according to the rules of "the game," which are made up by the programmers or management of this game.
Think of it this way, repeat rides could be possible, memory wipes probably mandatory, but not always effective, viz., the parts can remember the whole, viz., a woman who received a heart from a man that was shot to death in a bar, this woman never had bouts of anger, until she received that man's heart.
So, after-effects, affects or remnants of riders, even in their parts, is possible, viz., ghosting, deja vu, past life regression, precognition and premonition, all bugs in the program? Reincarnation? A repeat ride, or getting sent back to school? And if there is past life regression, the memory wipe was faulty, another bug?
We know this, NOTHING is perfect, and omnipotence isn't all it's cracked up to be. All that evil and suffering, why? In a perfect world, there would be no challenges, no pain, no gain, no test. At the end of the day, we all are here to make each other better, hypothetical ethereal existence aside, that could be the whole idea of the sim.
Upon return to our virtual world, we bring back to a higher plane, what we have learned in the corporal world — we'd take the best and leave the rest. It's all part of your schooling or training. One is tested through "life experience" to see their worthiness to advance to higher levels of consciousness and existence.
Would your actions and performance be reviewed by management upon return? Sounds like a video game or some religious texts, doesn't it? Or is there only one place where life exists that matters to you, you only live once and when you die you die. That's called The Big Sleep for a damn good reason?
Submitted for your entertainment, amusement and wonderment, we hope you enjoyed this imaginative journey between light and shadow, science and superstition, the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. Holla out to Mr. Serling and the original Outer Limits.
Outward stretches the quest for truth. Stars without end. Timeless infinities. A billion, billion galaxies. Man's imagination reaches out and out, while betimes the farthest reaches of knowledge are found in the smallest places…
This discourse spawned a plethora of questions with a dearth of tangible answers, just possibilities giving rise to both hope and fear. All from a simple question regarding our small and meek feline friend, for whom one reader aptly commented, a best friend whose only desire in life was to love us. Proving that the seemingly high and mighty, have much to learn from the innocent, simple, small and meek.
"There is a theory that Earth and sun and galaxy and all the known universes are only a dust mote on some policeman's uniform in some gigantic super-world. Couldn't we be under some super-microscope, right now?" – Wolf 359 – The Outer Limits
Many new estimates as to stars and potential Earth populations. What if that calculation presented in Fermi's Paradox? was not 1 in 100 million but 1 in a billion? Given the circumstances, it could easily be and meaning that even if the estimates are for billions of potential earth's in a galaxy, the conclusion derived would be the same.
As for that proverbial The Big Sleep, knowing that darn cat has already gone on record so to speak, and that nothing is immune to death's callings and all things must come to an end, she might even say, now quit daydreaming in this sim or whatever the hell you call it, and get back to living, live a little, live a lot even… and that we shall with much vigor.
Pictures of space courtesy of Geralt at Pixabay.
