The characteristic of modern technological civilization is its expansiveness. Civilization is to continuously develop and expand its scale like a balloon, regardless of when it bursts. But compared to expanding the space outward, the reverse expansion of shrinking its own scale is more likely to be the only way for civilization. It is technically more realistic than breaking the barrier to the speed of light, and think about it, when you become as small as an ant, What a magnificent palace an ordinary two-bedroom and one-living room would be. Then the reason why we have not been able to search for aliens may be that they actually microcosmic themselves...
When the alien civilization that generations of people dream, call, and seek finally arrives on the earth, humans may face their dreams. Unexpected embarrassment: The aliens turn a blind eye to the human being who is enthusiastic with outstretched hands, but go to hug and talk to the ant. This raises a question that we have never seriously considered before:
Who is the head of the earth?
If you take it for granted that it is a human being, you will only find yourself ridiculous in the end: we have only been down from the tree for more than a million years, and we can truly be called our civilization history, but for more than 5,000 years. On the ancient land of the earth hundreds of millions of years ago, ants have established their magnificent empires. In contrast, we are just vagrants who have just walked into the big room of the earth to beg for a bowl of water, far from the level of the head of the household.
Of course you will argue: look forward! We have civilization. It is human civilization that has improved the status of the earth in the universe.
But at least for now, there is no evidence to prove this. In our minds, the late Cretaceous period when comets hit the earth to extinct a large number of creatures, including dinosaurs, was the most terrifying era in the history of life on this planet; but you may not know that in our current civilized era, the earth species The rate of extinction is much higher than that of the late Cretaceous. The most terrifying era in the history of life on earth is now! Civilization may be a bright road that allows life on earth to continue for generations, or it may be a trap that leads life on earth, including humans, to extinction.
The characteristic of modern technological civilization is its expansiveness. Civilization is to continuously develop and expand its scale like a balloon, regardless of when it bursts.
In history, think about the era of great voyage full of desire and passion. In a short period of time, the European civilization awakened by the Renaissance covered every corner of the earth like locusts.
As for the future, if civilization can really continue, it will inevitably expand its scale without restriction and become a huge macro-civilization. Science fiction writers have made many vivid descriptions of such a super-scale civilization. Rune's "Ring World" describes a huge structure built by a civilization around stars; in Asimov's "Base" series, humans are spread throughout the entire galaxy; Clark's "2001" super civilization, more It uses a super-space structure that humans will never understand to make the entire universe their courtyard.
But we are not writing science fiction. If we want to make a slightly more serious ultra-long-term prediction of the future of civilization, we must do it within the limits of the laws of mathematics and physics, otherwise it is not a prediction but a myth.
The first step for civilization to expand into the universe is of course the planetary system in which it is located, which is the solar system for mankind. As you may know, it is a terrible thing to expand the biome in a geometric progression: Imagine that the earth is a culture medium covered with a layer of nutrient colloid, and you put a strain of bacteria invisible to the naked eye on its surface. At a certain point, maybe you haven't finished half of your summer vacation, and this kind of bacteria has covered the surface of the earth. If humans have acquired sufficient technical capabilities, their expansion into the solar system will be like this, and the cold economic laws will make them sweep the entire solar system like a violent wind. At this time, you will find that our planetary system is a very small place, the metal of Mercury and the asteroid belt, the territories on Venus and Mars, the liquid and solid hydrogen on Jupiter, the halo of Europa and Uranus on Saturn. The water in the water and the methane on Pluto are far from being consumed! Just like on the earth, human civilization in the solar system will soon face an ecological crisis and an existential crisis. The next step for civilization can only be to continue to expand into outer space. At this time, it will encounter an insurmountable wall: the speed of light.
There is no theoretical or observational evidence to prove the existence of space-time cavities. Space folding is even more idiotic. Based on the current theoretical basis, the speed of light cannot be surpassed. As mentioned earlier, in order not to turn our predictions into a myth, we must accept this restriction. In fact, it is extremely difficult for a large interstellar spacecraft to reach one-tenth the speed of light with the currently visible aerospace dynamics, such as nuclear fusion and light pressure drive. In this way, it will take nearly a century to reach the nearest star and return, and it may take thousands of years or even longer to reach a star with real resources available. Such a cycle is absolutely unbearable for a technologically advanced society with rapid economic development. of. Therefore, the future expansion of the earth's civilization on the interstellar will result in a dandelion that releases seeds in the wind, and finally bunches of new dandelions that are far apart will grow. There is no connection between them, and they will never become a whole. If there really is the Galactic Empire described by Asimov, it will be such a huge paralyzed patient whose brain wants to move a finger, and that finger will not receive instructions until a million years later, and another million. It’s only 20 years before the brain knows whether the finger has actually moved.
We can infer from this that there can be no macro civilization in the universe that spans the scale of stars. In other words, it is not feasible to develop civilization by infinitely expanding the spatial scale.
Let's change our thinking now and look in the opposite direction. Here comes back to the topic of ants at the beginning: Why did ants not destroy like dinosaurs and survive to this day? One of the important reasons is that their individuals are very small, and a biological community composed of small individuals requires little living space and resources, and therefore has stronger survivability. The same space may only be enough for a dinosaur to lie down and sleep, but for an ant city gang, it is a vast territory; only enough for a tyrannosaurus to eat half a bite of a piece of meat, but it can become all the residents of an ant city One year's rations. Therefore, in nature, the survival advantage of small individual communities is self-evident. Nature may have realized this. Judging from the trend of natural selection, organisms have a tendency to evolve into small individuals.
Reducing one's own scale is equivalent to expanding the living space. We call this the "reverse expansion" of civilization.
In the long run, reverse expansion may be the only way for human civilization. It is technically more realistic than breaking the barrier to the speed of light. This requires human beings to use technology to intervene in their own evolution and continuously reduce their individual scale. The currently imaginable technology is genetic engineering. According to the current development of this technology, it is not difficult to imagine that one day human beings can manipulate genes like computer software. At that time, biology will create miracles that we cannot imagine. . Take a look at the smallest mammals on the earth that are more similar to humans. They are mice. With the help of genetic engineering, humans may eventually reduce their individual size to the size of a white mouse. If human individuals reach this scale, the world will undergo a fundamental change in their eyes. Think about our ordinary two-bedroom and one-living house now, what a magnificent palace in people's eyes at that time! For human beings, the earth is a vast world that cannot be imagined now. Maybe you think this idea is a bit funny, but when everyone is that old, girls won't make fun of you about your height.
This is only the first step in reverse expansion, and it is not yet a true micro-civilization. Considering the ultimate development of civilization, such a reduction in scale is far from enough. In order to create a sufficiently broad space for the super civilization in the future, humans may have to reduce their individual to the scale of bacteria! This idea sounds crazy. To achieve it, genetic engineering alone is far from enough. It also requires more complex technologies, such as nanomachines and many other technologies that we can’t even imagine, but compared with surpassing the speed of light and space folding, At least it does not violate the known fundamental laws of physics. Considering the atomic level, the number of atoms in a substance the size of bacteria and the quantum state of each atom are sufficient to store and process all the information currently stored and processed in the human brain. You may still feel crazy, but if you want to go back more than a hundred years ago, you show a piece of P4 chip now, and tell it what this gadget contains, you will also be put in a lunatic asylum. of.
What is a civilization made up of individuals on the scale of bacteria? What does the world look like in their eyes? You can imagine freely, and you will soon find that this kind of imagination is the most refreshing thing. Below, only an excerpt from the mythical work "Micro-Era" (a science fiction novel describing micro-civilization):
... He imagined the ecstasy when the micro people first saw the green grass standing upright. What about a small patch of grass? What does a small piece of grass mean to Weiren? A grassland! What does a grassland mean? That is a green universe of Weiren! Where is the stream in the grassland? When the micro people stood under the grass roots and looked at the clear stream, what a magnificent spectacle in their eyes! The leader of the earth said that it will rain, there will be grasslands and creeks if it rains! There must be trees, oh my god, trees! Forerunners imagined a microman expedition, starting their long and wonderful journey from the root of a tree. For them, every leaf is an endless green plain... There will be butterflies and its wings. It is the colorful clouds that cross the sky in the eyes of the micro people; there will be birds, and every cry in the ears of the micro people is a red bell from the universe...
Scientists always tend to speculate about the possible existence of alien civilization from the perspective of macro civilization The behavior and signs of the stars, such as a famous hypothesis: when the interstellar civilization has developed to a certain extent, it will inevitably make the most of the energy of the star where it is located. As a result, their world may be a ring around the star, or even The stars are wrapped up! By looking for stars that show signs of this kind, we may find alien civilizations. Now, let us think about the existence of alien civilizations from the perspective of micro-civilization: if civilizations develop to a certain extent, they will inevitably make themselves microscopic. This does not help our search for alien civilizations, but it can explain why we have not seen them so far. The energy divergence of a micro-civilization to the outside world (either intentionally or unintentionally) must be small, which increases the difficulty for us to detect them. Think of an alien race made up of bacteria-sized individuals who gather under your nose for the Olympic Games, and you can't even notice their existence.
However, microcosmicization is not the ultimate development of civilization. Super civilization may eventually “freeze one's own existence in the lattice of light” as Clark described in "2001". Such a civilization has completely got rid of macro and micro. Concepts, if you want, they can be reduced to the size of an atom, or expanded to the size of a galaxy. This kind of ultimate speculation about civilization is increasingly appearing in science fiction. The American science fiction novel "Gravitation Well", which won the Nebula Award this year, describes a human civilization in a force field and radiation state in the distant future; even this Speculation also appears in the serious thinking of scientists, such as Paul. Davis's popular science book "The Last Three Minutes of the Universe" is a masterpiece in this respect. But for us, this kind of civilization has more philosophical and even metaphysical colors. In contrast, the incomparably mysterious micro-civilization that you thought just now has become much more real and has a touchable texture. .
We can imagine another ultimate civilization. Compared with the force field civilization that is indistinguishable from gods and ghosts, it has incomparable grandeur. This is the final macroscopic micro-civilization. The result of the expansion of micro-civilization into the universe will inevitably make its own spatial scale macroscopic again, but this is qualitatively different from the primitive macro-civilization composed of large individuals. It is another sublimation of civilization and the most magnificent life composes in the universe. The movement! For this civilization, I only describe a picture, the rest of your imagination:
a magnificent interstellar fleet sailing into the solar system, each of their spacecraft is the size of the moon, but these spacecraft are composed of thousands of bacteria Piloted by astronauts large and small, we can only see them with a microscope when they are together.
For the prospect of life and civilization in the universe, any imagination is weak.
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