Thoughts on: space travel, life and religions on other planets, and what if AI was banned (prompted by the "Dune" movie)

That's a good point, I was so engrossed in the film I missed that, although because I read the books I already know about it. I do like this new version though and I've just bought part 2.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and I agree with you. In relation to Religion, I wonder if that's always something that happens with a species that gains sentience, as a way of trying to understand what sentience is and how and why we are here.

Not a review but pause for thought. Look up the Hubble Seep Space Image.its a picture of space seen from the Hubble. It covers about as much as your thumbnail does at arms length. There are thousands of galaxies in that one small image. Now consider that space looks the same whichever direction you look, up, down, right, left. There is nowhere that doesn’t have tens of thousands of galaxies in view in a tiny portion covered by a picture the size of your thumbnail at arms length. Thats an awful lot of galaxies… and in every galaxy there are millions, nay billions of stars. 

Why would an old man with a beard make all that lot then ignore it to concentrate on just one of three despotic empires at their peak two thousand years ago? 

LoneYeti said:

Have you heard of the Gia Hypothesis?

I first saw a film about this in 2001 (Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within) which covered this in a very action film sort of way, but planted the seed for curiosity.

For the others who may be interested in this concept, there is a good description of gaia here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

I'm curious if there could be a whole microcosm of creatures such as this with smaller but still massive scale to them. Where would we even know where to start? How could we communicate etc.

Iain said:

What fascinates me is if there could be life forms that are geological in nature (eg continents or even planets/moons) -

Have you heard of the Gia Hypothesis? It posits the inorganic parts of the planet's systems interact with the organic living parts as part of a self regulating process that maintains life. The planet itself is a kind of organism. 

He original dune film is based more closely on the book/s. There is a lot more emphasis on the Bene Genserit (Dune 2 goes into this) and the ability to use Spice to travel through time a space. It wasn’t explained much in great detail in the new movies that the reason they were farming Spice was to fuel space and time travel. It completely changes the context once you know this. a huge chunk is missing on Paul is able to bend time and space, I suspect Dune 3 will cover this.

Lotus said:

I was wondering if it would actually be possible to have a life form that doesn't require water and is actually weakened and killed by it?

Imagine we have an object in our hand: How do we know whether it is a living thing?

One way, is to look at what life does. But there is a lot of diversity. We can focus on what is shared. Maybe at a cellular level? I guess nothing we call alive has no cells.

To an overly simplistic extent, a cell is a boundary, I think we may expect that.

But it is possible that "a cell" -which I use as the minimal living unit here or elsewhere- may be quite large in other planets or places.

If we take a cell as we know them, just to look at what life does (here), then what does an earthly-cell do?

- It reproduces (most), it passes on information to descendants (is it necessary?), it moves (most?), it maintains homeostasis. And does so while it can, using energy from external sources. A cell is also autopoietic (a property of how cellular components relate to each other.) Eventually, it dies.

Definitions are hard, the world was not created so simple. But they are useful as well. However, we need to agree on one.

Unless, for a living organism, "know it when we see it". Maybe. So, is the item in the palm of your hand alive? The more similar to us, the easier we can guess.

If we get lucky and find something like a cell (small or large, though), that repairs itself, maintains homeostasis, reproduces, then it may as well not use water. If they evolved without it the likelihood it is poisonous is somewhat high.

The role of water in cells is quite limited. Well...if we discount it as a medium for ions and molecules to move around. It is produced at the end of the Kreb's cycle, and as an intermediary during glycolysis.

Some bacteria even use Iron or Ammonia (I think) for obtaining energy. Either way, this seems possible in my view.

I think Nick Lane has some nice ideas about this.

Lotus said:

I also often wonder where intelligence and sentience come from

You can see more about what intelligence actually is when you follow the AI debate at the moment.

Ultimately it is easy to see that human intelligence isn't really that special, it is just a logic system with a load of learned experience to base its decision making from.

when you look at how we evolved from the earliest single celled life forms to having a brain, each step is a building block along the way with some experience being build into the "instinct" part of the brain through simple evolutionary selection. Those with this bit did better than those without so it became dominant.

I imagine something similar could happen elsewhere using different building blocks.

What fascinates me is if there could be life forms that are geological in nature (eg continents or even planets/moons) - we would even be looking for something like this and their tools for interacting with the outside would be so different to ours that they would ignore us as we ignore bacteria.

Also, what would extrapolating our evolution millions of years into the future yield? Would we even be corporial at the end of it all or would we find ways to become no longer limited by our bodies.

Looking at physics of the 4 dimensions we live in shows there are many other dimensions we cannot sense in our existing forms. There are 2 more time dimensions (possibly) so time travel and dimension travel are aspects that a creature could evolve to manage so how would their minds work? If time is non-linear then most of our daily actions would seem irrelevant.

It can bake your noodle to think about this too much LOL

Thanks for your reply. I'm also open to the idea of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe although it may have happened before our timeline began and have now died out. And even if there were currently an intelligent species on another planet who were putting out radio waves or something we could detect, it could take so long to reach us that by then either they or we were extinct.

Iain said:

I've read a lot of sci-fi in the last 5 decades and the more I think of it, the more I think we may not even recognise other life forms for what they are.

That is a good point, in which case if life on other planets was not carbon based it would have different needs, like maybe not requiring water. 

I also often wonder where intelligence and sentience come from - as you say it's fascinating but we will probably never know, certainly not in our lifetime.

I can’t discuss religion on other planets until I have evidence that there are beings with similar or higher intelligence to ourselves who have evolved away from earth.

I am open to the possibility that there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe, it would be arrogant to think otherwise as only a fraction of the universe has been discovered so why should Homo Sapiens be the ‘superior’ life form.

I don’t enjoy sci-fi films or books either, so I’m sorry I can’t add anything further.

Lotus said:

In this story, AI has been banned and replaced by human "Mentats" who are trained as sort of human computers, with vast memories, the ability to organise huge amounts of data and devise concise analyses. I wonder if humans could ever achieve this, and f so whether it would take an autistic bloodline to produce it?

I think if autism were "farmed" and the autistic children with savant level brains "trained" then this would be quite achievable.

The ethics of it are a different thing, but humanity has been remarkable flexible with this when it suits them.

Lotus said:

I wonder, if there was intelligent life on other planets would they have a religion and /or a creator story?

I've read a lot of sci-fi in the last 5 decades and the more I think of it, the more I think we may not even recognise other life forms for what they are. The things that happened in the formation of life were so random and evolution so convoluted that the potential for our carbon based life forms is just one fluke of nature.

How many other flukes have created life in forms we do not consider? Silicon based life is a closer proximity but what other chemical combinations could create an ecosystem that could sustain a growing entity? Mycelial entities are already showing evidence of incredible connectivity and ability in scaled ou up to kilometers across.

How about hive minds? Insects can produce activity that appears bordering on sentient with a single controlling entity but the intelliegence seems collective rather than individual.

Tartigrade creatures appear incredibly robust and can survive in space. If evolution took them to a larger and more complex form to develop intelligence, then they could be a native, space tolerant life form.

How about energy based life forms? They are touched on in several Star Trek episodes and the possibilities are just as credible as intelligence forming from the primordial soup on Earth.

A fascinating subject but very limited by our ability to get out there and look at the moment.