Could an advanced civilization change the laws of physics?
Do the laws of physics place a hard limit on how far technology can develop, or could an advanced civilization re-write those laws?
bigthink.com
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Are there limits to technology? Can a species become so advanced that it could actually re-engineer physics?
- One brilliant article explored the rules of physics and asked which ones might have been rewritten by a sufficiently advanced form of life.
- It is wonderful to imagine the ways a civilization could move past what we know of the physical world. But it is also possible that the physics we know today severely limits life and what it can do.
If you are going to look for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations in the Universe, you must start by considering what, exactly, you might be looking for. My colleagues and I in the NASA-sponsored Categorizing Atmospheric Technosignatures program spend a lot of time thinking about this. But there is a question that haunts me as much as it challenges the project: How far can a civilization go as it advances?
This question relates directly to the Kardashev scale, a topic we have covered before. The Kardashev scale is all about energy harvesting.
Kardashev envisioned civilizations that are still subject to the laws of physics. The Universe gives these laws to them just as they are given to us. We cannot change these laws — we can only use them more or less efficiently.
But what if a civilization becomes so advanced that it can in fact change those laws? This civilization would have gone well beyond merely harvesting energy. The very nature of energy itself, with established rules like energy conservation, would be subject to revision within the scope of engineering.
Astrophysicist Caleb Scharf explored this kind of question in a piece entitled, "Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?" The work is a masterpiece of creative invention. Scharf explored the rules of physics and asked which ones might have been rewritten by a sufficiently advanced form of life.
Allow me to enter the fray and introduce some radical speculation of my own.
What if there are actually many laws of physics, but evolution selects the ones that organisms can observe? Perhaps in the process of establishing the difference between the self and the world — which really form a single whole — there is some freedom in how an infinitely rich Universe gets parsed into observers and observed. This idea is implied in the wonderful movie Arrival, where a species of aliens who come to Earth have a different cognitive and linguistic structure, and this gives them a very different physics of time. If physics and biological self-creation were linked in this way, perhaps a hyper-advanced civilization could indeed peel back the veneer separating self and Universe, and mix and match physical laws any way they see fit.
Is any of this possible? Well, a lot of things might be possible in the Universe, and many of those possibilities still work within the constraints of what we know about physical law. But it is also possible, and perhaps more likely, that the physics we know today puts severe limits on life and what it can do. These limits might constrain technological development enough to stop well short of what our science fiction can imagine. Perhaps, for example, there simply is no way around the limits imposed by the speed of light, and crossing the distances between stars will always be tremendously difficult and expensive.
