Into The Unknown: The Truth About the Universe

The universe itself is billions of years old, while the earliest human only first appeared a couple of million years ago on this tiny, insignificant spec of dust in this ever-expanding, never-ending universe which in turn is marching through its own life. But, with the advent of the more evolved human, came science, technology, and innovation; we made fire, built a wheel, carved on stone. With the continuous evolution of human evolved science, technology and philosophy. Even in this relatively short existence of ours, we came to ask many questions that even with the evolution and propagation of philosophy, we have failed to answer yet.

Religion was one such alternate theory and it was immediately accepted widely, making human the center of everything and put an almighty creator who was watching over all of this creation of his.

People have always had a yearning to know, a craving to understand, their role in this universe. They wanted to know their purpose, a solution for their existential crisis and so rose belief systems, theories that were directed to answer these questions. Religion was one such alternate theory and it was immediately accepted widely, making human the center of everything and put an almighty creator who was watching over all of this creation of his. While this theory has been satisfactory for most, to this day, many of us even dedicate our entire lives in search of the truth, and we each take different paths. We as humans are still, continuously evolving and still struggle to answer the same questions as ever before: “Who are we? What are we doing here? What is life? What is all of this around me? Why am I, me?”. These are a few examples of the many variants of the same question, questions to which we have been debating to find an acceptable answer for millennia.

But in the time that has passed, this world has become a world filled with confusion. It’s become a world where we try to draw order from chaos, a world where alternate realities are proposed, ideas discussed, humans trying to live in harmony with everything around them which although seems to contradict everything in their very nature, since in reality, we seem to have only been bringing an end to the very life of the entire planet which we inhabit, the only home known to us.

So in such a world, I’d like to propose an idea that is more, easy going and to me at least seem fun to consider, one of the many theories that I have come up with over the years. Whether they make sense or not, they are nevertheless, thoughts that have originated in a relatively fresh and seemingly evolved human brain. So that makes this brain think, maybe these ideas are worth discussing. And so here we are.

And with this article, I am trying to bring into discussion, an idea, that Douglas Adams too thought of and presented in his book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” in the 1970s.

And now that I’ve done SOOO MUCH stalling let’s get to the part where I say, “Consider the earth to be a computer, and consider us humans to be the parts of that computer.”

“Consider the earth to be a computer, and consider us humans to be the parts of that computer.”

Yes, I am suggesting that we humans are nothing more than small insignificant pieces of equipment in a small insignificant computer (Mother Earth) in an expansive universe, which might be one of the infinite universes. Now that’s a ginormous shift from thinking we were created by an almighty being who is constantly looking over us and our lives hold an irreplaceable meaning in this universe. But I’m just saying things.

Anyway, if some of you don’t hate me yet, let’s move on. So why do I say these things you ask? Well, here are my arguments:

Point №1: Evolution: Much like the evolution of humans, the computer too has evolved from the Turing machine to a proper classical computer and now to one utilizing quantum properties.

From our primitive selves who “discovered” fire and invented the wheel, we have clearly come quite a long way. We have built civilizations which have fallen, we have had a renaissance and are currently, at the brink of another. We are exploring the unknown, now taking a leap from the moon to Mars and maybe, soon, we’ll finally be able to unravel at least the more proximal regions of the universe around us. We have been studying the science of minuscule objects to the vast, entire universe itself. We have been making some breakthroughs every now and then. Today we have come far enough to say that any kid born today can think of having a life expectancy of up to 150 years and that, we’re on our way to find an answer to climate change.

Just like we as humans have evolved and come this far in our short existence, quantum computers are an evolved successor to the classical computer. They might carry out different functions, but no human is still trying to carve into stone or write on leaves. No, we have paper, better yet we have computers. As humans, we too have gone from hunting for survival to hunting for leisure to being against animal cruelty of any sort and talking about how animal husbandry is actually threatening the climate.

Compared to the original machine invented by Alan Turing, to what we have seen in the last couple of decades and now jumping on to quantum computers, it’s clear to see that the trend has an ascending gradient. Like the original Turing machine, which was revolutionary and yet took up an entire room to fit in, today’s quantum computers are revolutionary and this has been only within a century. Soon when they reach their optimized stage, we shall come to see many more new species of computers, all performing different types of tasks alongside the evolution of humans.

Classical computers, being binary, could only process so much and had a limited number of pathways for thought processes. It was only yes or no and for each yes or no there needed to be a separate transistor. Now we have the quantum computers which, using the quantum properties of continuous spin, superposition and entanglement, we expect will solve questions that we don’t even have including those that we have pondered upon for all of humanity’s existence. That they will make hypotheses, form questions at a much higher level of permutation and combination than we can fathom, using quantum properties. (I know right! Feels a bit like Dr.Strange, so…. not fiction anymore?)

Point №2: Analogically: The earth is a computer which is kept in a stable environment, and we the humans are the computing and processing units and the software of the computer that utilize the surroundings, as hardware and external support to optimize our outputs.

We think we’re building computers the way we were structured, giving names to these processes as machine learning or artificial intelligence. Have we considered that maybe, this is how we were structured, we are a much more advanced computer than those we have managed to build today? Maybe if the entire computer (in this case the world) worked as a unit rather than each of us trying to further our own cause, and working toward a single cause, we could make much more and better progress, sooner than later. As time lapses, we might one day find that the computers that we make then are exactly how we were created by far more advanced beings, millions of years ago and stored in a part of this universe.

Much like how the hardware and software of a computer need a proper environment to function, like how the quantum computers are to be kept in a stable environment to keep working properly, the solar system, even the entire galaxy that we perceive might just be the system that is required to be this internal system of the computer stable. And inside the atmospheric environment, we humans, which run the software in our brains and implement them on our surroundings, use the ecosystem around us to optimize our results. That is, we use the oxygen, the “natural” resources around us to perform more efficiently, just like how in a computer the type of processing units available determine the computer’s efficiency and we create the optimal conditions for it.

Our use of resources from our surroundings in order to optimize our lives, might, in turn, be giving some sort of output. Maybe the climate changes and overburden that we are putting on this planet were an inevitable and natural course like the deterioration of batteries and HDDs and SSDs over time and use. Like replacing these when they’re worn out, were required to move on from here, to Mars, or some other planet and then another, with the wearing out of the hardware, i.e., the planets, as the software evolved.

Maybe this entire universe is a collective of computers which is regulated from the outside, that would even explain the continuous expansion.

Maybe this entire universe is a collective of computers which is regulated from the outside, that would even explain the continuous expansion.

What if outside the universe there are a different set of properties that govern the system and those properties made it impossible to create a computer and run it and therefore such an environment, which we now call a universe was required to be built.

And similar to how evolution is called the survival of the fittest, that is, the better genes are retained and passed through the test of time, while the bad ones are omitted or deleted, we continuously debug our programs or software to ward off mistakes that might render the program inefficient or useless even. The same can be extended to mutation.

If you wanna further this theory of such a system, you could even go as far as to say that, like how transistors of a computer alternate between 0 and 1, we switch on and off, sleep and awake, and in between like quantum superposition during the spin, we live carrying out activities, we dream, we even enter comas and live in vegetative states. We die. When measured, we read only one of the two, either awake or asleep, or dead or alive. With the natural course, and given our circadian rhythms, while half the world is awake, the other half is asleep. But when stuck on a problem, we reject sleep and food until we get past that bump or give in and give up. We’re always within this system, working one way or another to keep it running.

In this system, we can view each human’s function to be different. We could each be serving a different purpose to maintain the internal sustainability of the system to keep it from collapsing.

In his book, Douglas Adams says, the computer Earth was built to answer the greatest question of living beings: Life, The Universe, Everything!

Meaning, it was built to make sense of what is happening around us, to answer the purpose of life.

We are basically helping someone out there achieve what we are hoping to achieve with the advancement of the quantum computer.

From this, maybe we can conclude that the purpose of our lives is to find the purpose. But not for ourselves, but somebody else. We are basically helping someone out there achieve what we are hoping to achieve with the advancement of the quantum computer for starters.

To many altruistic humans on this planet, I guess this would be a nice theory to accept. Since it means we spend our entire life, serving a cause, helping another population of beings.

Does this require that all primitive beings (us, homo sapiens)be extinct to pave way for the newer, superiors beings, i.e., Artificial intelligence?

But if you consider such a theory, other questions also arise, if we are just the inside of a computer, trying to build computers, within the before mentioned computer, does that mean, that…we are simply trying to recreate life on earth but in a better way? If so, does this require that all primitive beings be extinct to pave way for the newer, superiors beings, i.e., Artificial intelligence? Since it is us, humans, who can maybe somehow be considered as a force of nature, maybe this classifies as a natural course of evolution as well?

We discover the secrets of our own existence and the existence of the universe where we might least expect it — in these manmade objects that we call inventions.

What if these manmade computers themselves one day become human, that is, we discover the secrets of our own existence and the existence of the universe where we might least expect it — in these manmade objects that we call inventions. We are continuously trying to make the machines mimic human behavior.

Maybe it’s not our qualities that we are trying to get computers to do, but that we are finding the qualities of computers exist in us as we try to further our learning, we are just building what we are. Maybe this apparently living form that we have is just of a component of any given computer.

Call me crazy, but, a continuous discussion is required on topics like this that spark a fire in humans, in the past century as we can see, technology and development peeked and there was almost immediately a lull, but as time moves forward several topics of discussion have come up and our minds which haven’t been constantly engaged and working at their full capacities, now need to show up. A renaissance must occur once again and revolutionize the planet.

The stalling of development, as many of us already know, after going to the moon half a century ago, we made no further efforts until recently, humanity needs to move forward, and while sitting still in a moving vehicle maybe taking us forward in space, it won’t help us move any further with respect to advancements until we actually do something.

I want people to know that all kinds of ideas no matter how f***ed up they might seem to an individual need to be voiced and taken into discussion. We believed in symmetry, that everything is binary, but with the advent of the quantum computer, we accept superposition and entanglement. Our thinking processes have also evolved in a similar fashion. For instance, gender was binary, now we’re on a non-binary path. Evolution makes a full circle. From the basics like sexuality to our innovations, it’s all based on our thinking processes, we have opened ourselves to things other than symmetry, allowing is to understand and apply the laws of quantum physics. Our inability to perceive other dimensions rises from this same limitation, which we might one day overcome with evolution.

Clearly, we are nobody to determine anything for a fact. At least in the light of our recent shortcomings with understanding the most fundamental aspects of human rights, we need to be willing to acknowledge our limitations. We need to come to terms with the fact that, just because something is vastly accepted, doesn’t make it right.