At the end of Men In Black, the point of view continuously pulls back to reveal our galaxy resides within a marble. We then see that this marble is part of a game of marbles played by aliens. Freaky deaky.
The question of whether our universe could simply be a tiny blip in some larger universe’s existence has been pondered by many folks. But there is a very interesting question within this idea:
What size can an organism be for us to recognize it?
Right now the upper limit on recognizing an organism as an individual life form seems to be an Aspen tree in Utah named Pando. On the other end of the spectrum, nanobes and viruses (depending on who you ask) are the smallest critters around. So there’s a range of about 20 nm to 107 acres. Considering that the earth’s land surface is roughly 32 billion acres, a 107 acre grove of trees isn’t all that impressive in the grand scheme of things.
But, we can certainly imagine recognizing significantly larger beings than that. It’s not hard to imagine a planet-sized living being–as long as it moved fast enough for us to notice.
Which brings up another piece of this puzzle: How much does perception of time affect our ability to recognize life?
Although perception of time is most likely bound by some physical constants such as the speed of light or perhaps the half-life of organic materials, our own perception of time is so far removed from these boundaries as to obviate their consideration. The rate at which time passes for us is idiosyncratic and, in my opinion, seems to be most easily related to our age.
For instance, when we were 4 years old, 1 year was 1/4 of our life. It took FOREVER for a year to pass by. Now that I’m 35 and a year is only 1/35 of my entire life, it takes a heckuva lot less time. A second still equals a second, but they happen much faster now.
So it’s not hard to imagine some sort of creature that perceives and entire lifetime of events in just a few seconds to us. Or, a being that experiences only a few seconds during eons on earth.
Imagine a colony of super smart microbes. These guys have really got their acts together and have started to explore the world around them. They build telescopes, radio receivers, etc. Can they discover that they are living within our stomach, for instance?
Here are the problems they face:
1. Time, most likely, moves at a significantly higher rate for them than it does for us. Your average microbe last about 72 hours, which plays pretty well with the average human lifespan. What perceptually takes an hour for us takes a year for them.
2. They’ve got to look really far away. Beyond just the cell lining in the stomach, they’ve got to move further out and be able to "see" the border between their human host and the outside world.
3. They will need to be able to infer that they are in a living organism. No one’s going to tell them about it.
4. They would have to conceive of a being as large as the human in which they live. This would be remarkably alien to them. At best, they would probably see their host as being a collection of organisms–similar to the earth itself.
The point about perception of time makes it so difficult for them to recognize that a human is a discrete being. Imagine that the host is building a house for himself. Assuming the microbes even had the ability to observe him grabbing a hammer and nails, it would take weeks for them to even see the hammer swinging and driving in the nail. Actually completing construction on the house would take a few generations to observe.
Could they be capable of putting all of that data together and inferring correctly that the "universe" in which they live is actually an intelligent being that is building a house?
Where’s the upper limit for us, then? We could just as easily be microbes in a much larger system being thrown around like marbles on some children’s floor.
Yr fthfl bddy,
Mike
I’ll get back to you on this, there’s a huge frickin’ eye looking down on me and I suspect that’s a giant slide cover he’s about to drop on me…
I think this line of thinking is valid and good, but the problem is that as you scale past a certain aspect there is no telling. What if the edge of our universe is a cell membrane in a larger organism? What if instead of your example, each and every atom that makes up our intestinal tract is a universe whose boundaries are the orbiting electrons? That’s where I think this scale breaks down, as we don’t have a capability of viewing things outside our universe yet, so I doubt we’d be able to see we’re organisms in a larger organism until such time.
Well, that’s the crux of this question here. What are the upper and lower boundaries of our perception?
Your suggestion that there could be universes hiding within subatomic particles is certainly not unimaginable. And I have to agree that discerning that seems nearly impossible.
But are there tests we can use to infer the presence of life on a larger scale? Could the wavelength of electromagnetic energy give us a clue?
Visible light is not just notable for being something we can see–it also has some unique properties that set it apart from other frequencies of EM energy. (Same goes for all the classes in the EM spectrum).
From this, can we infer a limit of the perception of time? I.e., time perception must be “fast” enough to be able to recognize visible light. (This may be valid whether the critter has eyes or not.)
As an aside, I’ve been thinking of describing this perception of time concept using frames per second (fps). Movies are shot at 24 fps. But if we play them back at 48 fps, everything seems to happen twice as fast to us. The movie hasn’t changed, however–the amount of content is exactly the same. It’s simply our perception of the rate at which the frames go by that has changed.
I’ve always been convinced that time passage is entirely an illusion forced upon those living in this ‘bandwidth’ of reality(Third dimension, time and matter universe).
Your idea of frames per second is interesting but only from the perspective of our frame of reference. As evidenced by recent discoveries like the half and quarter-turn particles, we understand that things break down in terms of laws and logic that we use on a larger scale.
From this we can infer that there is a break down of time and logic at a higher scale as well.
Without personal experience, I feel that only conceptual ideas are valid at these stages of reality, since I’m pretty sure that our “reality logic” isn’t valid.
The reason I believe ‘timeframe’ becomes irrelevant is this: if we pull back from our universe, not just in distance, but in dimensions, we have to see the universe as not a 3rd dimensional object, but a 6th dimensional object – we’re reducing all of our universe, including all timelines and probabilities to a single point.
Inside this point is us, existing and going from minute to minute in our lives, contributing our timeline to the bigger universal timeline.
What happens is what I’d call ‘recursive dimensions’. If we consider the smallest observable subatomic particle to be a universe, then inside this tiny point is another 5 dimensions just as outside our universe could be another five dimensions.