This is a great project! I’m glad to see it moving forward. I first heard about it from a TED talk that I quickly favorited. I hope to see more projects like this that leave a lasting legacy of our time for future generations.
It is also of great benefit for us now by allowing visitors to think about time on a longer scale. For me, it has a calming effect when I think about people, aliens, or sentient technology 10,000 years from now imagining what life was like in my lifetime. It’s an exciting time to be alive!
Professor Vedral reveals the best explanation of the universe that I’ve ever seen! I’ve been thinking along these lines for some time now, but wasn’t able to put it into such easy to comprehend terms.
I think understanding what information is, what the universe is, points toward an answer to the question: “Why are we here?”. And at the heart of everything is probability. That is the concept of information.
Since the beginning, the universe has been moving in one direction, towards ever increasing complexity. It’s about energy density per unit time (energy per gram per second). Up until the first transistorized computer was demonstrated at the University of Manchester in 1953, we were the most energy dense per second thing the universe had created (assuming no aliens or alien tech). Per second, we’re even more energy dense than a star! Now computers are by far more energy dense per second than us.
What is the end product the universe is trying (probabilistically) to produce? Will technology continue to aid us on this journey as it does now or will it eventually replace us? I don’t know. In other words, is technology, or something greater than technology, the end goal or are we? One thing is for sure, we created technology. The universe could not create it without first creating us.
I like to think of it like an assembly line for a car. The production process has already started, but the assembly line itself has yet to be completed! It starts out with the basic parts and pieces (energy, matter, laws of physics) needed for assembly, and as the car progresses down the line it gets more and more complex. I think we are either a robot working to produce the car on that assembly line, or we are the car. Either way, I don’t think we’ll have to wait long to find out.
