Re:Grabby Aliens: A Resolution to the Fermi Paradox
by colordrops on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @12:19AM
(#33416859)
I wasn't talking about Einstein-Rosen bridges. In fact I was wary of using that analogy because I suspected, correctly, that it would be misunderstood.
It sounds like you are saying that any possible reality could only interacti with another one using Einstein-Rosen bridges. This is far too narrow a limiting of what is possible. If it's possible at all, regardless of likelihood, that reality could be a simulation, then anything you say about the Einstein-Rosen bridge is a property of the simulation, and not a limit on reality as a whole.
As for completeness, each revision we make to the known laws of physics is always smaller than the ones that came before. Einstein’s Relativity trumped Newton’s laws of gravity and motion, but only at high speeds or energies. At high speeds you start to notice weird effects like time dilation, but at low speeds the time dilation is so small that you would never notice it unless you knew to look for it.
Likewise, in most situations the difference between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics is unobservable. There were some edge cases where classical mechanics just couldn’t explain observable phenomena, like the photo–electric effect or phosphorescence, and all quantum mechanics does is fix those edge cases while still being able to explain all the rest of chemistry and such that we already knew about. The changes introduced by Quantum Electro–Dynamics and later Quantum Chromo–Dynamics were even subtler than that. The only easily–measured thing that QCD explains that QED couldn’t is radioactive decay, which is basically irrelevant to life. QED is much more useful to biologists because it explains how chemical reactions can release light (fireflies!), how chemicals can be sensitive to particular parts of the light spectrum (think rhodopsin in the cone cells in your eye), etc.
Because every new addition to our understanding of physics must not contradict anything we already understand (if it did then we would know it was wrong), we are asymptotically approaching a limit (as it were). That limit is either the full laws of physics, or I suppose you would say some limitation of our own minds. But why should our minds be unable to comprehend the full laws of physics? Even if those get harder and harder to learn about and understand, we have all the time in the universe to come to grips with them. Any individual can maybe hit a limit of how clever they can be, but the human race as a whole? I doubt it; we’ll crack that nut eventually. Even if humanity gives up at some point, nothing that we fail to learn could contradict what we have already figured out.