Perhaps extraterrestrial life is hidden in the surrounding matter.

NGC 1300, an example of a barred spiral galaxy. Photo : NASA, ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team STScI / AURA

English science fiction writer Arthur Clark in his work formulated three (four) laws, which later became known as Clark laws. One of them is the most famous. He says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

If you show a medieval man a smartphone with a speech synthesizer and a music player, he will definitely recognize you as a wizard or a witch. Even banal electricity will seem like magic to him. But the law of Clark applies not only to our ancestors, but also to modern people.
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Perhaps Arthur Clark was not sufficiently ambitious in his thinking. What if an extraterrestrial civilization has advanced so far that we will not just consider its technology magical, but generally cannot be distinguished from the physical phenomena of the surrounding world? Such a bold point of view was advanced by the famous physicist Caleb Scharf from Columbia University (USA), whose article was published in the November issue of the journal Nautilus Cosmos .

We must recognize that if intelligent life is not a unique phenomenon, and if there are a great many intelligent civilizations in space, then many of them are ahead of humanity in its development. And some of them are likely to be ahead of us so much that we can not even imagine the difference. That is, we cannot understand the complexity of their technology and the laws by which it works, as a Neanderthal cannot understand the device of a smartphone.

It can be assumed that there is an extreme development of an alien civilization. The current futurologists consider technological singularity to be the edge of normal technological development in the human sense - the moment when technological progress becomes so complex after the fusion of a person with computers and technological intelligence that it becomes inaccessible to understanding.


The path to technological singularity. Illustration: Ray Kurzweil

If we realize the possibility of the extreme development of civilization on the model of Q from the Star Trek series, it becomes very easy to explain why we still do not find signs of its existence. After all, even looking at it in emphasis, we at our level will not be able to understand that we are looking at this civilization. In other words, this explains the notorious Fermi paradox .

By the way, this simultaneously explains why we still cannot understand all the mysteries of the Universe, including the nature of gravity and the essence of dark matter.

A sufficiently developed civilization can literally subjugate the surrounding matter.

Imagine that computers will continue to exponentially increase computing power, in accordance with Moore’s law, to infinity. At a certain moment they will be able to fully calculate the movement of all atoms and molecules that make up living beings and material objects. “In this case, civilization can rewrite itself and the whole physical reality into new forms,” writes Caleb Scharf. “In the end, maybe our Universe is one of these new forms into which some other civilizations have rewritten the world around.”

Probably, such a theory is unverifiable, like the theory about life in the Matrix. Indeed, in this case, a sufficiently advanced alien life will be able to firmly implant itself into the fabric of this new rewritten Universe, which we consider to be an intact natural phenomenon.

But even if the theory is unverifiable, Caleb Scarf proposes to pay attention to some cosmic phenomena, which fully correspond to it, no matter how crazy it sounds.

For example, the well-known fact that only 5% of the mass-energy in the Universe consists of ordinary matter: protons, neutrons and electrons, of which humans are also composed. A much larger part - 27% - is diverted to a supposedly unobservable substance, which remains an absolute mystery. This is dark matter , the essence of which is completely incomprehensible to us.


Mass distribution diagram in the universe

Astrophysicists provide convincing evidence of the existence of dark matter, based on its gravitational effect on the fabric of space-time. But still, no one even closely understands what it can be. It is fundamentally unobservable, because it does not emit electromagnetic radiation and does not interact with it directly. That is, at our level of development it is impossible to observe it.

In theory, huge clouds of dark matter surround galaxies, tying the entire structure together using gravity.

Scientists have no idea what dark matter is made of and how it is organized, although there are several theories about this. The most obvious suggestion is that dark matter is composed of ordinary baryonic matter, but this is contrary to the Big Bang theory. Some astronomers suggest that dark matter has a heterogeneous structure with some internal content. It may have an analogue of our light, that is, some invisible interaction of elementary particles besides strong interaction.

It is possible that dark matter is a complex structure. And maybe this is the line where a technologically advanced civilization goes. In fact, how is it even better to protect yourself from the vagaries of supernovae and gamma-ray bursts from outer space, if you do not rewrite yourself in a form that is immune to electromagnetic radiation? Perfect option.

According to modern cosmological theory, the accelerating expansion of the universe began about 5 billion years ago. The reason is unknown. It is customary to explain it with dark energy - this is something unknown that they have entered into a mathematical formula specifically to explain the observed expansion of the Universe. But it is still not clear why the expansion acceleration suddenly began. For some cosmologists, this obviously indicates that our Universe is part of the Multiverse — the multitude of real parallel universes.

Caleb Scarf does not stop at this theory. He proposes to dream up the theory that dark energy itself is a product of an outside civilization, which has certain reasons to accelerate the expansion of our Universe. For example, to absorb the entropy that a highly developed civilization generates. Our universe cools when expanding. This allows you to dump into it outside the excess energy, it works as a cooling system.

Perhaps some kind of smart life 5 years ago realized how to use our Universe as a cooler and learned how to manage the process.

For further study of the theory, the author refers to the idea of quintessence and to the ideas expressed by the famous physicist Freeman Dyson in the article “Time without end” (1979), talking about civilizations that operate on an astrophysical scale.

Well, if we assumed that a rational being was the reason why the expansion of the universe began to accelerate 5 billion years ago, why not go further and assume that advanced life uses photons in cosmic radiation for data transfer and backup systems. Or controls the streams of cosmic radiation, directing them to specified areas of space to generate interference, excitement of atoms and molecules, approximately like in the novel “The Voice of the Lord ” by Stanislav Lem.

It is possible that by transmitting data in photons you can transfer and recreate your material objects in another part of the Universe. This is just one of the many ways in which a sufficiently developed civilization is capable of hiding its existence from uneducated humanity, says the American physicist.

Perhaps, extraterrestrial life really does not hide at all somewhere far away, but surrounds us from all sides?

In any case, it makes sense to study the surrounding Universe more carefully. Then over time, we will discover a part of scientific truth.