Two New Radical Advanced-Extraterrestrial-Life Theories

Two mind-boggling conjectures about the existence of advanced alien civilizations have been made by Harvard’s chief astronomer and the director of Columbia University’s Astrobiology Center.

Astrophysicist Caleb Scharf at Columbia University proposes that alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics. While Harvard’s Avi Loeb suggests that the first-known interstellar visitor to our Solar System, Oumuamua, could be a probe sent by an alien space-faringcivilization, and that the scientific community should be more willing to acknowledge and embrace uncertainty.

Physicists have found that for the last 7 billion years or so something is pushing the galaxies, adding energy to them. Something they are calling “dark energy,” a force thatisreal, but so far eludes detection.

One of the most speculative ideas for the mechanism of an accelerating cosmic expansion is called “quintessence”, a relative of the Higgs field that permeates the cosmos. Perhaps some clever life 5 billion years ago figured out how to activate that field, speculates Scharf. How? “Beats me,” he says, “but it’s a thought-provoking idea, and it echoes some of the thinking of cosmologist Freeman Dyson’s famous 1979 paper “Time Without End,” where he looked at life’s ability in the far, far future to act on an astrophysical scale in an open universe that need not evolve into a state of permanent quiescence. Where life and communication cancontinuefor ever.