I can believe an advanced, falgsc human society would be capable of eradicating the possibility of life in the solar system, but I don't think that there is any version of human society that could substantially alter the course of the heat death of the universe, or that could prevent the potential for life across all of space.
Right, at a minimum, the difference between the universe and the 'observable universe' is going to put limits on human reach, but maybe there are enough similarly minded organisms in the universe to overcome that.
The problem with an automaton based approach is what characteristics they would need to get the job done. To match the scale of altering the entire reachable universe, they would have to be self reproducing. To be able to prevent life from existing, given all of the different environments in the universe that could lead to the rise of life, and all of the different forms that life could take, they would have to be able to adapt to the local environment, and have enough complexity of information processing to be able to identify previously unanticipated forms of life, and find the best way to disrupt it.
At this point, you've, at the very least, severely blurred the lines of what life is, and most likely created a new form of life that is much more prevalent than naturally occurring life ever was.
Yeah, that would destroy all life that currently exists, but it would also essentially re-roll the whole universe, and create new conditions for the development of life that didn't exist before. 'Destroy all life' is one thing, but 'prevent any possibility of the development of life' is a much harder job.
I can believe an advanced, falgsc human society would be capable of eradicating the possibility of life in the solar system, but I don't think that there is any version of human society that could substantially alter the course of the heat death of the universe, or that could prevent the potential for life across all of space.
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Right, at a minimum, the difference between the universe and the 'observable universe' is going to put limits on human reach, but maybe there are enough similarly minded organisms in the universe to overcome that.
The problem with an automaton based approach is what characteristics they would need to get the job done. To match the scale of altering the entire reachable universe, they would have to be self reproducing. To be able to prevent life from existing, given all of the different environments in the universe that could lead to the rise of life, and all of the different forms that life could take, they would have to be able to adapt to the local environment, and have enough complexity of information processing to be able to identify previously unanticipated forms of life, and find the best way to disrupt it.
At this point, you've, at the very least, severely blurred the lines of what life is, and most likely created a new form of life that is much more prevalent than naturally occurring life ever was.
There's still a lot we don't know about the universe. Maybe we can trigger false vacuum decay or some such.
Yeah, that would destroy all life that currently exists, but it would also essentially re-roll the whole universe, and create new conditions for the development of life that didn't exist before. 'Destroy all life' is one thing, but 'prevent any possibility of the development of life' is a much harder job.