In anticipation of another public lecture, the organizer asked for the title of my lecture. I suggested: “Hunting for aliens”. The organizer expressed concern that some audience members may confuse me for an employee of the US government in search of illegal aliens near the southern border wall. I explained that no two -dimensional wall erected on the ground will protect us from extras because they come from above.
It is only a matter of time until we notice interstellar travelers arriving without a proper visa. The policy of deporting them back to your home exoplanets will be exorbitant – over a billion dollars to flight. The journey will also take a long time – over a billion years with conventional chemical drive. We will have to learn to live with these aliens and promote diversity and inclusion in a galactic context.
The sun was created in the last third cosmic history, so we were overdue for the interstellar travelers. Experienced travelers could be involved in their interstellar travel for billions of years. To properly interpret recorded diaries and photo albums in terms of specific visited stars, we would have to interpret their time measurements thoroughly.
Imagine an interstellar tourist in a mechanical analog watch. Such a watch is at best true up to 3 seconds a day or balance 30,000 years for a billion years. This clocking error is comparable over the time he needs to jump from one star into another with chemical drive. Travelers interstees must wear better clocks to have a reliable time recording.
Our best atomic clocks are precise for fractional uncertainty billions of billions. They will operate a natural transition frequency of atoms such as YTTERBIUM. Higher frequency transitions allow greater precision. This was recognized in recent articleWhich suggested the operate of nuclear passages in future clocks.
What is the final precision achieved by clocks? In the context of our current understanding of quantum mechanics and gravity, there can be no transition between discrete quantum states in which the emitted particle transfers more than Energia Planck. Sharing this maximum energy by a fixed Planck gives a maximum frequency of any clock. This suggests that no clock can operate a time cycle shorter than the opposite of Planck's frequency, 5.4 × 10^{-44} seconds. The age of the universe is 8 × 10^{60} Planck units.
Because each clock cycle provides independent measurement, Theorem about the central limit In statistics, it suggests that fleeting clock precision can improve the opposite with the square element of the number of cycles. The Plancka clock operating in the entire cosmic history would achieve at most the precision of 4 × 10^{-31} Planck Times or 2 × 10^{-74} seconds. This is sufficient for all practical goals of interstellar travel.
Until now, we assumed that time is continuous as postulated in contemporary physics. But what if time is implemented as a series of considerate points? We would not notice the difference between these cases if we operate a clock that cannot solve the discretivity of time, because its inherent time errors introduce blurred, which makes discrete time steps appear as a continuous sequence. When probing a harvest of atoms with indigent spatial resolution, much greater than separation between atoms, the system appears as a continuous fluid. While watching a movie about the speed of frames, which exceeds the sampling speed of our visual sensory system, the film seems continuous. In fact, the film is a collection of snapshots.
Is reality a set of snapshots?
Since the speed of delicate is a universal constant, discretion over time translates into the discreteness of the space. The length of the spatial pixel is the time duration of the pixels than the speed of delicate.
Computer simulations take considerate pixels in space and time. If our world is a computer simulation, like suggested In 2003, by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, the improved clocks can ultimately solve discrete simulation time intervals. The exact clocks would detect the physical reality of snapshots in which nothing happens between discrete time steps.
A film observer with an extremely high sampling speed will see the shutter sequence. For the same reason, future clocks can be experimentally disclosed that we live in a simulation. But winning the Physics Nobel award for such a discovery will not be particularly satisfying, because the award ceremony is part of the simulation and in no significant way. The discovery had to be choreographed by the simulation creator.
We hope that our interstellated guests will wear the Planck clock, which would show the best possible precision that time is continuous and that we do not live in simulation. In this case, the reality of their visit would seem much better than the Hollywood script for the artificial shutter sequence.
But in our future meetings with aliens there is also a cultural nuance. The way we express the age of the universe, because 13.8 billion years reflect our anthropocentric worldview, in which we document the cosmic history based on the orbital period of our home planet around the sun. Aliens can operate the orbital period of their home planet. Just remember to rewind albums with photos in chronological order.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
