Technology
Ep.10: The Time Machine
In Episode 10 of 'Alien Encounters,' we explore the implications of advanced alien technology and its integration into human society. As a quantum supercomputer named Quincy merges with alie...
Ep.10: The Time Machine
Technology •
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Interactive Transcript
Speaker A
Previously on Alien Encounters. For nearly two decades, an alien presence has dominated our world.
Speaker B
On the positive side, aliens will provide us with a cornucopia of new technology. Or they may come to conquer, to use us as seven and a half billion lab rats.
Speaker A
Millions of alien hybrids live among us.
Speaker B
The most powerful emotional driver in human beings is fear. They may be different. They may be more powerful.
Speaker A
A quantum supercomputer dubbed Quincy and the alien spawn merged into a single living network. Fearing alien control, the military built a rival supercomputer and launched the first worldwide war of the digital age.
Speaker B
If two supercomputer intelligences got into a cyber war, airplanes start falling out of the sky.
Speaker A
Amid the chaos comes communication from a distant planet. Can we handle what we're about to learn? Earth's most powerful brain has been destroyed.
Speaker B
When something iconic disappears, when a great leader disappears, now a vacuum has been created. So what do we take to fill in that space that was there before and was there? A succession plan.
Speaker A
With its central processor reduced to rubble, the worldwide alien network falls silent four hours later.
Speaker B
As long as that computer's intelligence is centralized in one location, it's vulnerable. One thing that the computer is going to want to do is decentralize. Spread its intelligence throughout the entire network of infrastructure that is available to it.
Speaker A
Quincy's machinery may be gone, but its intelligence has been distributed to processors everywhere. The more information becomes available to computers worldwide.
Speaker B
We will probably be right on the.
Speaker A
Verge of the singularity. When the computers begin exchanging information with each other without human input. Quincy is dead. Long live Quincy. Dispersed in the cloud, the U.S. and its allies cannot fight an enemy that surrounds the globe. Quincy is back. Or is it? Something seems wrong with the connection. Perhaps it's just Quincy getting back on its feet. After all, Quincy only had a short time to prepare before the shower of hellfire missiles. The computer compensated for the damage with a distributed design similar to our world's most efficient information processor. The human brain.
Speaker B
The brain has many mechanisms by which it can store information. The connections between neurons, how molecules are distributed across the nerve cell membrane, the expression levels of different genes and adapting over time.
Speaker A
But our brain cells are stuck inside our individual skulls. While Quincy's connections span most of the computer processors and half the human brains on Earth, it can mathematically predict our actions, our illnesses, our weather, and every other aspect of our physical world.
Speaker B
The world is run by algorithms. Algorithms are stronger than any human being, any institution, any government. There's no government with the ability to shut down algorithms.
Speaker A
Because Quincy understands all the formulas that describe reality. It can use those formulas to create an incredibly detailed virtual version.
Speaker B
Virtual reality 1.0, it's basically really kludging. It's obviously fake. And 2.0, it looks realistic. We're now reaching computational closure with the resolution. It looks like reality. The next upgrade beyond that is programmable matter, A solid or a liquid or a gas that changes its state depending on the input, so that it can actually respond like real objects could.
Speaker A
At Carnegie Mellon University, humans began engineering a seamless virtual world in the early 2000s.
Speaker B
The key to having people feel immersed in a virtual world Is to create tight feedback loops between what they do, what they see, and then what comes back to them. We're trying to really create the feel that you are in there and you are part of the loop that is the imaginary world.
Speaker A
Students here experiment with every kind of hardware. Immersion rooms or caves and headsets.
Speaker B
So this is a head mounted display, and he can see the game that you can see on the screen. He's moving around, he's controlling his view, and he's operating an in game laser all with his head.
Speaker A
The headsets use 3D stereoscopic images to mimic our vision. Gyroscopes and accelerometers track the head's position in space.
Speaker B
We're going to see advancements happening in two different directions. One of them is from the outside in, Trying to create things that look and feel more and more real to us from the outside. And you could build physical, touchable structures. But the other, which is the creepier part, Is from the inside out, where we make you think you're touching physical, actual structures, when really you're not. Since reality itself is really just an illusion, what we experience as reality and what actually exists out in the world Are two radically different things. And as we learn more and more about neuroscience, we're finding ways to fool the brain into thinking that there are realities there that don't exist at all.
Speaker A
Are the aliens luring us into a reality that doesn't exist?
Speaker B
This could be looked at as a way that the machine is subduing the humans. Let's keep them busy. Let's keep them needing this thing we're feeding them. I mean, the skeptical community would certainly look at this as the first steps that the machine is using to control humanity.
Speaker A
The aliens have the technology to control our minds if they want to. The quantum computer called Quincy is physically gone, but its essence is now everywhere. It's inside the minds of the alien hybrid teenagers. And now they are being overwhelmed with uncontrollable visions of distant worlds. The violent universe inside their minds is a horrifying place.
Speaker B
We have tens of millions of black holes just in this galaxy. And every 25, 26 million years, we have a mass extinction event. We have gamma ray bursts. We're gonna have this collision at some point with Andromeda. So we take a 220 million year road trip through the galaxy. But some of the galaxy's neighborhoods are very dangerous.
Speaker A
The origin and meaning of the visions remain a mystery. The Turkish physicist who built Quincy believes he knows the source. Before the missile strike, Quincy opened a quantum link to a distant alien network. It disseminated thousands of yottabytes worth of information. The download was almost complete when the bombs hit. But what gems of intergalactic wisdom were in those final unsent bits of data? The physicist looks for clues using a new technology. A new generation of quantum powered virtual reality devices delivers sensations directly to the brain. We can explore our world as never before.
Speaker B
One of the main thrusts in all fields of science are the constructions of simulations. When we really understand some type of phenomenon, we can describe it with the use of mathematical equations. These are our scientific theories and our scientific laws. So once we have these scientific theories, people can become immersed in these simulations and can experience whatever event they want. Right now, when we create virtual worlds in video games, they tend to be little pocket worlds that are created by one group of people. And that little pocket world is off by itself. But we're going to be moving into something much more like the world wide web, but for simulations, where anytime anyone creates a new element of the simulation, it becomes part of a continuous reality. And people from many different disciplines all bring their knowledge together into one unified vision of how the world is, was, and will be.
Speaker A
Explorers don't need to leave their armchairs. Spacecraft can be piloted virtually. Microbiologists make virtual voyages of discovery deep inside the human body. And marine biologists virtually visit fish in their native habitats under flying 14,000ft of ocean. But could this new technology be too good?
Speaker B
Give people the power of a God to create a virtual world? Will they live it with others or live it by themselves? Will they do it to waste time or to be practical? Or will they turn back to our everyday lives when we get to the point that allows you to enter the matrix? They may stay there, hang an IV and leave me alone for 12 hours. Just like junkies who go from fix to fix and waste away, destroying their bodies. We may see that if you could get a wire into the pleasure center of the Human brain and a button that would give yourself a jolt. Could any human being put the control down? Mice can't. Rats who've had this operation can't. They will press the bar until they starve to death.
Speaker A
Two decades after the aliens arrived, their technology makes our virtual worlds more real. Billions of people live increasingly lifelike simulated lives.
Speaker B
The more that we interact with these things, the smarter they're going to get. For example, if you use Siri on Apple devices every time you speak and that information goes off into their central database, the entire system is getting smarter. To be able to have that in a virtual world as well takes us to new heights, New realms of immersion and new realms of reality.
Speaker A
With quantum powered, globe spanning artificial intelligence, we can simulate dynamic forces across the world and across time. Geologists can feel the movements of tectonic plates at any spot on Earth, past or future. Biologists can run the evolutionary clock forward and backward to see species as they differentiate over time. And historians watch the forces of human history unfold. They uncover truths about our past. And even relive will seem like a time machine.
Speaker B
I mean, what would you pay to go back and be with Cleopatra or Julius Caesar or William Shakespeare? It has that possibility.
Speaker A
If you want, for example, to understand Lincoln's assassination based on the existing material and you model it in virtual reality.
Speaker B
You might see somebody in the crowd.
Speaker A
That nobody noticed before. This kind of time machine doesn't actually move us through the fourth dimension, but it might as well. With the new technology, the Turkish physicist can revisit the minutes before the Hellfire missiles destroyed Quincy's main focus frame. He attempts to create an alternate virtual path through time, a version of history where Quincy was never destroyed and where the final upload of alien data was complete. Other scientists are taking virtual trips to a much more distant past. Humans have kept astronomical records since ancient Babylon, 5,000 years ago. Quincy compiles all of the data and rolls back the clock much farther. It shows the position of stars and planets, as well as geological and climate conditions in Africa's Great Rift Valley at the summer equinox, exactly 1.5 million years ago.
Speaker B
It's very natural that people will want to use the simulation power to go back and understand our history, to understand where we came from and all of that, because that's one of those basic human needs, to connect with our roots, complete the circle, and encounter ourselves again at the beginning.
Speaker A
Paleoartist Victor Dayoch began working on a similar prehistorical puzzle in the early 2000s. He works with paleontologists who collect all the evidence about each extinct hominid species. And he synthesizes this information into an accurate life sized representation of our ancestors.
Speaker B
I keep my work as accurate as possible by first and foremost really listening to fossil material. As you can see, these areas that are this yellowish color are the areas of the flower fossilized bone.
Speaker A
This is a replica of Homo habilis, one of the first species of advanced humans. It walked the earth 2 million years.
Speaker B
Ago from the skull, using it like a roadmap. I follow the surface features to give me the size of the nose and whatever pieces of anatomy I can calculate the subject's world.
Speaker A
His climate, diet and geography inform the final work.
Speaker B
This is a specimen of Homo erectus from Chokodan, China, the famous Peking Man. And so what we see in erectus is its anatomy. Adapting to its region, Erectus evolved smaller.
Speaker A
Nasal passages as protection from cold air, leading to a flatter face.
Speaker B
I look at these hominids and I can only see family. These things have survived eons beyond anything that they ever imagined they could. The thing that we need to really understand too, is that our time is limited. All these humans have become extinct. And so Homo sapiens will not live forever, but a version of humans may.
Speaker A
The alien technology has given us the chance to walk on The African Savannah 1.55 million years ago alongside Homo ergaster. We're witnessing the birth of humanity.
Speaker B
From a research perspective. For those of us that look at biology and aspects of evolution and behavior, the ability to look into the eyes of our ancestors would be extremely profound. We've come to accept the idea that.
Speaker A
There is one specific species of human, Homo sapiens.
Speaker B
But hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Speaker A
The human line had not yet coalesced into just Homo sapiens. You had Homo neanderthalus and Australopithecus, and all of these other variations died out because they were out competed.
Speaker B
Those levels of simulation would be incredible scientific tools. I think we would discover things from, from the simulations that would be remarkable to look at problems with experience rather than being caught unprepared.
Speaker A
Recreating the past can lead to discoveries about our future. The simulation has picked up a heavenly pattern that no human astronomer ever noticed. The millions of human alien hybrids living among us continue to have strange visions. They see galaxies, hungry black holes, and now a planet with rings. It looks like Earth with its magnetic rings of alien matter. But it could be the planet Gliese 667cc, 22 light years away, where we discovered another civilization surrounded by rings. Or perhaps it's yet Another planet that has been visited by the same aliens who turned our world upside down. Astronomers immersed in the simulated dawn of man watch searing lights cross the east African sky. 1.5 million years ago, Earth is passing through the tail of an enormous comet.
Speaker B
The beauty of comets is that they're predictable. They come in and visit the inner solar system periodically, like Halley's comet, which has a period of 70 some odd years. Then we have these long period comets, comets that may visit the inner solar system once every hundreds of years or thousands of years. These longer period comets can really sneak up on us and surprise us.
Speaker A
If this virtual reality is a faithful recreation of history derived from alien computations of big data, then the comet and its path are also real.
Speaker B
The average comet is about a few kilometers across, the size of a small city. They've hit the Earth in the past and caused mass extinctions, wiping out lots of different species. And the same thing could happen to the human race.
Speaker A
The comet has made a million and a half year journey around the solar system and once again is racing toward Earth. Our planet is dotted with evidence of previous devastating impacts.
Speaker B
The Tunguska event in Siberia was actually about 100 years ago. A very small comet, maybe about 50 meters across, entered the Earth's atmosphere and exploded over the Siberian tundra, flattening thousands of square miles of pine tree forest. If that had occurred over a more densely populated area, it could have had a lot of casualties. An impact in the Pacific Ocean would trigger a very large tsunami, which would flood all areas around the Pacific Rim. An impact on a continent could basically decimate an area the size of the continent and throw up a large dust cloud, which would basically create a nuclear winter condition. So the comet or asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was about 10 kilometers in diameter and that wiped out about 60% of all life on Earth. A much larger than average comet would be the end of all life as we know it on Earth.
Speaker A
Perhaps the aliens helped us develop this new technology as a warning.
Speaker B
HP Lovecraft once said that the most merciful thing is, is our inability to correlate all the incredibly dangerous things that are out there, because it might drive us mad. 99% plus of all the species that have ever lived are extinct. The average length of time of a species about 100,000 years. Humans might be 200,000 years. We are ourselves overdue for extinction.
Speaker A
NASA astronomers calculate the trajectory of the comet. Then they aim the James Webb Telescope at the outer edges of the solar system. There is good news. The comet will miss earth by about 239,000 miles. And there is bad news. It's on a collision course with our moon.
Speaker B
All we have to do is look at the moon almost with the naked eye and we see that we've been dodging bullets. If a very large object, say the size of Texas, were to hit the moon, it could change the moon's orbit. That can make it move closer to the Earth, farther away from the Earth. We would see this as an effect of tides. It may change the rotation period of the Earth as well. When the Moon formed, it was much closer to Earth and the tides were kilometers in height. What if this comet crashed into the moon, broken apart? If you redistribute that mass, it's going to have a huge impact on the Earth. Our tides are now going to be twice a day, tsunamis all over the planet. So life on the coastlines where most human civilizations are would no longer be possible.
Speaker A
From its speed and trajectory, we know that the comet will strike the moon in one year, 22 days, 17 hours, and 22 minutes. The doomsday clock is set with just over a year to prevent a global catastrophe, Leaders around the world come together.
Speaker B
If we were to discover a comet rasher that we knew was going to hit the Earth within a month or a year, there's probably not much we could really do about it.
Speaker A
Every possible way to save humanity must be considered starting with the most direct.
Speaker B
Probably the best method is to actually try to go up and deflect the asteroider comet off of its current course. With our current technology, we could launch a satellite to match course and hit it with paintballs or spray it with bright white paint. All we would have to do is change its albedo so it is reflecting light differently, and the light pressure from the sun would alter its orbit. If we build rocket engines that are sufficient, we could attach them and we could steer them gently away so that they miss us. But we better get the calculations right. Blowing it up could work, but then you have the dangerous thing of you turned one falling object into many, that basically you really haven't changed the orbit of any of the objects. So you'd really have to obliterate it into such small particles that they would all burn up upon entry to the atmosphere, which would be pretty difficult to do.
Speaker A
Many look elsewhere for answers, in faith in each other and in the virtual world where humans are in control.
Speaker B
I wouldn't be surprised if human beings.
Speaker A
Said, I like this virtual world better than where I live now.
Speaker B
And I go in there and I play, and I like what it predicts about my life. So I'm gonna stay there. You know, you go to your job moving boxes around a warehouse, you, go home, and you get to be a God. Stomping wizards and warriors.
Speaker A
However enjoyable, Virtual escapism won't save our world from the comet aimed at our moon.
Speaker B
We haven't set up a way to protect the planet from space threats. There isn't a defense against a gamma ray burst. There isn't a defense against a rogue black hole. There isn't a defense against everything. And so that means we have to go to another planet to make sure that humanity can survive. I think it's our most fundamental, basic obligation to back up the biosphere. If we're going to preserve human life, preserve human DNA, preserve Earth life and DNA, preserve our information and our science, Then what we're going to want to do is build a fleet of ships, our ark, our lifeboat to the stars, to save our planet and save our legacy as a species that has existed in this universe.
Speaker A
But a year is not enough time to design and build the type of spacecraft we would need. And even if we manage to launch an ark, where would we send it? The Turkish physicist spends what may be Earth's final weeks Virtually reconstructing a moment in the recent past, Seconds before missiles destroyed his quantum supercomputer. In reality, the computer died before completing its final download. But with each iteration, the simulation becomes more accurate. Virtual Quincy survives a moment longer, and more of the final alien message comes through.
Speaker B
One of the great questions is, how far can we take simulation? Are you going to be able to create simulated worlds where virtual reality can change history?
Speaker A
Could this be our salvation? The quantum link between our world and the intergalactic Internet Is now complete. The bridge visions coalesce into an image of the universe as never seen before. A line appears from Gliese 667cc to Earth, then to another solar system and another, A network of civilizations across the galaxy and beyond.
Speaker B
Communication across interstellar distances Would be like the delivery of electricity and radio and television and the Internet simultaneously to a little town that previously received all of its mail by the mule climbing up the hill. But it would also transform us, because we would be seeing not just the world. We'd be seeing the universe.
Speaker A
Outside our space. Communications are limited by the speed of light. How does the galactic Internet work when civilizations are separated by hundreds or thousands of light years?
Speaker B
The question that really comes up is, can we find a way around the limitations of the speed of light? If we could do that, we could Create an interstellar Internet. Current physics says you can't go faster than the speed of light. We have a history of saying we can't do something, and then a new breakthrough occurring. For example, quantum mechanics.
Speaker A
A trillion photons on earth connected us to earth. Others in a distant alien world.
Speaker B
A photon qubit is extremely good for carrying information from point A to point B. You can use photons to communicate across long distances. The secret is entanglement. If you have some entangled particles, then what you can do is you can make a measurement on these electrons over here. And this measurement gives you just the right information you need to reconstitute the electrons that are over here. If you could have an entangled particle here and an entangled particle on the other side of the galaxy, you'd have instantaneous communication anywhere in the galaxy.
Speaker A
How is this possible? Did that box of entangled photons somehow survive the missile strike? Could the entanglement have been transferred to the virtual world? Or was the connection there all along?
Speaker B
When I think of what the alien virus might have done to these brids. All of that dust came from one source. Which means it could have been programmed to be quantum entangled from the very beginning in inside of their bodies. If that dust is part of that device. Well, all of those grids are now possibly entangled, acting as one quantum computer.
Speaker A
But with a massive comet hurtling toward our moon, can we survive long enough to join the universal community? Without an interstellar arc, we may need to take a different kind of journey. Virtual reality showed us our past and warned us about our future. Can the same technology save us from extinction?
Speaker B
If I could preserve myself electronically into some kind of quantum computer essence, I'd be very tempted. There are things that are going to happen beyond the span of my lifetime. This body is never gonna get there. But if this intelligence could get there, if this spirit could get there, you better believe I'd be tempted.
Speaker A
Transcending our planet's destruction, leaving our bodies behind, While uploading our minds into the galactic Internet May be our only salvation? Or is it only a temporary reprieve?
Speaker B
The underlying challenge of a transcendent future. Where we get uploaded is, what happens to the machines if a comet or something comes and wipes out the planet, Wiping out the computers themselves. Everybody who's transcended goes with them. But here's the really interesting thing. Time would operate differently. If you're living in a virtual reality, you may have 10,000 years of life ahead of you before one week has passed for the earth, you are living essentially forever. In a very short period of time, it's going to create these incredible new opportunities, the greatest one of which I think is going and meeting all these other interesting intelligences that are taking their own unique and unpredictable paths into inner space as well.
Speaker A
Uploading our intelligence and leaving our bodies behind may be the ultimate step in human evolution.
Speaker B
What I find the most fascinating about human evolution is that it's the sort of last little molding stage of the universe as it develops a voice in this part of the cosmos. Understanding our evolution is understanding the awakening of the universe itself. Carl Sagan said it best. It's taken 13 billion years for the universe to become aware of itself. We are that part of the universe that is aware of the rest of the universe. Yeah, there's a certain arrogance to that, but there's also a certain awesome majesty to it.
Speaker A
Maybe human salvation will come when we transcend this physical realm. Virtual reality is an escape from the worries of the actual world. Perhaps a computer simulated escape is the only one possible.