Given the vastness of the Universe - not just our own galaxy, the Milky Way, but across all galaxies to the furthest fringes of what we can observe - there simply must be life.
Yet all we know for certain is that the Big Bang, the origin of all we see in the night sky, happened 13.8 billion years ago, and that life has emerged here on our planet.
In our feeble attempts to define 'God', a supernatural or metaphysical reason and purpose for Everything, we must acknowledge that were the Universe more than just a random thing that exists, God must indeed be universal. Like the laws of physics - present in the same way across the Cosmos.
Our understanding of the fringes of the observable universe are filtered by the fact that we're seeing how it looked billions of years ago, before our solar system was even born. So the development of sentient life, and then civilisations, outside our own galaxy is not something we can observe in anything like real time. And remember, the Milky Way is but one of around 200 billion galaxies that we can observe.
The panpsychists' notion of consciousness connecting all matter requires it to act superluminally (faster than the speed of light) - indeed supercausally. This requires a leap of faith, abandoning the accepted limit that nothing with rest mass can be accelerated to the speed of light, with massless photons being the only particles capable of travel at that speed. Accelerating matter to speeds approaching those of light requires increasing amounts of energy that would approach infinity.
But the panpsychist's consciousness is by its nature massless, like a proton or (unconfirmed) graviton. That would match my intuition. A universal substrate upon which, through which, matter moves, interacting with it. As I say, this is nothing more than a hunch, but an idea I'd like to see taken further.
Assuming that consciousness is universal, massless and superluminal and indeed supercausal, it must affect all sentient life on whatever planet of whatever star system of whatever galaxy it finds itself. And indeed, on interstellar (or interdimensional or intertemporal) craft.
Can interstellar craft travel faster than light? Well, there is the Alcubierre drive, a theoretical idea in which space is warped (compressed ahead of the craft, expanded behind it). Objects can't accelerate to lightspeed within normal spacetime so the Alcubierre drive shifts space around an object so that it arrives at its destination more quickly than light would in normal space, without breaking any physical laws. This would of course break the laws of causality; the craft would arrive at its destination before it had even departed. Literature about UFOs frequently mentions propulsion systems based on electrogravitics or anti-gravity, or other ideas from science fiction.
But even if superluminal speeds were the ultimate barrier, any civilisation that was, say, a billion years advanced compared to us, has still had time to explore the galaxy using robotic self-replicating probes (as posited by John von Neumann as early as 1948) travelling at a small fraction of lightspeed. These ought to be everywhere by now - except they're not - or we've not seen them. There are many explanations to the Fermi Paradox (given how much life there should be out there - where is everybody?); two possibilities are the Zoo Hypothesis ('don't interfere with creatures less evolved than you') and the Shadow Biosphere Hypothesis (they are here, but we humans don't see them).
So - whether aliens are here or not, there is a vastly more likelihood that intelligent life exists across the Cosmos; the next question is - how does that life refer to the question of spirituality?
If could ask an alien one question, it would be regarding its worldview - ultimately reductionist-materialist, or spiritual? Does all sentient life in the Universe share one God - one reason, one purpose?
[Today marks the halfway point of Lent.]
Lent 2022: Day 23
Matter and materialism
Lent 2021: Day 23
Near-death experiences and the Afterlife
Lent 2020: Day 23
Refutation I
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