Marcel Legros - Play the Game of Life

There’s an old saying, “You Can Never Go Home.”

I understand the sentiment behind the proverb, but I feel the need to add to it, with:

“You can never go home. You’re already there, and you’ve never left.”

When you go back to places and people from your past, they’re never quite the same as you remembered them. Often, you’re let down and disappointed by what you find but often they’re exactly as you left them. It’s a strange feeling, returning to a childhood haunt or place of past importance to you. It feels like you’re walking onto the set of your own movie, somehow. It’s even stranger to contact someone you haven’t spoken to in years and say hello.

Try This:

Go to a place you haven’t visited in a long time - somewhere important to you.

Call someone you haven’t talked to since you were a kid - maybe an old friend, neighbor, realtive, or teacher.

It’s exciting and satisfying, but I’m not entirely sure why.

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This is the first post in a new series called, “The Intelligent Universe.”
Each article will explore random, everyday things but explore them a with a twist. Discover fantastic adventures contained within the mundane. In the Intelligent Universe, science and spirit are exactly the same - creative expressions of energy and thought. There is meaning in everything around us if we look deeply enough…

When we accidentally turn our tv or radio to a station with no broadcast, we get static, snow, and white noise. Why do we get white noise at all? If there isn’t a broadcast, shouldn’t it just be a dead screen or silence?

SETI’s Dilemma

SETI stands for “Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence”. This non-profit’s stated mission is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. Since 1984, they’ve been scouring the universe with radio telescopes for any trace of life emitted from other worlds by intelligent beings. They face the daily challenge of eliminating false positives - “how do we cut out terrestrial and cosmic noise from our results?” Trillions of cosmic bodies combine their energies to form a soup of white noise that bathe the entire universe in static - so do cellular phones and microwave ovens. Software algorithms do a great job of filtering the noise from collected results but here is the problem, as I see it - the signal astronomers are looking for, is the noise itself.

Ever Try Unscrambling an Egg?

What happens to the sound of your voice when you’re finished speaking? It doesn’t disappear; it travels outward in space and mingles with every other sound and vibration on earth. The strength of vibration dissipates with distance but never entirely disappears. The first two laws of thermodynamics apply - no energy is ever lost, it can be only transformed into other forms. As your voice mingles with every other voice and noise on the planet, it becomes white noise - indistinguishable and unidentifiable as human, but it’s still there. No word ever uttered is lost - it’s simply buried under a cacophony of other voices. The challenge facing SETI is something like pointing a microphone on a street corner and listening for the Gettysburg Address delivered by Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863. His famous words are still vibrating in the air today but they’re intermingled with 144 years of every other sound created on Earth. There’s immense intelligence contained within white noise, but how do you extract it?

The Universe is a Chaotic Party

Sound cannot escape from Earth but light, and other energy forms can. If you read a book outside on a sunny day, some of the light reflected from the pages travels outwards into deep space. If an alien race, 100 million light years away have equipment sensitive and smart enough to cut out the cosmic noise, they might observe you reading your book 100 million years from today. They’ll wonder why they invested so heavily to watch you read trash novels.

All noise contains intelligence. Lives pass and speeches end, but records of them are all contained in noise and chaos. The next time you hear static on your radio, you might be listening to the energy of your neighbour heating up his lunch in a microwave. When you look a up at the stars, the light reaching your eyes might also contain the reflected image of an alien being, reading a trashy novel from 100 million years ago. Some things never change…

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