Scientists have put to bed a theory about space brains, which will be a great relief to those who have trouble sleeping over such matters.
According to the New Scientist there are physicists who claim that there is good evidence that a legion of floating space brains are not spontaneously bursting into existence throughout the universe.
For the last decade it was postulated that space might be full of floating brains, which were dubbed Boltzmann brains.
The idea was that since space was jolly big, there was a likelihood that consciousness big enough to form a brain could evolve. These space brains, made out of different components of space matter would float around the galaxy doing whatever brains do, and certainly not inventing reality television.
One scientist, who clearly did not get out enough, worked out that most physics theories would come unstuck if the number of space brains was higher than those of human brains.
If Boltzmann brains outnumber humans, then theories of space and time will be compromised because humanity would no longer be ‘typical’ observers. Instead the watchers of the universe might be these space brains who might perceive things a little different from us.
For example, instead of heaven and hell, they might perceive religion as being an itch which is impossible to scratch because they don’t have hands.
Fortunately, according to the New Scientist, there are physicists who claim that there is good evidence that a legion of floating space brains are not spontaneously bursting into existence throughout the universe.
New understandings of string theory and the theory of multiple universes might just save us from wasting our time worrying about space brains.
Physicists Claire Zukowski and Raphael Buosso at Berkely say that the key to this balance between human and space brains is whether or not universes expand forever and linger for much longer than creatures like humans can survive.
However, using two models of the universe it now seems less likely that reality as we know it is dominated by space superbrains. So now you can all get some sleep knowing that we are still the best observers of the universe that we know of.
