LIFE — I too think that the mere emergence of life ("life" as in this new minimum quantifiable definition and a bit beyond like cyanobacteria and cambric explosion like life) might be a much lower bar than what (we believe) is generally believed.<br><br>I do not think that high technological life at and beyond human level has a low bar. I wouldn't even be suprised If we really were the first and thus only ones (at least in our galaxy) — After all live on Earth took a good chunk of the lifetime of the universe to go from emergence of life to humans building computers and starting to leave the planet (yes it did). So Earth must have been <b>*incredibly*</b> lucky to provide a sufficiently stable environment for so long.<br><br>I'm wary of the idea of hyper-developed life already being plentyful and we only not being ready yet to detect, decode, and understand it.<br>For every hyper-developed life out there there might be many instances of life at or slightly above the human level which whome we very well could communicate productively(or destuctively) with. That is given the grim assumption that filters at and beyond human level continue to be as harsh as they seemingly are before.<br>(Probably not a good way to think. Famous physicist Richard Feynman advised against falling in a bad state of mind facing the nuclear threat given he said he had that for a while.),(reply>), TIME — I do get the notion that there are different types of time beyond the physical arrow of time. But I was more thinking about (seeking formalization of) consciously perceived time. The idea of a time defined by a memory of life building up sounds quite interetsing.<br>I totally wouldn't call it "memory of the universe" though since I think this potently attracts the wrong crowd of people (homeopathy, grander-water, energy spirals and pyramids and more such pseudoscience nonsense).<br><br>Physical time seems "fundamental" relative to the other not yet formalized forms if time but …<br>I totally do not get the notion of "time is fundamental" in the sense of <br>"fundamental" == "non-emergent".<br><br>There are two base cases of reality where time is clearly not present yet and from which it thus needs to emerge to gain "existence":<br>★ There is no arrow of time in an ideal gas (or a hypothetical pre big bang plasma of all possibilities) where the number of future microstates equates to the number of past microstates which thus makes future and past completely indistinguishable.<br>★ I think there is exactly one future and exactly one past microstate in a (from the outside quantum-frame-of-reference) collapseless stretch of a quantum computation, which again is making past and future completely in distinguishable.<br>(Sidenote: such a stretch of quantum computation could be seen as a very small local embedded closed multiverse within the quantum computer - I think/ponder)<br><br>Yes for all we know we indeed cannot go back in time, but this only holds for places were time already emerged. I totally do not get that argument.