On Tuesday, April 28, 2026, at 11:46 AM, Matt Mahoney wrote: > I wonder if it is possible for something resembling life can exist in extreme > conditions like intergalactic gas or the core of a neutron star. Life > requires reproduction, which requires computation, copying bits somehow > encoded in a stable form such as DNA or capacitors on a silicon chip or the > orbits of galaxies or quantum states in a quark soup held together by > gravity. Copying a bit reduces entropy by one bit, which requires at least a > 1 bit increase somewhere else. This requires free energy, something that can > generate a temperature difference across space. The universe has about 10^92 > bits of free energy, 10^69 per star. The biosphere has 10^37 bits encoded as > DNA. The human body has 10^23 bits of DNA. All computers globally store 10^24 > bits. The brain encodes 10^9 bits of long term conscious memory in 10^15 > synapses.
NASA has been studying various plasmas for 20 years at least. There have been videos released/leaked with publicly available scientific papers like this: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=131506 They do have some intelligence and sentience. I don't know the extent of NASA's interaction, haven't dug into it but from what I've gathered there are similar but highly intelligent known entities. On Tuesday, April 28, 2026, at 11:46 AM, Matt Mahoney wrote: > It is possible to imagine other universes where computation can exist without > energy. That's a tough one, it would take quite a bit of thinking to imagine a universe such as that for me at least. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T7fbc44c56222e976-Md21897fd5c117b2c49936b39 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
