The Black Cloud
The novel's plot revolves around the consequences of the Earth's sun being blocked out by an "intelligent" black cloud.
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What Hacker News says
- There is a great classic sci-fi book that explores this: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Cloud-Fred-Hoyle/dp/0140014667
- I really like the shepherd.com way of curating the recommendation. Browsing trough books and picking something to read has become much easier this way.
One scifi book that was very impactful to me is the black cloud by Fred Hoyle. It's such a well thought out story and has held up remarkably well for a 50 year old novel.
- Fred Hoyle, "The Black Cloud"
and I wish someone cleverer than me would read Nick Harkaway's "Gnomon" and then explain it to me.
- Hoyle wrote an entire — very entertaining — book at as indictment of the Big Bang hypothesis, which he didn't like. It's called "The Black Cloud".
- > My only rebuttal (if I'm to take an opposing position), would be that different organisms have different clock-cycles, an example would be organic life, hummingbird metabolism versus elephant or whale metabolism. I don't know if their brains are also faster, but since their reaction speeds do seem to be connected to their metabolic rate, it's probably the case.
That's a fair point. I think the comparison would have a somewhat similar conclusion, perhaps not as dramatic though.
Either way, "clock speed" / "number of clock of cycles" is only one way to analyze such a system.
Another important aspect of an intelligent system is the computational complexity of each node in the system and their ability send "messages" back and forth. For a brain, we could look at the neuron. My limited understanding is that neurons are actually pretty complex from an information processing standpoint, despite the implied simplicity we see with artificial analogs such as the neural nets used in machine learning.
I can't imagine what sort of naturally occurring entity would be able to function as an analogous "node" of a galactic brain, or even what sort of messages could be used do to do complex information processing. Stars don't look like they could fulfill the role. In terms of "information processing" I don't think they really do much.
Anyways, it is all very interesting. It is probably possible to have a much larger and very different "thinking system" than what we find on Earth, although I'm not sure what it would look like. Bu I am skeptical that such a system could span the enormous distances between stars.
By the way, you should check out book The Black Cloud [1]! It is a fun science fiction story that explores this idea.
- A bit of tangent -- the article talks about powers of ten, and hints at how powerful a tool it is for analyzing everything around us. This resonates very strongly with me. The entire known universe, from the smallest particle to the width of the cosmos itself, fits within several dozen points on this scale. It's incredible.
Personally, the last few years, I have felt that working to understand how all phenomena can be sketched out on the log scale has helped me gain a deeper understanding of the world. Of course, this goes hand in hand with related ideas, such as having a generally skeptical mindset, seeking first principles, etc.
These ideas has been very powerful for me, and I thought it might be worth sharing.
P.S. the book "The Black Cloud", mentioned in the article, is a really fun and quick read. I recommend it for any sci-fi fans.
