Multiverse, my ass. It's nowhere near that simple.
For too many lifetimes, including half of my own, we had been searching for another intelligence to chat with.
We scattered descriptions of ourselves, our mathematical ideas, our clever observations of the structure of the cosmos, the things that we thought constituted our life and intelligence, hoping that a neighbor would notice.
We also studied the signals coming to us, searching for a message as sensible as the ones we were sending.
For too long, embarrassingly too long, we varied the details of our transmissions, seeking broader coverage of the cosmos by the signal, as well as more universally meaningful presentation of its content.
I was just settling in for another long and fruitless meeting of the search team. My colleague, Ran, offered refreshment, asked politely about my partners at home. No-one cared to start one more futile discussion of our real task, which increasingly seemed disconnected from reality.
Fring, ever trying to be cheerful, “Are we looking in the wrong direction? I really mean, missing entirely what sort of directions are relevant? What if the neighbors we seek have an entirely different notion of neighborhood?”
...
Long individual pauses, followed by a collective “DUH!”
During the next long pause we all realized the impossibility of developing Fring's insight into a useful plan of action.
I'm the sort of jerk who can't help jumping on this: “OK, if the cosmos has roughly 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible states, then there are only 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different transforms to different state spaces to consider. All right, I overcounted, because the range of the transform has to be pretty big to display a lifelike, much less intelligent, pattern. But there are at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 factorial with the full range, and that's probably more than we can search, eh? Oh, and there could be more if there are other measurements of the cosmos independent of the ones we've thought of.”
We all went home depressed. We were all bored enough to return for the next meeting, anyway.
I wish it had been me, but in fact Ran had the idea for the Convergent Gnarlometer. I still think that we needed a jerk like me to annoy Ran enough to think of it.
And it was Fring who cooked up the Maximally Conceivably General Sensor System, and that probably had nothing to do with my jerky sarcasm. No, it didn't sense every possible signal, just the ones that are conceivably related to the ones that we can conceive in our understanding of the cosmos. Might be good enough.
Hell, I wish that I even understood Ran's idea well enough to explain it. Lifelike patterns have to be sorta complex, and sorta structured. Somewhere in between trivial and random. Gnarly. So, maybe I should expect someone as smart as Ran to find a way of measuring the gnarliness of a signal well enough that a collection of 1,000,000 or so signals that trip the gnarlometer is highly likely to contain one that we can actually recognize as meaningful in some sense.
Of course, the hard part was the convergent part. There are still too many arrangements of state space to even start a gnarlometer on each one. Ran claims that the convergence idea jumps right at you if you just think of partitioned search in the right way, but if it jumped right at me, it must have jumped too high.
In a classical application of good team management, we assigned the mind-numbing tedium of inspecting the results of the convergent gnarlometric search to the one who had spouted off most annoyingly, without contributing any insight. Me.
It's been too boring. It's been going on too long. But the 3,763,454th Gnarlometric Convergent of the 5,883,627,542d Conceivable Signal that I tried might be interesting, if I can just think about it the right way:
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