[jonathankoren]

But that's the thing with information panspermia isn't? You beam genetic information via quasars across universes, which then somehow magically turn back into people.

It's indistinguishable from magic, only it's got some math trappings. I read this, and it struck me as basically the 20th century equivalent of demonology and angelology, which was basically just religion fanfic with some feudlistic political science thrown on top. (If God is the king, who is the viscount?)

[garmaine]

Eh, it’s not totally crackpot. If you knew something about the physics and initial conditions of the child universe you could “stir the pot” enough with your signal (whatever mechanism it is) to trigger natural processes of complexity formation which eventually leads to life (e.g. make sure galaxies form fast enough in the early universe to create heavy metals before inflation pulls everything apart), then project a compressed scan of your consciousness as a signal on the background radiation. Eventually intelligent life will form, find it, get curious about its structure, decipher it, and simulate it.

Makes good hard science fiction. Not something I’d give high priors for having actually happened, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look.

[jonathankoren]

But information isn't physical. I download the human genome, I don't get a clone of Craig Venter. I get some mosfets that were manufactured in a factory set. There's no mechanism that even makes sense for any of this. It's basically "But if I multiply time by -1..." There's no evidence for any of this, and no plausible mechanism of these pre-initial conditions to come about. It's just magic people from outside the universe.

That's the thing that makes it crackpot.

Sure Penrose did some good science before, but this isn't it. This is just bullshit. It happens. Tesla made a lot of discoveries with alternating current, and high voltage electricity, but then he died convinced he was talking to a martian civilization, and was on the cusp inventing a death ray. Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, but in they're later years abandoned molecular biology and started to embrace various quackery that tarnished their legacy.

[garmaine]

If you download a connectome scan of Craig Venter, you do get Craig Venter. You're reasoning from a bad analogy.