Quote Originally Posted by Nick Capozzoli View Post
Yes. Abiogenesis is a logical point to begin explaining the origin of life, unless you want to assume that "life" existed from the beginning of the material universe, which to me is an unscientific approach.
The beginning of life is such an improbable occurrence that extraordinary theories are, in this case, justified. The one that I buy involves the math of Hugh Everett who argued in his doctoral thesis that everything that can happen does happen, just in realities that are orthogonal to our own, and which can coincide later, although it is unlikely that they will.

Hawking looked at Everett's thesis and concluded that it is true and trivial. I agree with the true, but not the trivial. I think Hawking overlooked some aspect of this. Eddington captured some of what I believe in scientific poetry.

"We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own."

I believe that what we call "G-d" is our future selves communicating with us backwards in time to create the present. I've taken Frank Tipler's math (in my opinion, he has made one understandable error and compounded it horrendously; universe is observably everywhere locally hyperbolic) and applied it with Feynman's and Everett's and Shannon, Kelly and Thorp (he's the guy who beat blackjack and roulette in Vegas using math).

Our future computational skills, when summed over multiple histories, is immense. Is it enough for life or wisdom to leak over from one reality to another? My best guess is yes. Could that be perceived as G-d? Easily.

Now, if our future selves are communicating with us, then we have survived into the future. Unless it's also communicating from a different future universe, one that we did not spawn. It doesn't prove that our survival is guaranteed; only that it is likely. So I would get extremely worried if the voice of G-d were shut down. Of course, both some but not all atheists and some but not all religionists get annoyed at this kind of argument.

As for signal-to-noise ratio, J.L. Kelly gave the definitive answer to that, back in the 1950s. Interestingly, if the signal-to-noise ratio gets to less than zero, we get imaginary results (or complex) which should give us faster than light travel. Unfortunately, no such animal as negative signal; just signals not properly interpreted.