this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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Philosophy
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Eh...
The universe is likely conscious, we just can't observe it as a whole from inside of it. We can't even see that far away without huge time distortions
The sun is likely conscious though...
And if the Sun is conscious, it's not much of a leap for the universe to be. If anything it was way less likely for the Sun to be conscious.
https://www.sheldrake.org/videos/is-the-sun-conscious
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352039545_Is_the_Sun_Conscious
The sun is also a much more local and immediate threat.
Solar flares are used to meet the standard of interacting with the outside for consciousness, and we're significantly overdue for a solar flare strong enough to knock all the electric transformers on whatever side of the globe was unlucky enough to be facing the sun when it hit.
Like not "overdue" like it should have happened 5 minutes ago, "overdue" like... Last big one was when we had telegraph networks, and it allowed for global transmission without any power sources for hours.
If the sun is conscious and I teracts purposefully with the environment thru solar flares...
It could essentially destroy human civilization with two proverbial flicks of it's wrist 12 hours apart.
But short of bringing back Aztec sacrifices, we don't really know how to appease the sun.
So yeah, I'll take nihilists over human sacrifices.
Fair. If the sun is conscious then it either likes us or tolerates us. If it didn't like us then it probably would've killed all of us a long time ago.
We'll honestly never know.
Like, in an ideal world, this is something we'd dump money into. Constant monitoring from Earth, and have the ISS try various signals each pass. Just random trial and error, maybe some representation of binary math and hope for an equal demonstration or even just reproduction of the signal.
At the very least the whole time we'd be gathering data in the hopes of preventing a random flare.
There's just no money in that, so no capitalist society would ever pay for the research.
And who knows? Maybe the sun knows we're here and the only reason it leaves us alone is we leave it alone?
Maybe trying to say wassup just pisses it off and we're fucked if we try?
Nihilism isn't the worst plan