A few years ago, most scientists imagined that nothing could ever escape from a black hole –– not even light. It was understood that a black hole would destroy information about the original quantum state of anything falling into it. Only a mixed disturbance of stray Hawking radiation or irrelevant noise could be emitted as faded energy from a black hole.

But in 1997, theoretical physicist John Preskill bet Stephen Hawking that information was not lost in black holes. Hawking wrote an article in 2005 and announced that quantum perturbations of the event horizon could indeed let information escape from a black hole. Stephen Hawking lost the wager but shed light on the information paradox. He said that we must look at the multiverse as a whole since information going into black holes is saved in parallel universes.

The best opinion among physicists today is that information is preserved and that Hawking radiation is not precisely thermal but receives quantum corrections. In simple terms, this implies that a strong chemical synapse (intelligence-transmitting impulse) of complex organic molecules would most certainly be crushed out of reality by the physically powerful gravitational forces of a black hole. But a weaker electrical synapse of elementary particles below the atom in size could conceivably endure a passive black hole merger without wiping out structural complexities. For this reason, evo-devo biologists think the ultimate universal computer is a black hole attractor.

If a developmental singularity is the ideal computing platform for a universal intelligence merger, how many universal civilizations might be involved in such a merger? The Drake Equation estimates 10,000 communicative civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy alone. Today there has also been an explosion of renewed interest in astrobiology over the search for “extreme forms of life” on Earth and for similar life in deep space.

An international panel from the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck institute in Germany and the University of Sydney found that galactic dust could form spontaneously into helixes and double helixes and that the inorganic creations had memory and the power to reproduce themselves.

A similar rethinking of prospective alien life is being undertaken by the National Research Council, an advisory body to the US government. It says NASA should start a search for what it describes as “weird life” –– organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life on Earth. (Robert Booth, “Dust ‘comes alive’ in space,” Sunday Times, August 12, 2007.)

I was initially amused to find that nearly all of the visitors attracted to my small exhibit expressed sight of an allegorical humanoid shape pinpointed on the map of the visible universe. Their metaphors ranged from Godhead, Jesus, and Buddha –– to a snowman, Bigfoot, and King Kong. But the pareidolia was the same: a cloudy pyramidal bulb at the center of the sky map looked a bit humanoid to most people.

I understand you've been running from the man
That goes by the name of the Sandman
He flies the sky like an eagle in the eye
Of a hurricane that's abandoned
(America – “Sandman,” 1972)

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