The Hesitant Headline · chapter 13

The difficulty of predicting enormous technological advances

One of the most common objections to the ET hypothesis is that the distances in the universe are too great for alien life forms to get here. But if you believe that today's human scientific level, with its great problems in explaining consciousness and unifying relativity and quaternary mechanics in a physical model, is close to omniscience about the nature of the universe, then you are probably sitting on far too high a horse. With a great chance of erroneous perceptions and insurmountable limitations as a result.

Before the Wright Brothers and early aviation pioneers demonstrated controlled flight in the early 1900s, it was hard for people to imagine that we could cross oceans in hours instead of weeks by boat. Many thought it was impossible due to the limitations of gravity, but technological breakthroughs changed that.

The holographic principle is a hypothesis in theoretical physics that proposes that spacetime is not fundamental, but rather an emergent property that can be described as a hologram.

This idea, originally proposed by physicists such as Gerard 't Hooft and Leonard Susskind, has roots in black holes and quantum gravity, and it challenges our understanding of reality by suggesting that what we experience as "spacetime" might be an illusion based on underlying quantum information.

Just as a 19th-century person could not dream of jet engines or supersonic speeds, perhaps our current understanding of spacetime as a fixed barrier is equally limited - if the holographic principle is correct, very advanced civilizations thousands or millions of years ahead could have discovered ways of moving through the cosmos that few of us can imagine today.

Many prominent scientists/researchers such as Albert Einstein, Max Plank, Erwin Schrödinger, Roger Penrose, Tom Campbell and David Bohm as well as Eastern mystics and a large number of philosophers and thinkers have proposed non-materialist explanatory models for the foundations of our universe.

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for their work on the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. Particles have been shown to be able to influence each other directly regardless of physical distance. An incredibly strong argument for the ideas above.

Late in 2025, the Swedish-Norwegian professor of nanotechnology Maria Strømme released a notable research article close to the above ideas that should not be missed⁴⁶.

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