Message #225387

[Guyfolan]

8. UNIVERSAL TIME Barring such hostile aliens we can expect to have contacted and be trading with alien civilisations within a few centuries or millennia of starting our wormhole exploration of the universe. This is a symmetrical situation. Not only will be meeting aliens within historically short period, but they will be meeting us shortly after their expansion begins. Consequently all the species of the universe will be linking up at about the same stage in their development. This gives us all shared interests and hence markets in common. We might expect each civilisation to go through two future phase changes. First phase change is when they develop nanotechnology and start redesigning themselves, speeding up etc. Second phase change occurs when they link up with the rest of the universe and get the benefits of the near- infinite economies of scale this brings.

At this point all the local empire-times have merged to form a universal time or simultaneity surface. On a very large scale the sheet of universal time conforms with the co-moving average. On closer inspection (ie scales of billions of years and light years) the universal time surface reveals conical pit-like indentations that mark the place where each civilisation arose and stamped its own chronological footprint on the surrounding space-time topology before merging with their neighbours. By saying the universal time surface is indented I am revealing my co-moving prejudices. From the vantage of point of someone from universal time it would be co-moving time that would appear bumpy. To them civilisation birth points appear as the summits of cones in the co-moving time surface. Universal time would be the preferred time for discussing life, history, politics etc - everything except prehistory before Link-Up. Absolute time, as Newton conceived of it [18], would have finally returned. The notion of relative time frames would be irrelevant.

Half the civilisations we meet are likely to have been around, in co- moving terms, hundreds of millions or even billions of years before us. Gaining access to their time zones would enable our astronomers to observe the expansion of the universe in the distant past (although always further away from here in space than co-moving time). The occurrence of the first civilisation in the universe would be the limit beyond which we could not travel.