Posthuman Blues

Rudy Rucker goes deep:

Timing Channel Attack on the Computational Ultrastructure of Spacetime

Encryption isn't an obviously relevant notion for exploring the computational ultrastructure of spacetime, and still less does it open an obvious travel route to the world's deeper levels. How could the side channel attack give you information about the structure of the subfab? How could it help you get there?

Suppose you slavishly encrypt your body just like a silf does and then hope that it simply happens that you'll then trickle down into some cracky-crack of spacetime. We won't do this so crudely, though, we won't turn ourselves into, like, radio waves as they did in The Fly. What we're gonna [d]o is quantum-tunnel from a material body to an aethereal body.

Rucker has captured the essential aspects of the ufological cosmologies of Jacques Vallee and John Keel. If our reality is a computation, visitors from "elsewhere" may hail from embedded computations; slipping back and forth could be absurdly simple and completely do away with the need for "nuts and bolts" spacecraft. When abductees describe weird landscapes and the interiors of otherworldly vehicles, they may be reporting on the conditions of some neighboring encrypted cosmos.

Maybe the "aliens" are hackers intent on tweaking code in our universe for reasons we might not appreciate (assuming we could comprehend them). Perhaps our reality is a transcelestial data haven. Or an artificial life laboratory. Or even a vacation spot for weary travelers.

If ufology is nothing more than a contemporary demonology, couched in the technological vocabulary of our time, then the Information Age may provide us with the conceptual tools to understand -- if roughly -- what the "demons" are up to.