Through analogizing to human structures, there’s little reason not to consider the Internet a life form.
We just don’t because it seems alien to us.
But we wouldn’t recognize true aliens if they came to us anyway. Why would alien life have analogous structures to what humans consider life? We only recognize what’s familiar to us in some way. I consider some things alive that many people wouldn’t. I think our very definition of Life is merely an unrecognized anthropomorphism.
Honestly, I believe there’s life at the center of stars and black holes. At the level of quantum foam (should that hypothesis be true) I believe there’d be life there, ahoy, as well.
Get enough complexity together and mix together some uncertainty and unpredictability, some tiny physics we don’t yet understand entirely (see protein folding), with a dash of black-boxed choice, you got a conscious life.
So far it’s the planck scale, yeah. I think we’re just too big a creature with too limited a set of sensory organs to be able to perceive any deeper than that. It’s a practical limit for humans at present.
It’s possible with a few changes of theory and a little nano-tech to make sub-planck possible. We’ve busted through limits before. I’m hoping I live to see Pauli Uncertainty Principle busted as a working myth. All the explanations for it seem rather ridiculous to me but they’ve got to get beyond a spherical view of elemental particles and over relying on statistical methodologies first. ’til then, all we have is fat approximations to reality but not reality.
Our technology is based on forms we can analogize to either ourselves or to what we perceive in the world around us. When we reach a level where’s stuff that we CAN’T ANALOGIZE to anything, well, we get all confused and spooked as a species.
Oh it has. I believe it’ll be a working number for a VERY long time to come. And there’s LOT OF awesome technology we have yet to build first.
But eventually, at some point in the human future, should technological progress and scientific interest continue along with it, they’ll have to tackle the Planck Scale and revisit it.
Heck, science isn’t even ready to tackle subjectivity properly yet.. but that’s a different tale. As long as science rejects something, it’s incomplete because it can’t explain everything then.