This reminds me of some of the more interesting thoughts I had while learning about information theory and astrophysics. Apologies for the lack of rigorous terminology, this is all stuff I’ve just thought about and never discussed.
The speed of light is also the speed of causality. Information can be sent out at that speed. So information sources have a sphere of expanding influence. Information that one node sends can be taken in by another node, modified, then retransmitted. This is general enough that it could apply to many contexts, but I am interested in the most general context. Information that replicates itself: memes. Is our existence creating a meme sphere? Will our meme sphere(s) collide with other meme spheres? Is this all just an unnecessarily strange way to look at things? I wish I had a firmer grasp on interpretations of quantum mechanics, since that may inform some of my questions.
The more complex the encoding of information, the more time it takes to decode and retransmit it. Speed of light may be an upper bound on the speed of information, but anything on the order of memes require complex life forms to communicate and understand them.
> Will our meme sphere(s) collide with other meme spheres
Of course, "meme spheres" already collide all the time, but I think they are subject to too many intervening forces to be idealized as actual physical spheres like the propagation of light in a vacuum might be.
The meme spheres interact in a more complicated process than just a repeater. They can amplify each other by sending and returning the same (or similar) information.
Some ideas get retransmitted a lot more than others. I wonder if a universally retransmitted (maximum strength) meme is possible.
The speed of light is also the speed of causality. Information can be sent out at that speed. So information sources have a sphere of expanding influence. Information that one node sends can be taken in by another node, modified, then retransmitted. This is general enough that it could apply to many contexts, but I am interested in the most general context. Information that replicates itself: memes. Is our existence creating a meme sphere? Will our meme sphere(s) collide with other meme spheres? Is this all just an unnecessarily strange way to look at things? I wish I had a firmer grasp on interpretations of quantum mechanics, since that may inform some of my questions.