Could a non-material living being exist?

Question

I'm imagining an electromagnetic wave that could deliberately alter its wavelength. It would be a totally unfamiliar type of creature, but actually, we material beings act because of the electical neuro-signals in our bodies. So assume that it's a wave that could change its wavelength. I'm also thinking about its trajectory. I'm uncertain whether it's actually physically possible, but suppose it could change directions at will. (If the ray actually has a two dimensional cross section, it could 'heat up' one side of it to expand it, therefore turning to the opposite side). If so, then, if it had a device similar to a speaker it could pass through it to make sound. So it would communicate, but that means energy losses, so would it be slowly killing itself by 'speaking'?

Also, if it passed through a human being at a certain wavelength, it would in theory be warming him up. So if a person was stuck in the middle of the arctic desert with one of those he would not die of hypothermia, but he couldn't send a message out either because the wave would be busy passing through his body.

In theory (in my head) it makes sense, I'm just trying to understand whether I made some fundamental logical steps (maybe about the speaker, those things are pretty complicated).

This might be complete nonesence, but they do have a particularly intelligent shade of blue in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...

Answer 1

There are cases where this has been done. A few of the masters (Assimov, Clarke) dabbled in it.

The hardest part is defining a "living creature" without using matter. The actual definition of a "living creature" is not well defined in science. However, it is well defined in the minds of readers, so you have to unshackle them first.

Science recognizes several traits of living creatures, of which some of the important ones are:

• Metabolism. They fight entropy by consuming energy.
• Reproduction. There is some "next generation" for the creature
• Homeostasis. The creatrue roughly keeps its form.

If you want an exotic creature such as a non-material creature, you should fall back on my favorite law, Sanderson's First Law of Magic. "An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to the reader's ability to understand it." A non-material creature is going to be unusual enough that treating it as magic might be wise. Make sure you give the reader enough time to make sense of your non-material creature before solving problems with it

Answer 2

I am embarassed at how old this question is that I didn't see before, but I don't regret writing all this. Hopefully someone may find it useful.

I came into this question thinking that a being made entirely out of immaterial stuff (not composed of fermionic matter like we are) would be impossible, but upon further reading I'm not so sure...! This is quite interesting, at least. The following is based on my amateur understanding of quantum mech, so I welcome corrections.

An EM wave is just one or more photons. It's hard to say whether they could change their wavelength and direction of their own will without getting more specific about what our Being is made of. An individual photon travels at lightspeed so it does not experience any passage of time, and therefore its properties cannot be changed except by interaction with something else.

But multiple photons can interact with one another -- indirectly. This is two-photon physics. In short, one photon in a pair possessing high enough energies (extremely short-wavelength gamma rays) can spontaneously fluctuate, or change, into a pair of temporary "virtual particles". The other photon can then be absorbed by (or, coupled to) one of the virtual particles, and re-emitted in a different direction before the virtual particles change back into a photon.

In this way, we might perhaps conceive of... let's call it "hard light", composed of gamma-ray photons, arranged in such a way that two-photon interactions constantly loop back around in predictable ways, forming stable "matter" that is actually gamma photons constantly fluctuating, bouncing and re-intercepting one another. This seems VERY questionable under the uncertainty principle, but maybe it's doable, somehow. Humans would certainly not want to go anywhere near this thing, and just as well, since it probably wouldn't survive long in human living conditions either.

So we have some kind of material to work with. Would our hard light be capable of forming a creature with a metabolism?

I think so. Maybe. Photons do not have any electrical charge, and I have no idea what interesting physical properties might arise from a unit of "hard light", so I cannot say that their "chemistry" would work like human cells (which essentially do work by exchanging electrons around in chemical reactions). But you could still build a mechanical computer.

Humans are chemical circuitry, and I see no reason why mechanical parts of arbitrary composition could not also form a living being. Clockwork computers on Earth are limited by the fact that they are made of metal: high energies and complex operations are required to turn refined metal into cams and circuits. It has been done before, but gears made of refined metals don't occur naturally on Earth the way amino acids spontaneously form from carbon chemicals. But maybe our hard light is different, and microscale gear-shaft machinery forms quite naturally from it.

Our being would probably require some extraordinary living conditions:

1. A source of extremely hard gamma rays.
2. Staying far away from large concentrations of fermionic matter, like the stuff that makes up humans. Hard light gamma rays could be quickly absorbed by atomic nuclei, disrupting the being's structure.

So where could they live? I have no idea. My best guess is somewhere in the vicinity of a pulsar, or an active galactic black hole, that has happened to avoid contact with lots of regular matter somehow, for some time. It's possible we could contact them if we built our own strong gamma emitters, perhaps a GR laser, and they might be discovered using gamma ray astronomy.

So that's the basic mechanism of it: Hard light by way of two-photon physics. As for the details, go wild.

Answer 3

When I started thinking about this question, I thought about how information is sent through the the internet in packets of light. 16 separate wavelengths can be combined without losing any of data contained in each. So could an A.I. program be contained in 16 packets? Is there any reason aside from infrastructure upgrade issues that it couldn't be 256 or 1024?

Since energy is expressed in packet called quanta, it isn't unreasonable to imagine the information of life contained in a quantum of energy. I'm going to continue to treat it like a program for simplicity's sake; though I don't expect it to be artificial life, I imagine this is a decent model for energy based life.

Every time my quantum encounters another packet of energy, it takes it as input (it eats it). It parses the information this packet contained. It might only have information on energy level, wavelength and spectra, or it could be another energetic life-form analyzing it simultaneously. It determines whether it needs to alter its program in response to the data it read (more on that later), and afterward expels (excretes) a packet of energy. Increasing or decreasing its total information will change its energy level and its vector.

It may even absorb the entire packet and significantly increase its energy level. Doing that a few time could cause it to "reproduce" by encoding its information onto the packet it releases. This is pretty much how an amoeba reproduces.

But you want more from this life-form than just that. Communication and intelligence. I don't think you are going to get a scenario where it walks through a speaker and can be heard speaking. Nor is it likely that they can warm someone up by passing through them. Remember that as a creature of pure energy, it is traveling at the speed of light. But it can collide with atoms of the air to be absorbed by its electron cloud and be expelled again in the opposite direction thousands of times per second so that it can stay in close proximity to your hero. Colliding with him with the intention to warm him up would be an ignominious suicide, and ineffectual since, depending upon its energy level it could warm up a single cell, burn it out, or wreck its DNA.

As far as communication goes, lets hand wave the first part where it learns to speak English. It picked up radio packets of our communication, determined that they were of value to it for whatever reason, and pieced together enough of them to determine that it was a language and it learned it.

Now it has to communicate with us. First it would gather enough energy to reproduce, but instead of creating a clone, it would write a program, encode that on the outgoing packet and aim it at a radio receiver. The program wouldn't be sentient, so it would have no moral issue with sending it to its doom.

So, what would happen to a random file received on a random radio antenna? Probably nothing. It would be filtered out as noise. My quantum would probably try multiple times before giving up. Perhaps it would try synthesizing a voice eventually, but I wonder what we would make of it? Perhaps it would be the beginning of meaningful contact, or perhaps it would give up in frustration after being ignored.

Answer 4

I'm not sure what you want to achieve but a reasonable explanation could be that there are material living beings that live in a 4th (or 5th ...) dimension perpendicular to ours but they leave traces of electromagnetic waves that propagate through our dimension. Basically think a bit like Flatland.

As some unification theories require extra dimensions it shouldn't be hard to argue they are there. Once that leap is made it only stands to reason that, if our dimensions are populated with matter and sentient beings that, those other dimensions would contain the possibility for life as well.

Answer 5

The science definition of Life was well stated by Schröedinger in his "What is Life?" book. Basically, it is any organized system that can extract energy from its surroundings to oppose its own decay caused by Second Law of Thermodynamics. Wikipedia cites:

Schrödinger explains that living matter evades the decay to thermodynamical equilibrium by homeostatically maintaining negative entropy (today this quantity is called information[9]) in an open system.

In light of that, the question is: Can an electromagnetic wave extract energy from its surroundings?

My answer is that not. Electromagnetic waves can be created, and enhanced, by their surroundings, but (with the exception of light-estimulated radiation in laser and related devices) they can not extract energy from the medium.

Moreover, there is a different consideration, that of Relativity. Something moving at the speed of light (like an electromagnetic wave) has an extreme time dilation making time effectively stop, so even if such a lifeform exist, it would notice all time to happen "at the same time", with no possibility for causality. This living being would be unable to react to events of any kind, since the event happens at the same time as the decision and the reaction, to say.

Answer 6

See the novel Macroscope by Piers Anthony. It features an intelligent (as in alive and thinking) broadcast. It was explained (if memory serves; I read it over 30 years ago) that reflected energy can interact with incoming signal to allow it to interact with the receiver.

Answer 7

I'm not certain whether this answers your question, but: short answer is No, with an If; long answer Yes, with a But.

There is no such thing as this so–called “non-material living being”. What people describe as Matter and Energy are simply two aspects of the same thing. Anything which has some properties of Matter has some properties of Energy.

All objects are a trifecta of matter, energy, and information. You could be describing a vast interstellar Mind which treats planetary bodies as its neural clusters.

When most people think of these so–called beings of pure energy, they are usually imagining something which certainly uses material bodies but is able to exchange matter much more freely than lifeforms which are more constrained.

So, with regards to my strict interpretation for the premise of your question: no, it could not.