Mason Inman - science journalist

I'm lifting the post below wholesale from a site called Daily Mantra (their slogan: "where the enlightened find enlightenment") because it talks about two fascinating things in cosmology I recently reported on, a gaping hole in the universe, and brains popping up from empty space.

Scientists have recently found a huge void deep in space that they say is a billion light years across. In other words, if Paris Hilton was attending a party at a club on one side of the void and Nicole Ritchie was about to set off from her house on the other side, it would take a billion years, at the speed of light, for a wardrobe checking text message from Paris to reach Nicole. This hypothesis assumes that (A) the frenemies are talking to each other, (B) Nicole resumes clubbing while pregnant, and (C) celebutantes have cracked the minor problem of faster than light personal travel.

In such voids, according to an article in New Scientist, vacuum energy can theoretically produce particles, molecules and even beings of many different levels of consciousness, that can just spontaneously pop into existence. Known as Boltzmann Brains, after the person that put forward the notion, these atypical observers of the universe, could in theory, one day, outnumber us, so called, typical observers. They could take on any form, even perhaps exact clones of Paris Hilton's brain. And if the universe continues to expand infinitely, such a theoretical outcome becomes more likely. Indeed, we could already exist in such a universe. Who knows?

Apparently my article on Boltzmann Brains is generating a lot of letters, mostly hostile, saying that this stuff is too speculative to waste time writing about. (Although the readers did decide to spend their time reading the article...) But here's one letter I got from a more sympathetic reader:

Maybe we could solve a lot of problems with all that extra brainpower. Would they necessarily be hostile?  My computer's pretty smart and it doesn't hate me, not yet anyway.

... each time one popped up (assuming it didn't shrivel up and die instantly in the interstellar vacuum - what would it live off?) we'd get out to it, round it up, and harness it for our own use, a sort of intergalactic slavery.
 
In fact I reckon we should be protecting the poor things, if and when they come.  This is where I formally start the Society for the Cosmological Advancement of Boltzmann Brains In Extrasolar Space (SCABBIES).  Want to join, anyone?

Watch this space!