Life at the Limits of Physical Laws

Putative extraterrestrial planets are being discovered at the rate of one a month. A subset of these exist in the liquid water zone and are thus capable of evolving life similar to that with which we are familiar. While perhaps not common, the development of technological civilizations seems possible for some of these worlds. If we are typical, the evolution of technological civilizations proceeds from a condition where physical laws are unknown to a state where the limits imposed by those laws are reached within a few hundred years. These limits (molecular nanotechnology on solar system scales) allow the construction of Dyson shell supercomputers ("Matrioshka Brains") with thought capacities a trillion trillion times greater than that of a human brain and longevities measured in billions to trillions of years. Natural selection at stellar and galactic scales would, over time, eliminate any civilizations lacking these prodigious capabilities. We must consider that astronomical observations such as the missing baryonic dark matter and the gravitional microlensing observations may indicate that many such entities exist and that our galaxy is currently a Kardashev Type III civilization.