The Next 80 Years

Just finished the first two books of William Gibson’s latest planned trilogy: The Peripheral and Agency. Both are typically well written with plots and characters that briskly move a complicated story forward. Gibson has been ahead of his time since his 1984 sci-fi novel, Neuromancer launched the cyberpunk world of computer hacking anti-heroes. The new “jackpot” books are built around figures in the future (just prior and after 2100) using quantum entanglement to exchange information with people living earlier in this century. (Wikiquote describes the jackpot as “an ‘androgenic, systemic, multiplex’ cluster of environmental, medical and economic crises that begins to emerge in the present day and eventually reduces world population by 80 percent over the second half of the 21st century.”) The future period is in the aftermath of the jackpot, where whats left of humanity, after it was far too late, took climate change seriously. The earlier times (in the first book, 2032 and in the second 2017) take place when it was already far too late but we hadn’t yet changed how we live.

Gibson nailed it. To expand in my own words, these are the next 80 years.

It’s hard to know where to draw the line of when humans began degrading the world with the way we live. Was it with language, a bigger brain, fire and tools allowing homo sapiens to raise above mere animal abilities of tooth and claw? Or with the emergence of agriculture, where we began consuming our environment and changing the very face of the earth? Certainly with the industrial revolution and the utilization of hundreds of millions of years of buried sunlight in the form of hydrocarbons. Finally, with post-industrial, global capitalism, our consumption of the environment, and resultant waste dumped into it, increased exponentially.

This year, 2023, we have seen what must be – to anyone not totally fuddled by the paid climate change deniers – the many faces of climate change. Going well beyond mere weather extremes, it includes pandemics, drought, desertification, death of pollinators, failed crops and food shortages, unquenchable mega-fires, soot-filled air, regular “once-in-a-century” floods, climate-fueled illnesses (from hotter temperatures, swifter passage of pathogens and toxins), spreading invasive destructive and disease-causing pests, disappearing habitats, mass extinctions, ocean temperatures rising, over-fishing, death of reefs, melting ice and glaciers, garbage filled oceans and even whales attacking boats. Along with these are related violence and conflicts over mass migration, diminished water supplies, precious metals and growing domestic and global inequalities. Our own version of the Four Horses are saddling up.

Calling the tune is the oligarchy that benefit from the current form of global capitalism. They have been doing everything possible since big oil hid awareness of the implications of hydrocarbon use for the climate in order to maintain profits. They and their fellow mega-profit-maximizers have funded political elements resisting all efforts to challenge their power and seek even modest change in the dynamics of increased inequality and degradation of the environment. These political elements seek to divert attention away from the possibilities of real change by pushing backward-looking nationalism, racism, and fabricated cultural divisions meant to magnify the otherwise rational discontent with the world in which most of us now live into fear and rage directed at anyone but the rich and powerful. Thus many of those who might most benefit from change have nevertheless been convinced to accept outrageous lies and authoritarianism in its various guises.

There are few good guys among the world’s mega-corporations. The media platforms promulgate hate and directed misinformation. The new tech industries offering their magic are actually plunging us ever further into the technological singularity where fundamental change in our made-world runs ahead of our ability to understand and control it (AI and energy-intensive black crypto are certainly examples). And my iPhone, I must admit, is another opiate assuring us that we are up-to-date and in control of something (at the cost of far away miners dying in deep pits of rare earths.)

But we humans are likely to simply get used to the new normal exemplified by 2023. As long as it doesn’t happen to us it’ll remain just those things briefly floating into the media highlights. And so it is likely to go for the next 10, 15, 20 years until the cumulative changes chaotically coalesce into the widespread collapse of food chains (and not just for us), emptied aquifers, mass starvation, whole areas made unlivable by pervasive wet-bulb temperatures beyond 95o and the wars and domestic violence fueled when those who have nothing to loose try to get what remains from others. Then we descend into 40-60 years of continued catastrophe. Gibson called this the jackpot, I suppose somewhat ironically as everything comes due at once. He seems somewhat optimistic that, at some point, the economic and political elites will come to feel threatened enough – if only from the wholesale lost of customers – to look to the science and technology of green energy, carbon capture and revitalization of what’s left of the natural environment to reverse the effects of climate change. Surely, even now, such technology exists and is getting better all the time, but just not “economic” in the judgement of those who still make lots of money from hydrocarbons and those they have enlisted in their “anti-woke” crusades. So we will suck every last bit of hydrocarbons out of the earth before we change our approach enough to make a difference.

One can hope. Those living in the places where climate change is already threatening their lives, especially in the tropics, are trying to adapt and, if that is not possible, leave. We in the West have the biggest cushion. But we are too heading into bad times.

The Human Conditon

Yin: We are the stuff that dreams are made of. Puffs of air buffeted by the wind, fading into night.

Yang: We orbit along the event horizon of the black hole for some time, getting a little closer to crossing it each second. We eventually do cross it and it’s always there. And sometimes we can’t help but stare.

My Problem?

I see good and evil. The good is beautiful, the evil ugly. (One knows it when one sees it?) Good is not the problem of course, but evil and the people that do it. A friend who doesn’t have this problem finds our whole species a sometimes entertaining mistake. But for me, seeing evil makes me angry and unavoidably sad. We humans are all deeply interconnected, in time and space with each other, the earth and all creation. To not see this is dumb. The human race could be a wonderful thing if there weren’t so many people, especially powerful people, doing dumb things.

Not all people doing dumb things are evil. They may simply be misguided, not aware of their own self-interest.

The evil ones are the rich and powerful who intentionally do harm to others as they seek what they mistakenly see as their self interest. They are selfish and dumb. As humankind has “conquered the world,” the powerful have monopolized the means of production of everything, including the way many of their victims think. That our political systems have bent to the rich and powerful makes evil – and it’s hard to avoid saying this – seem triumphant. As a boomer in his 8th decade – one who dreamed of changing the world, making it beautiful – this is deeply disappointing. This is my problem. And as I see it, also the problem of the American version of constitutional democracy left us by those Confounding Fathers.

A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: Part One

Sometime ago, I wrote in this space an Introduction to a Still Unwritten Book. For several years before and since, I have been pondering consciousness, cosmology and quantum physics in what I like to think follows in the tradition of natural philosophy. While I am not a scientist, I believe that the ultimate questions are essentially unanswerable but – following Saint Thomas’ finger – the proper subject of a reasoning intellect. It seems to me that the most fundamental question remains one that has haunted all philosophical and religious traditions: why is there anything? Science alone cannot shed light on this. Current science points to a Big Bang some 13 billion years ago. Today’s quantum physics and cosmology can say much about the first few moments after that event and the subsequent evolution of the universe and life. But we cannot say much about where the Big Bang came from and even less about why it might have occurred. Nor can we explain – without positing an infinity of less comfortable parallel universes – why our universe seems so right for us.

So the ultimate questions – why should there be anything, why should there be us – remain unanswered. It would seem that nothing is the more natural state because it would need no explanation. That there was nothing and always would be nothing would require nothing to be done or said about it. That nothing somehow gave way to something, anything, would have required a departure from the most simple state of nothing to greater complexity. The universe, in which we find ourselves a part, exists, it is something. Furthermore, it seems to have been fine-tuned insofar as it expresses a particular set of physical laws that seem designed to make life and intelligence inevitable. We live in a Goldilocks’ reality, not too cold, not too hot, but just right for us. The apparent design that gave rise to our existence must inevitably imply a designer.

But granting all this, this still leaves two fundamental questions. Where did the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit. The possible answers to the first question appear to converge on two possibilities, that the designer always was – i.e., that something always existed and there never was nothing – or that there was an original act of creation (or self-creation) that led to the existence of the designer. Both of these “explanations” essentially define what we might call God. One of them must be true.

The second question, why did the designer enact the particular act of creation that led to us, could have a myriad of answers. It might have been from boredom – as an eternity of nothing but self might eventually wear thin – perhaps in the form of a cosmic-scale version of a computer SimUniverse. It could be the night’s sleep of a very rationally-minded dreamer. It could be an experiment of some kind, or a simulation set to explore possible design parameters. It could be an act of love. Whatever the possible reason, the act of creation implied a kind of consciousness (even of the sleeper) and some version of a conscious choice. The designer must have been a conscious entity, perhaps even consciousness in its rare form. Whether the designer always was or was somehow created, the form it had or took was consciousness. In either case, consciousness was primordial, coming before the creation of our universe, before matter, before the Big Bang. The primordial consciousness – what might be called God – was the designer.

A fascinating aside about following this chain of thought is the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the designer was or felt constrained to create a universe capable of being apprehended by scientific reason. The universe is not just some stage set on which we players play our parts but an intricate mechanism that obeys its own complex, intrinsic laws. This suggests that the designer was using – for whatever reason – a given toolbox that provided the means to form the particular set of physical parameters manifested in the Big Bang.

Still, why us? What are we and what were we made for? I lean toward the notion that the cosmic consciousness designed a reality that it could then enter, whether out of loneliness, curiosity, love or some combination of these. 

TBC... 

Decoherence, or What is Special About a Tree

Quantum physics makes some people – especially those that seem to understand it – uncomfortable. It suggests that at the base of reality, things can be both here and not here, both particle and wave, both one and zero. The double slit experiments, in which electrons are sent in groups or individually through screens with slits open or closed, show wave or particle features depending upon the experimental set-up. Anything, small or large, can be thought of as existing as a wave function with the probability that when measured the wave will collapse into a definite object in a specific place as determined by the probabilistic mathematics. (Large objects have the highest probability of being where we see them, when we see them, rather than anywhere else the wave may be spread out to, including perhaps in another galaxy.) The picture of reality that quantum physics paints is strange yet the mathematics of it – quantum mechanics– successfully predicts core elements confirmed by experimentation. Niels Bohr, who was at the forefront of inventing the mathematics, said that it requires a “radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality.” For Bohr, and others of the Copenhagen school, the relationship of quantum physics to classical physics – the micro world to the macro – is not straightforward. Quantum mechanics accurately predicts outcomes at the level of the very small where quantum affects lead to strangeness. Yet we seldom see quantum effects at the macro level that is well-described by classical physics, despite its failure at the micro level.

One of the stranger possibilities raised by quantum physics is the role of the conscious observer. This interpretation posits that a wave function is collapsed when measured and the measurement observed. (The role of the measuring instrument and whether it is part of quantum or classical reality is one of the many issues still debated.) Various efforts have been made to sweep aside the difficulty of reconciling quantum and classical physics and avoid the messiness of assuming a tree is not there unless someone sees it. (This problem is separate from attempts to reconcile quantum physics with relativity or to unify the fundamental forces and particles of nature.) One such – the many worlds theory – suggests that every time a measurement is made, reality splits into separate universes. A more parsimonious approach looks to the concept of quantum decoherence. Essentially, wave functions spread out into each other and merge into the world of classical physics. Strictly speaking, this still leaves the question of the role of measurement and the observer open. But some believe we need not accept any quantum strangeness because decoherence itself leads to macro objects emerging from the micro reality. The quantum waves crash onto the shores of observability by themselves. A tree is there whether we see it or not.

The questions here are profound. One hundred million years ago, the earth was populated by dinosaurs. Some very large creatures roamed the earth and we have found their bones in our time. Surely they existed and moved through space and time as discrete objects. They stepped over stones and across rivers that also had a specific and real existence. Even before that, in deep time, before multi-cellular life, primitive bacteria and archaea lived and reproduced and we’ve found their traces as well. They existed without being measured or observed by any higher, conscious living being. So does this mean that quantum strangeness is fake physics?

The possibilities seem to be three:

– quantum mechanics works well at the micro level but is unnecessary to explain the reality of the world we see because it emerges on it’s own whether we are there or not to see it.

– nothing emerges from the universal wave function (the equation encompassing the totality of existence across time and space) as discrete objects until observed.

– some things exist as collapsed wave functions on their own while other “things” exist only as the former interact with them.

The first possibility simply begs the question of how two fundamentally different pictures of reality can both be true. Rather, let me suggest that the second possibility may be a subset of the third. Life is the dividing line. Rocks, planets, stars and even galaxies exist as wave functions perhaps decohering as they spread out into each other but still not there until acted upon – observed, eaten, stepped on – by something acting as an individual agent, something alive and trying to stay alive and perhaps reproduce. Life seems inevitable given the fundamental constants of physics and chemistry. (Why the universe is made this way is a separate question.) But a rock is just a rock and is never trying to become anything else. It may be acted upon but doesn’t by itself act. A tree is always there because it is trying to be. It acts upon its surroundings with purpose thus collapsing its own wave function and those with which it interacts. It transforms earth and sunlight into living tissue, its own living tissue. This may imply or even require a certain kind of consciousness. Certainly, it does suggest awareness of environment sufficient to utilize it. How is a tree’s awareness different from our own? That is another matter. But a tree is there even if alone its forest.

Pre-history Inspired by the Surroundings

Been in Swaziland for the last month.  A beautiful country and quite complex for such a small one.  A traditional King and some of the oldest terrain on the planet.  Sibebe Rock is a grand granite mountain some three billion years ago, the second largest pluton in the world.  It dates to the first formation of continental crust.

From hiking through the hills here, some basic ancient history put together from various sources including my ancient geology studies:  About 3.5 billion years ago oceanic basalt broke the surface in what is now southern Africa.  Soon after, erosion, sedimentation, burial, heating and erupting began producing granite.  By 3 billion years ago, enough granite had been extruded – and added with metamorphic gneiss also so produced – to form the root of a continental pluton.  The Swaziland Supergroup of the Barberton Greenstone belt contains some of the oldest-known, least-metamorphosed sedimentary and volcanic rocks on Earth.  Chert is the most abundant sedimentary rock type within the volcanic part of this mix. The oceans then were about 100oF degrees warmer than present. During this time – 3.5 to 3.3 bya – bacteria, including cyanobacteria, formed stromatolites “commonly low-relief, nearly stratiform, laterally linked domes … [and some] pseudocolumns and crinkly stratiform stromatolites …  on a substrate of altered komatiitic lava [lava with high iron-nickel-copper-platinum-group content from an erupting komatiite volcano] and sediments deposited on the lava surface, and in most places … covered by later komatiitic flows. Abundant fine-grained tourmaline included within the stromatolite laminae suggests that stromatolites formed in an environment dominated by boron-rich hot-spring emissions and evaporitic brines.”  Picture the hot springs of Yosemite on a larger scale and perhaps on the shore of an ocean.

Much later, apes turned into humans in the same area and the humans made some of their first tools with that chert.

                                                    Southern Africa Fossil Stromatolite

Saint Thomas’ God

Somewhere in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas is the suggestion that when one follows reason as far as it can go, that is a finger pointing to God. Over the past several years, I have been considering what the existence of consciousness, modern cosmology, quantum physics and relativity can say about the origin of consciousness, life and the universe. This has led me to some conclusions, including that consciousness may be primordial, that there may indeed be a “ghost in the machine,” and that the creation of the universe seems to have happened according to laws written into the act. My way of summing all this up has been to accept the notion that the universe is a product of conscious intent and that we all share in that same consciousness. I have come to think of the “creator” as a kind of Shakespeare who wrote a cosmic script setting the stage full of interesting processes, happenings and beings and dumped itself into it in order to experience its creation first hand. (Each “I” is part of that consciousness.) Another way to think about this might be to imagine an all-powerful being who designed the most amazing multi-level, multi-player computer game to play – to alleviate a really cosmic case of boredom? – by downloading itself into it to play every role.

As a former Catholic, however, I had trouble with the concept and notion of “God.” Cleary the God of all three religions of the Book – the Hebrew, Christian and Muslem – was too anthropomorphized. The concept of God comes with baggage I could not accept. A transcendent being like some sort of super human that loves us as a parent and deserves worship is simply a reflection of our own collective lack of psychic maturity. There is also no evidence for such a being that judges us and will hold us accountable for our actions, right and wrong. Given the fantastic and unlikely beauty of a universe that seems just right for us, there is no reason to suppose that there must be a heaven beyond it. Given our experience of the various forms of evil, historical and current, there is also no reason to suppose the need for some other hell. It seems clear to me that the universe as it exists is ungoverned by any morality beyond what we humans bring into it.

But recently, sitting in the Bishops Garden at Washington’s National Cathedral on a sunny, early spring morn, I made my peace with the word God. Listening to the gentle sound of a burbling spring and basking in the warmth of the sun, I considered the process by which the millions of photons showering down reached me. The sun’s energy comes from a myriad of fusions of two hydrogen atoms into one helium in the sun’s core. It takes thousands of years for the energy produced by each single fusion event to reach the surface of the sun. Then it takes just eight minutes to travel the 93 million miles to earth. The physical laws governing our universe are just right to allow this font of endless free energy sitting in the middle of an expanse of nothingness to bring to life our planet and all the creatures on it.

Some might say that that conditions may seem just right because else wise we wouldn’t be here. Just a happy accident out of an infinity of possible combinations that don’t work for conscious life forms. But that seems to violate Occam's Razor. Why suppose an infinite number of random fluctuations just to come up with one that has us? Much more direct to suppose that the one that contains us was meant to do so. And besides, the fundamental questions remain why is there anything at all rather than nothing and how could something arise out of nothing. Much more logical to recognize the likelihood of a First Cause. And one might as well call that God. Not one to worship, follow or depend upon for any kind of salvation but one to wonder about. Accepting the existence of St. Thomas’ God opens, at the most basic level, the door of wonder.

What if non-avian dinosaurs survived?

There seems to be a growing consensus that the number of dinosaur species was already in decline before the great asteroid impact that ended the Cretaceous era 66 million years ago. As Science News reports, as of about 50 million years before the mass extinction the number of new dinosaur species was being eclipsed by the number going extinct and dinosaur diversity was decreasing. Duck-billed and Triceratops-type dinosaurs were doing well until the end of dinosaur days as was a group of small toothed raptors. But ultimately, only avian dinosaurs – the birds – survived.

Why did the number of dinosaur species decline over time and why did only avian dinosaurs survive? The dinosaur decline might have been due to climate change perhaps brought on by continental drift and the resulting land-form, rainfall and ocean current alterations from the late Jurassic onward. Perhaps only birds survived the long “nuclear-type” winter after the impact because they could eat carrion and seeds, of which there might have been much. Some small non-avian dinosaurs also could have been able to do the same but they might not have been able to travel long distances. Perhaps only a small number of birds – even just a few species – made it through on remote islands and as the earth recovered, they could spread. The land-bound non-avian dinosaur survivors – if any – might not have been able to reach places where their numbers could then rebound.

But what if there was no impact or somewhere creatures like the small raptors made it through? Carnivorous tyrannosaur- and velociraptor-type dinosaurs (theropods) were doing well at the end of the Cretaceous. Indeed, it may be that the hundred million year-plus competition between carnivores and herbivores had led to the evolution of a lesser number of species but ones ever more evenly matched. Some of the largest herbivores and carnivores ever were alive at the end. And it may have been that the carnivores were getting smarter, perhaps even hunting in packs. (The herbivores apparently had long been herd animals.) Seems the smaller theropods – like Troodon – were the (relatively) smarter ones. It is interesting to speculate how earth's evolutionary processes might have played out differently if at least some of these non-avian theropods had survived the great impact. With another 66 million years of evolutionary competition, might they have gotten even bigger brains, as primitive primates eventually did. Or perhaps I was just too impressed at an early age with the Gorn captain forced into combat with Captain Kirk.

Deep Time: Take Two

It's hard to fully comprehend the depth of time past. The universe came into existence some 13.8 billion years ago (BYA). The earth was formed around 4.5 BYA. The first signs of life – simple microbes – appear about 3.5 BYA. But as presented in a wonderful book about just how complex and essential they are – Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable by Paul Falkowski – microbes are anything but simple. Microbes – bacteria and archaea – are prokaryotes, single cell life without a nucleus or organelles. Everything else – single cell or multi-cell plants and animals – are eukaryotes: cells containing a nucleus and organelles such as mitochondria. The prokaryotes developed the ability to extract energy from the chemical environment and, eventually, from the sun. It took another two billion years for them to evolve into complex cells: the eukaryotes.

Two billion years is a long time. Why did it take that long to go from bacteria and archaea to the first eukaryotes? The machinery to convert chemicals such as hydrogen sulfide or ammonia, and then the much harder task of using sunlight, to fuel life would have taken a long time to develop. But not just that. Extracting energy from the environment meant a complex process of freeing electrons from chemical bonds, transferring those electrons around within the cell and using them ultimately to create other chemicals that would store those electrons (i.e., serve as “food”) to provide energy for cellular processes. Photosynthesis is an even more complex process that uses sunlight to crack electrons from water and combine them – through intermediate steps – with carbon dioxide to produce carbohydrates and, as a waste product, oxygen. This complex machinery had to evolve step by step through the repeated random changes in DNA and RNA as winnowed through natural selection. (A good part of the first billion years after the formation of earth would have been used for the construction of the RNA/DNA mechanism itself.) As Falkowski argues, the processes for producing and consuming biologic energy work as tightly as a complex and precise system of interlocking gears: one out of place and the whole won't work. All the parts of the machinery had to come on line more or less at once or it would not function. Somehow, the machinery evolved anyway, implying that a lot of time was required for vastly more failures – in which the resulting organism from random mutation simply died – than successes.

That the machinery was there to be evolved – that the givens of the universe allowed such a thing to come into existence – is also worth pondering. As is the fact that we would not be here otherwise.

Krypton Discovered?

Science News reports the discovery of a second mega earth. This is an apparently rocky planet many times more massive than our own. Could this then be a Krypton-type planet with greater gravity where if two-legged folk evolved, and they could somehow get to earth, they could jump further than mere earth people and travel faster than a speeding bullet?

Sixteen times as heavy as earth, massive BD+20594b should be a gas giant like Neptune or Uranus. But instead it's 100% rock. The planet orbits its star in 42 days. A little online research indicates the star itself is very slightly smaller and cooler than the sun and also about one billion years younger. This makes it a yellow star as is our sun, i.e., not red.

Judging from the planet's orbital period, it is even closer to its sun than is Mercury to ours. This probably means it's too hot for life as we know it. It also seems too massive for plate tectonics to exist. Scientists suggest that plate tectonics is key to the circulation of carbon which is the basis for life on earth. Without moving continents and circulation between core, mantle and crust, everything remains locked in place.

Now, if the planet might be tidally locked to its star – one side always facing toward and the other away – there might be a transitional zone between -- in perpetual twilight -- where the temperature might be more conducive to life. And in twilight, at sunset, that sun might appear red. Tidal forces might also create enough internal tension to stimulate circulation within the rocky layers. So, perhaps the possibility of finding Superman's home planet cannot be completely discounted.

What is clear is that recent discoveries of exoplanets make a strong case for the existence of a wide range of planet types including ones that might support life. We also should not limit our consideration to forms of life based on carbon or water such as ours.  Might someone be sailing methane seas on Titan?  Is anyone out there?

Branching Out

I have been blogging here at Everything Rum since 2007.  My first posting was a Consciousness Riff.  I used to blog at Outside Walls, mostly on Kosovo, but closed that down a while ago.  In the Everything Rum space I've blogged on quantum physics, cosmology & space/time, biking, the state of the world, capitalism, the Articles of Confederation and sometimes on politics.   State Department cables (cleared through FOIA) and other related material from my time serving as a US diplomat can be found at Real Diplomacy.  Since 2009, I was writing on international issues at TransConflict. 

Now I am branching out.  I've tried Twitter and Facebook in the past but didn't stay with them.  I'm now returning to Twitter to connect and to accompany my expanded blogging here.  I'll be commenting as I see useful and perhaps will find others who if not in agreement at least have some reason to stop and reflect.  My first effort will follow shortly on the US and Russia.

Decoherence, or If a Tree Falls In the Forest...?

One of the basic unsettled questions of quantum physics is why we don't see quantum superposition in everyday objects. At the quantum level – and before being “measured” – mass and energy exist simultaneously as both wave and particle. The classic examples are light and electrons. Photons exist as both wave and particle and manifest as either depending on how it is observed. Similarly, electrons do not exist, in reality, as tiny “planets” circling the nucleus in neat orbits but in clouds of probabilities that may be “found” as a particle in a particular “place” only when measured. Everything that exists at the quantum level – the realm of the very tiny – shares this dual nature as wave and particle. It can be more accurately described as a wave function.

If everything were to remain in quantum superposition in the macro-world we inhabit, Schrödinger's cat – and everyone else's – would be both alive and dead at the same time. We don't see in that way because superposition seems to breakdown when things get large. The wave function has collapsed and we see either waves or particles, i.e., individual, unconnected, single state things. Why?

The easiest answer might be that we don't see quantum superposition at the macro level because when we look at the world, we as conscious observers collapse the wave function. Light, sound, touch, smell, taste all enter our perceptual mechanisms and, interacting with brain and mind, are perceived. The world is there when we observe it because the act of observation collapses the wave functions around us even if nothing else did. But does this mean that if a tree falls in a forest with no one there to hear it, it doesn't make a sound?

One answer might be yes, the unobserved falling tree makes no sound. The basic reality of the universe may be thought of as one all-inclusive wave function in which everything is entangled. The universe is one big cloud of probabilities. Nothing exists per se until observed. But that verges on solipsism. So, science has considered a variety of other mechanisms for decoherence of quantum superposition – collapsing the wave function of anything tiny before it can get very big. It may happen simply because as things get bigger, they get more complex. They interfere with each other, fall out of phase, or vibrate at different frequencies. The latest theory posits that as mass slows down – dilates – time, even the gravity of earth would be enough to pull entangled particles into different time streams.

But at least some aspects of the macro-world do work through quantum effects. The efficiency of photosynthesis arises from quantum mechanical effects. Quantum mechanics may explain how birds use magnetic fields to navigate and our sense of smell. It may be that the cosmos is an entangled universal wave function that decoheres only at the boundary of individual acts of “observation.” But the observers would not simply be conscious human beings but any living thing interacting with its environment? Might the definition of life be that which breaks wave functions?

Gravity, Mass and Time II

I recently noted that mass, gravity and time may be essential features – givens – of our universe, that gravity is something that slows time and that at the speed of light, time stops. Actually time doesn't stop at the speed of light but becomes instantaneous. At that speed, everything happens at once. It's at an event horizon that time actually just stops passing. As whatever it is that is “falling” into a black hole passes the event horizon, the time that it may be experiencing cannot escape. Beyond that, at the singularity, anything/everything disappears from this universe (leaving aside the mechanism by which black holes “evaporate” over time). The mass and energy falling into the singularity is converted into the very warping of space that is the black hole.

How long does it take to fall from the event horizon into the singularity? Has time there stopped or has it become instantaneous? Apparently, if you could survive passing through the event horizon, you would still experience your own personal time. The length of time you'd experience would be very short but it would pass. As under general relativity there is no absolute standard of time, that would be all that counts for you. Indeed, time may be thought of as something entirely a matter of perspective. As I would be falling through the event horizon experiencing my own usual passage of time – it would not slow down or stop – it would appear to be doing so only to an outside observer experiencing his own usual passage of time.

Our human sense of the passage of time may be an entirely arbitrary experience defined by our nature as biological mechanisms (with mass) operating according to physical laws as elaborated by the evolution of life on our particular planet. One defining process may be the rate at which ribosomes add amino acids to the protein it is building (called translation). In all life on earth this process proceeds at the same speed of 10-20 additions per second. A “second” is a human unit of time but not an entirely arbitrary one as at the most fundamental level it is related to two apparent givens: the ability of our consciousness to hold just 2-3 seconds as our now and the existence of a basic unit – the Planck time – of 5.39x10 to the -44^th seconds. Or perhaps we might simply say that our human, species experience of time is one heart beat. That, however, might speed up a bit as we crossed the horizon.

Will the Coming Turing Machines Have Soul?

By now, most everyone probably has heard of Alan Turing.  He played a lead role in breaking Nazi codes during WWII and contributed to the conceptual framework behind modern computers.  He also devised the Turing Test, a way to decide the question of whether an electronic machine might be able to think.  A machine might be said to pass the test if through a series of written questions and answers through a blind channel, a human would think that he or she was communicating with another human being.  This has set the standard for much of the debate over artificial intelligence. 

Machines that may pass the Turing Test are on the horizon.  Much is now being written about the development of machines that can learn and even read emotions -- affective computing -- by working through big data using sophisticated algorithms, running many iterations with pattern recognition. The machines essentially construct elaborate maps of patterns that emerge through analyzing huge sets of data by trying all paths but increasingly using the ones that lead to useful answers, a kind of binary evolution.  This form of machine "intelligence" is already being used on iPhones to determine what you might like to type, by Google to direct your search as you consider where to go and by the NSA to pick through the ever-expanding data haystacks for those "golden" needles.  Companies are eager to use affective computing to read your face, body language and physical state (via iWatch and other connected sensors) -- and therefore your emotions -- as you socialize and consume via the Web. 

All this also raises the very real possibility that soon, we might be able to talk with a robot able to read our verbal and non-verbal, internal and external information and convince us that even though we can see it is a machine, it is acting human.  It would pass a Turing Test squared.

Leaving aside the possibility that such machines might also be able to read us without our knowing, this raises the question of whether such machines would indeed be thinking actors perhaps deserving the attribution of being considered conscious.  Would a machine able to meet the Turing Test -- including by "understanding" what we say, how we feel and also being able to respond in a fully appropriate and meaningful way-- be alive?  Human?  Or to flip the question, are we, essentially, anything more than an evolutionarily elaborated biological device trained through life experience -- iterative learning -- and thus able ourselves to meet the Turing Test and nothing more?

Put more simply, can true understanding be reduced to even extremely complex patterns and decision algorithms stored and processed in massive memory?  Is a machine that "understands" in this way still just a very sophisticated hunk of metal or has some sort of "soul" been engendered in the complex workings of advanced electronics?  There are those who see consciousness as indeed just such an emergent property of the physical world.  The only other alternative seems to be some variant of the ghost in the machine.  Beyond this is perhaps the ultimate question of what exactly distinguishes life from non-life?  Can only things alive be said to truly think and feel?  Is it only a living creature that can be an agent with its own subjectivity?  I suspect so.  But the time may be coming for us to add to the Turing Test some way to measure that very property, which might also be called consciousness or just soul.

Familiar Paths

I'm recently back from several months living in the Midwest. I liked it in Des Moines and developed some comfortable routines, including favorite bike rides. But now back home in DC, I've returned to the many paths and byways that I've used for the past 35 years. Being at home feels good for various reasons. It's nice to be back with family and friends. But I get a distinct pleasure from biking or walking along long familiar paths. In certain seasons, I'm drawn to particular greenways. Something about doing this plucks deep neural cords, satisfying an apparently primordial need to keep to the well-worn paths of home. Perhaps it harkens back to the time when we lived in small bands in a particular place where it was vital for survival to know the routes and places where we could find food and water through the changing seasons. Evolution might have favored development of behavior that anchored such knowledge through the release of endorphins when triggered by the right external markers. This might suggest the need for all of us to find ways to allow ourselves to be so anchored along familiar ways that bring us to be somehow in nature.

Just a thought.

New Letters for the DNA Alphabet

Scientists recently created a life form – using a living bacteria as a starting point – with two extra letters in the DNA alphabet. The DNA of all living creatures on earth is made up of four such letters – the nucleotides A, C, G and T. They pair up – A with T and C with G – to form DNA “words” that direct protein construction and the development and maintenance of every living organism. These scientists added two synthetic nucleotides thus adding two new letters to the genetic code. They note that this opens up the possibility of creating new DNA-based “nanomaterials and proteins with exotic abilities.”

This discovery may be the hidden sleeper of recent scientific developments. When one considers that all of life as we know it – and which we have not even yet discovered all the forms – is built up of long strings of two-letter genetic words, adding a new letter – and why stop there – could open up vast vistas of new products and even new life forms. It may give brand new meaning to “genetically modified.” Cultures that grow rather than construct their technology is a common motif in science fiction. There may be careers out there for those who can write genetic code as we now write computer code.

Why Aren't We Hearing Anyone Else?

Read an article recently on the Great Filter, the notion that we may not come across any evidence of advanced civilizations beyond our own because something eventually rubs them out.  We have been sending out electro-magnetic signals for over a hundred years and have been listening for almost as long.  We have by now discovered almost 1800 exoplanets. An estimated 22% of sun-like stars in our galaxy may have earth-like planets orbiting in their habitable zones.  That would mean 20 billion candidates for life such as ours. Four of such earth-like exoplanets planets have been identified within 50 light years of us, another two within 500 LYs.

There is no reason to assume that life would have to be similar to our carbon-based form or would require conditions similar to ours.  Life on our planet sprung up quickly and the physics and chemistry of our universe seem to favor self-organizing processes.  Life forms could be quite varied and perhaps universal.

Enrico Fermi suggested in 1950 that if any advanced civilization developed the ability to travel beyond its solar system, even at less than light speed, in ten million years it should be able to colonize the whole Milky Way (100,000 LYs in diameter).  So why don't we see them?  Why haven't we even heard anyone else?  The Great Filter suggests various possibilities.

The first would be that advanced life is rare.  The conditions for it to develop are quite special. While life on earth arose quickly, in just 400 million years after earth formed a solid crust, it took another almost two billion years for complex single cells to evolve.  Add another billion years – about 550 million years ago – for multi-cellular creatures.  Most of the history of life on earth is this long prelude to the development of us.  Humans arose only in the last two million years of the earth's 4,500 million years.  Along the way, life went through several mass extinction events.  The last one, 65 million years ago, took out the dinosaurs leaving the ground clear for the development of mammals.  The combination of events and circumstances that led to us may be so rare as to make us one of the very few – or only – lucky ones.

But with some probable 20 billion earth-like exoplanets and some 100 billion likely planets in all, chances are that however rare, odds would favor the development of a considerable number of advanced life forms in our galaxy.  Some might have arose millions of years ago.  Any signals they sent would have had plenty of time to reach us.  Any earth-like planet with advanced life within 500 LYs would presumably have been heard by now.  So far, the SETI project has found none.

Perhaps our listening capabilities are still not sensitive enough to pick up any signals.  But clearly we are now able to tease out the existence of exoplanets themselves out some two thousand light years.

Maybe cosmic natural disasters – nearby super-novas, meteor strikes, etc – occur frequently enough to set back life and knock out civilizations before they can get very far?  But we've gone 65 million years without one and there is no reason to expect any such for at least the next few hundred years.

Maybe someone is out there, able to hide themselves and/or tracking down and destroying any potential competitors before they get too far?  This is a common science fiction trope.   But it assumes that advanced civilizations would either be very modest – and thus hide themselves, perhaps quietly visiting and making crop circles or waiting for us to rise to the level where we could join their Federation – or especially vicious and aggressive.  Based upon the only advanced civilization we know of – ourselves – one could not rule out the second possibility.

Finally, there is the possibility that there is something about advanced technologies that operates to cut short the civilization that develops them: industrial civilization leading to run-away climate change; biotechnology leading to – or failing to keep up with – disruptions in the present web of life; failure of critical management systems to handle increasingly complex and changing political, social, economic and ecological dynamics.

Bottom line, so far we have no evidence that we have company anywhere out there. We may be special. Question is, are we doomed to be filtered out and will we have ourselves to blame?

Life as Striving Towards Self-awareness

The remake of Cosmos began airing last night. Featured a presentation of the time since the Big Bang scaled as a year-long calendar starting January 1 at 13.8 billion years ago (bya) and ending in the last few seconds of December 31 corresponding to the entire time of human recorded history. Been thinking about this immensity of time focusing on recent news of the earliest piece found of the earth’s crust and of the earliest signs of life.

The earth was formed some 4.5 bya. The moon was formed in a colossal collision between earth and a Mars-sized planet some 4.45 bya. That oldest piece of crust – a zircon – has been dated to 4.4 bya. It took some 50 million years after the collision for the earth to cool down enough to have a solid surface. But the earth was still in for further impacts during the Late Heavy Bombardment that lasted until around 3.9 bya. The first signs of life – monocellular bacteria and archaea – appear around 3.5 bya. But it takes almost another two billion years for complex single cell life – the first eukaryotes, cells with nuclei and DNA – to appear. Sexual reproduction follows at about 1.2 bya and the first multicellular life at 1.0 bya. The first fossils of multicellular animals date to around 550 million years ago (mya), fish to 500 mya, land plants to 475 mya, insects to 400 mya, reptiles to 300 mya, mammals to 200 mya and primates to 60 million. Humans are some 2 million years old.

Life was quick to emerge once the earth had a solid surface. It took only 400 million years for inert chemicals interacting somewhere on that surface to become life. To us, that is a long time. But given the leap from non-living to living, maybe not so much. During those 400 million years, the laws of physics and chemistry plus the raw conditions of earth and water somehow gradually led to small clumps of matter coming and staying together and reproducing themselves. The first such clumps that successfully kept out the environment, organized themselves internally and made copies of themselves may have been something like viruses. At what point they crossed from non-living examples of complex chemistry to living things is unknown. But it took another two billion years for those clumps to become the most simple form of single cell life we know and then another billion years years or so to become the simplest form of multicellular life.

Four hundred million years for life to get started, two thousand million to reach the level of bacteria, another one thousand million to reach jellyfish and then fish in 50 million years, plants on land in 25 million, 75 million more for land animals (insects). Some 170 million after the first land animals takes us to dinosaurs and then — clearing the board — their extinction 65 mya. In a blink of an eye, at 60 mya, the first primates appear and then in the past 200,000 years homo sapiens.

Life started quickly but took a long time to build the tool box for evolution by sexual reproduction. It then took off leading to complex life within a comparatively short time and exploded in the last 500 million years. What about the universe might account for the easy start to life, the steady progress of evolution and the relatively fast emergence of higher forms of life and ultimately human awareness?

With the confirmation of the Higgs field, it now seems that the universe beginning with the Big Bang had its properties imprinted from the start. The laws and constants of physics and chemistry seem to conspire to produce the material universe of which we find ourselves part. Atoms emerge from a primordial soup of particles, combine in stellar processes to form elements and eventually become planets. Stars themselves combine the simplest elements in such a way as to provide copious amounts of free energy. The Kepler program has confirmed that planets are common and most stars have them. Put together a planet like the early earth – and there probably are millions of them in our galaxy alone – and wait 400 million years or so and life may emerge. Given a degree of long term stability, it may become self-aware.

I've speculated here that consciousness is itself a property of the universe and may well be prior to it. But how might it be connected to life? What is “life” and how did it emerge from chemistry and physics? Suppose that consciousness pervades matter and the universe and drives – through the laws of physics – increasing levels of complexity beginning with atoms toward sufficiently elaborated organizations of matter to enable mind and thereby self-awareness. Life becomes a form of striving, a movement of consciousness toward a clumping of matter sufficiently complex to provide it with the biological substrate for perception and thought. Life is the process of individual striving within and against its environment. At various levels, we call this process physics, chemistry or biology. Within biology, it manifests as evolution. But it might be seen as “God thinking.” Hegel anyone?