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?

Light Music

Been reading Light Music, a 2002 sci-fi novel by Kathleen Goonan. Like most good science fiction, it takes some central bit of science or technology and extrapolates it. Light Music contemplates a juxtaposition between string theory and consciousness. Now string theory has taken some hits recently as analysis of the Higgs field seems to rule out the simpler, more elegant, versions of supersymetry. But Goonan paints a picture of consciousness, residing somewhere in the extra tiny dimensions postulated by supersymetry, as a kind of energy acting on the universe through matter as a kind of string vibration, a kind of music, as photons of light are vibrations of electro-magnetism. Thus Light Music. Very interesting speculations.

In this space, I've suggested that consciousness is primordial, that it does not rise from matter, or any particular organization of matter, but may indeed be prior. That consciousness – our individual experience of it – may be bound up with light, which is its “speed.” So picture consciousness as vibrations in (of?) spaces too small for us to observe – at or even smaller than the Planck length – intersecting the fields and particles of matter and energy we can measure and manifesting as observation. Yes, a “ghost” in the machine, taking the form of mind when the organic substrate is complex enough to give rise to such. Collapsing the wave function and exercising choice, self-generating music out of our individual being, a lifetime symphony.

Just another rumination.

Plants and the Sun

There's a fascinating article in the New Yorker on The Intelligent Plant.  It looks at the current debate among plant scientists over whether plants are intelligent or might be said to behave intelligently.  Plants do seem to interact with their environment in a way that appears directed and can often be quite complex.  But what caught my eye was the statement by one scientist to the effect that one does not have to ascribe intelligence to plants just to make them sound special as it's enough simply to note that they "eat sunlight."

We all learn about photosynthesis in school.  How sunlight is converted to free electrons within plant chloroplasts and made available to make carbohydrates from air and soil.  This is indeed wonderful enough.  But the notion that what plants are doing can be simply described as eating sunlight brings to the fore just how miraculous a process this really is.  Plants eat sunlight and we animals can then eat them and those that eat them for us.  Through the intermediation of plants, we too eat sunlight.  And it's free.

On a recent warm, sunny winter solstice day, sitting outside smoking a cigar, I looked anew at how this system works.  The universe is constructed in just such a way as to allow complex physics and chemistry to evolve giant balls of gas that release tremendous fountains of energy -- we call these stars, like our sun -- free to be consumed by stationary processing plants -- that we indeed call plants -- to also feed mobile creatures that may eventually achieve individual consciousness. 

Pretty cool.

Beyond quantum physics? Needed, a new Einstein

I've been thinking about consciousness and quantum reality for some years now.  Come to a few conclusions that have flowed into these ruminations:

First, seems to me that consciousness is primordial, i.e., to originate from the same source as the material universe that is the subject of modern physics.  Or to put it differently, to be unexplainable as a mere manifestation of some complex process of matter.  Consciousness is a property of the universe just as material existence appears to be.  Indeed, it may be that consciousness is prior to matter, that the ghost in the machine came before the machine.

Second, that the universe must be understood as something both eternal - the speed of light to itself is instantaneous - and immersed in time via our individual consciousness of it.  The universe is something that exists all at once in time and space.  It is we that travel through it at a speed - the flow of time - that leads us to measure light at 186,000 miles per second.  Individual consciousness seems to be attached to material processes that result from the Higgs field having given certain particles mass, that is, that slows them down from the instantaneous propagation of light and other mass-less particles.  Connected to these "slow particles," we experience time.

And now a third thought, too preliminary to call a conclusion.  That modern quantum physics while powerful and beautiful, is somehow fundamentally wrong.  Quantum physics is essentially a quantitative, numerical understanding of reality.  It offers probabilities and predictions flowing from a mathematical model of reality.  It has been amazingly accurate, predicting particles and properties then confirmed through experiment.  But more recently it seems that reality conforms too accurately to the standard model of physics.  The Higgs mass so far is exactly as predicted and now it seems the electron is perfectly spherical rather than dipole.  Both results appear to rule out the simplest models of super-symmetry (which already proposes more dimensions than the four we experience).   Super-symmetry is the effort to extend quantum physics into a theory of everything, accounting for all particles as well as gravity, dark mass and dark energy.

The latest news on the Higgs seems quite revealing.  Its mass (125 GeV) seems to be exactly where it should be for the universe as we know it to exist.  If it was much stronger, nothing much would form beyond hydrogen and helium because the particles that make them up would be so tightly bound that heavier elements - and us - couldn't form.  If it was much weaker, nothing could hang together and yet again, nothing much - including us - would form.  The Higgs - like Goldilock's porridge - is just right for us.  This is enough of a conundrum, why should it be just right for us?  But there also seems no reason - absent a super-symmetry explanation - for the exact value that the Higgs does have.  It seems to be a "given."

Quantum physicists still have hope.  There are more elaborate models for super-symmetry, less simple, less beautiful, more dimensions.  And some suggest that the Higgs has different values in the many multi-verses of which our universe may just be one.  So we happen to live in one with just the right value because in most of the others we could not exist.

Quantum physics is already a bit Rube-Goldberg.  The multi-verse proposal is more so.  Occam's Razor suggests there must be a simpler way.  It might be useful to again consider Einstein's dictum that "God does not play dice."  His theory of relativity did not flow from math but from a profound insight into how time and space relate.  Yes, math flows from it but relativity is an understanding of time and space as one thing and gravity as resulting from its curvature.  Quantum physics and relativity remain trains running on different tracks.  We may need a new Einstein to put everything on one.  Someone who can provide a deeper insight into why the universe is the way it is rather than look to mathematics to explain everything.