Cosmic Fun: Random Ramblings in Modern Cosmology: The Infinite You: Part One

The following ideas are primarily mine alone, the good, the bad and the ugly, albeit based on and influenced by reading multi volumes of tomes in modern cosmology. However, I’m also quite sure that numerous others have quite independently thought somewhat similar, if not exact, thoughts as well. Therefore, I’ll take no credit for being right, if I don’t get blamed for being wrong!

THE INFINITE YOU

Firstly, some definitions are in order. We have the ‘observable universe’ which is that part of the entire Universe we can actually see in the here and now. Parts of the Universe that exist, but which light hasn’t yet reached us, aren’t part of our ‘observable universe’ – yet. The ‘Universe’ is all that we can ever know about, regions seen, and regions as yet unseen. Then there is the ‘Multiverse’ which, if it exists, are a conglomerate of separate Universes, each of which exists as a discrete entity. An analogy could be the nucleus part of a liver cell (our ‘observable universe’), the entire cell (the Universe), and the grand collection of liver cells – the liver Multiverse as it were.

1) The Infinite You In The Existing Universe: The existing Universe could be as near to infinite as makes no odds. It obviously can’t be infinite, because it would take an infinite amount of time to expand the Universe to an infinite volume, and we know the Big Bang took place less than 14 billion years ago. And, the Universe can’t contain an infinite amount of ‘stuff’, otherwise it would have to have an infinite volume to house it all. The fact that our night sky is dark, suggests that there can’t be an infinite number of stars and galaxies in our observable universe, otherwise, no matter in which direction you looked, you’d see a star or galaxy and the night sky would be as light as the daytime. However, from our point of view, while not infinite, the Universe is still BIG! And it does contain a lot of stuff. It is within the bounds of possibility that within such a vast space, by chance, there could be a duplicate(s) of you, even more identical to you than any identical terrestrial twin you might happen to have. The odds aren’t very high to be honest, but they aren’t zero.

2) The Infinite You In A Cyclic Universe: Current cosmological observations suggest that our Universe began some 13.7 billion years ago in a Big Bang. Alas, the expansion of our Universe appears not only not slowing down, but ever accelerating due to something cosmologists/physicists are calling dark energy – which they admit they don’t really understand. Anyway, many cosmologists cling to the concept that eventually the expansion will slow down, halt, and reverse, resulting in ultimately a Big Crunch billions of years in the future. That Big Crunch leads directly to another Big Bang – expansion – contraction – Big Crunch – Big Bang, etc., etc. Thus one has an ever oscillating/cyclic Universe with no beginning and no end. Ah, the concept of infinity (this case in time) rears its head. Since the Universe has already gone through an infinite number of these cycles, as surely as night follows day follows night, anything that could of happened, has happened, and happened an infinite number of time. That includes in infinite number of you, and you’ve led the life your leading now exactly down to the last detail an infinite number of times, as well as leading differing lives in every possible variation from the major (marriage, career, children, lifespan, etc.) through to the relatively minor, right down to the highly trivial (like an infinite number of lifetimes absolutely identical to the current one except for one morning when you had an ever so slightly different breakfast cereal). Just think, somewhere in the infinite past, there was a you who lived an entire lifetime driving a car and never hit a red light! Again, anything that is within the realm of possibility, even if improbable in the extreme, has happened, and has happened an infinite number of times. Such is the nature of infinity.  The other nice thing about an infinite Universe (whether in time or space) is that all those unsuccessful eggs and sperm, all those failed/un-germinated seeds, all those spores and pollen that never bore fruit, all those lives that never were, all now get their moment in the sun!

There’s an interesting variation on the above theme. Most of us are probably familiar with the sci-fi idea of being caught in a time-loop. You repeat an interval of time over again and again, probably until some weird sense of deja vu alerts you that something’s not quite right. Expand the idea to the grandest scale possible. Big Bang – expansion – contraction – Big Crunch – Big Bang – expansion, etc. but each cycle isn’t a new cycle with a new history and new possibilities rather each cycle is absolutely identical to the one that came before, and the one before that, etc. So, there will be an endless number of you, but there will be no wild new things in your lives, just the same old life, again and again. Maybe that’s where we get our now and again sense of deja vu from. 

3) The Infinite You In A Multiverse: We live in a Universe that is very friendly to life-as-we-know-it (life-not-as-we-know-it is another can of worms that need not concern us here). That is, it seems that the various physical laws and physical constants are fine tuned to allow our kind of life. If any of those values were slightly greater or slightly lesser, the biophysics and biochemistry that allow organic life forms to exist wouldn’t be possible. For example, if gravity were ever so slightly weaker, atoms/molecules wouldn’t coalesce into macro-bodies like galaxies and stars and planets. If gravity were ever so slightly stronger, stars would be far more massive on average, and the more massive a star, the shorter it’s lifespan, to the point where there wouldn’t be enough time for life in a young solar system to develop before the parent star went poof! So, that fine tuning leads to a trio of possibilities.

The first is that we (meaning the Universe’s life forms) are just incredibly lucky that our one and only Universe just happened to meet all the Goldilocks criteria that allow us to exist. The second is that there is indeed, an intelligent designer responsible for those conditions. For want of a better word, let’s call this intelligent designer “God”. (There’s an interesting variation on this theme and that is this Universe was created by an extraterrestrial intelligence in another Universe, a feat which might be relativity simple to a highly advanced technology able to manipulate the basic forces of physics.)

The third possibility is that there is a Multiverse. We can all agree that our Universe is a Goldilocks universe. We can also all agree that we can imagine other universes, while superficially akin to ours (it would at least have space and time), have differing values for some of all of the physical properties we associate with ours – differing values for the physical constants, the types and numbers of physical forces and particles, the physical laws that are part and parcel of physics, etc.  It’s akin to humans – we’re all superficially similar, yet each one of us (past, present and future) is unique (even identical twins differ and the same applies to clones as well as nurture affects us as well as nature). So, like we have a multiverse of humans, we could have a multiverse of universes (the Multiverse), some of which, like ours, will be Goldilocks universes, although most won’t be because some critical constant(s) or force(s) or particle(s) or law(s) will be too different enough to allow the complexity we associate with life.

In other words, there exist dozens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe multi-millions or billions (or more) of Universes where the physical laws and constants may well be different. That being the case, most Universes will be barren of life because their physics, hence chemistry, aren’t compatible with life-as-we-know-it.  But a few, by chance, will be Goldilocks Universes. It wouldn’t surprise anyone that because we exist, our Universe must be a Goldilocks Universe.

How exactly a Multiverse would come about is neither here or there. But there is at least one theory. To help explain various observational cosmological anomalies that would follow a traditional Big Bang, several decades ago the idea was floated that immediately following the Big Bang came a period of ultra-rapid inflation, before the expansion settled down to a far slower rate. Today, inflation is widely accepted as part and parcel of the Big Bang model. However, inflation need not have ceased at the exact same nanosecond everywhere. That is, if inflation continued on at one point, another Universe would quickly form, and if inflation didn’t shut down exactly at the same moment, another bubble or pocket or baby Universe would bud off, and so on and so on, resulting in a sort of bubble/foam collective of Universes – the Multiverse.

The upshot is that lots of Universes (a Multiverse), could mean a lot of you!

4) The Infinite You In Parallel Universes: There is a theory (known I believe as the ‘Many Worlds’ theory) that each time anything, from fundamental particle to human being, comes to a fork in the road as it were, has to make a choice(s), both/all forks are taken (something can be, and not be at the same time). To accommodate both/all alternatives, this quantum (in the case of the micro), or decision making (in the case of the macro), the entire Universe splits, and where we had one Universe, we now have two (or more), one for each fork. Of course when you consider the number of forks that the Universe encounters, well it’s been calculated that every second, some 10 to the 100^th power of Universes need to be created. (Just think how many hundreds, perhaps thousands of decisions (usually quite trivial, often subconsciously) you make every day. There has to be a new Universe to accommodate every alternative. Of course that means that when you add up all these collected Universes, there must be a lot of you, and a lot of everything else, each one ever so subtly different. In the case of Schrodinger’s Cat, there are now two Universes – one with a dead cat; one with the cat alive and well and doing its cat thing.

To be continued...

Cosmic Fun: Random Ramblings in Modern Cosmology: The Reproducing Universe

The following ideas are primarily mine alone, the good, the bad and the ugly, albeit based on and influenced by reading multi volumes of tomes in modern cosmology. However, I’m also quite sure that numerous others have quite independently thought somewhat similar, if not exact, thoughts as well. Therefore, I’ll take no credit for being right, if I don’t get blamed for being wrong!

THE DARWINIAN (REPRODUCING) UNIVERSE

It’s been theorized that our Universe could well have created itself; such is the weirdness of quantum physics. Of course if you are your own parent, there’s no requirement for any actual act of reproduction. Now I can hear you muttering now that it’s silly, even downright ridiculous to even contemplate a universe reproducing itself. I mean Johnny Universe doesn’t have a one night stand with Mary Universe and produce nine million years later little Joey Universe! Yet, where did our Universe come from? Perhaps we (our Universe that is) is the cosmic offspring of some other universe. How?

Eternal inflation is one way of producing lots of universes (a Multiverse), but that’s a sort of budding process with no scope for Darwinian evolution. However, there might be two mechanisms by which a universe can in fact reproduce itself, reproduction that will exhibit Darwinian fitness by the creation of other universes that would maximize their reproductive capabilities. The two means are 1) black holes, and 2) E.T.

While the precise physics of the internal doings of black holes aren’t clear, there is reason to theorize/speculate, based on what we suspect that physics might be, to further suspect that black holes give rise to other universes, albeit ones forever beyond our reach. All the stuff, information, etc. which forever goes down the black hole gurgler, while lost to us, has to go somewhere. That somewhere is a new universe, a new universe that owes its existence to a black hole in our universe.

Then what about a highly intelligent and technological extraterrestrial civilization that could be ideally placed to create an entirely new universe if it wanted to? I mean, our Universe started out at a size where quantum affects rule. That is, very tiny. So I don’t mean creating a fully matured universe billions of light years across at one go. Rather, create a tiny quantum universe, akin to what ours was ‘in the beginning’, which would expand and inflate and condense, etc. That might not be beyond the ways and means of a super technological civilization.

So, any universe that has had a natural selection by which its physics are the sort of physics that’s conducive to producing either lots of black holes, and/or advanced technological civilizations, will be the sort of universe that will produce offspring, a universe in turn which might produce even more universes which will produce even more, and so on. Sounds sort of like terrestrial biology to me!

In short, this is a nice variation on the creation of a Multiverse, which would probably contain a lot of you!

Further reading:

Smolin, Lee; The Life of the Cosmos; Oxford University Press, New York; 1997:

Cosmic Fun: Random Ramblings in Modern Cosmology: The Condensing Universe

The following ideas are primarily mine alone, the good, the bad and the ugly, albeit based on and influenced by reading multi volumes of tomes in modern cosmology. However, I’m also quite sure that numerous others have quite independently thought somewhat similar, if not exact, thoughts as well. Therefore, I’ll take no credit for being right, if I don’t get blamed for being wrong!

THE CONDENSING UNIVERSE

The complexity of the Universe is highly temperature dependent.

In the beginning (the Big Bang), the Universe was very hot and very dense. From that moment on, the Universe has expanded, become ever cooler. What happens in general when things become cooler? Well, on can say that complexity increases as things become cooler. Steam isn’t very complex, but cool it down to a liquid (a phase transition) and you’d have to conclude that water is a more complex physical substance than steam. Cool water down through another phase transition and complexity increases again – ice crystals are certainly more complex than drops of water.  In general, if you apply heat to something, inherent complexity decreases. For example, a human body at room temperature is much more complex than that same body post cremation! A rock is chemically more complex than the sun. A magnet loses its magnetism when heated. And so on.

If all you had were steam (water vapour), and you cooled things down, what would condense out would be liquid water: 100% water. If however you have your usual atmospheric mix of gases and cooled things down, you’d condense out the different components at different temperatures. Water might condense out first, the carbon dioxide, and then say oxygen or nitrogen, and probably lastly, hydrogen. What was a uniform chemical mixture has separated into the discrete chemicals that previously were all mixed up together.

Appling the above rules of thumb to the young Universe and I conclude that the Universe has gone from a simple uniform mixture of very hot stuff in the beginning (a ylem – to use George Gamow’s term for the ‘primordial substance from which all matter is formed’), stuff which then condensed out as unique entities (from the ylem-like-plasma to the various particles and forces, hence nucleosynthesis and matter, etc.) as the Universe expanded and cooled, and hence increased in complexity – atoms to molecules to stars and galaxies and planets and life. In other words, I suggest that the ‘in the beginning’ Universe was more akin to our atmosphere (a mixture) rather than just a 100% uniform stuff (like just water vapour).  This makes a sort of sense in particular if our Big Bang was somebody else’s Big Crunch. However, this seems to run against the grain of current thinking which (unless I’ve really misunderstood things) which suggests that ‘in the beginning’ the energy (temperature) was great enough that all the particles/forces were unified. However, I fail to see how a unified stuff (this ylem-like-plasma) could cool and ultimately condense out to produce un-unified stuffs! I’ve probably celebrated pass-over somewhere along the line in that the accepted concept (uniform stuff) has passed over my head!

Cosmic Fun: Random Ramblings in Modern Cosmology: Quantum Cosmology 2

The following ideas are primarily mine alone, the good, the bad and the ugly, albeit based on and influenced by reading multi volumes of tomes in modern cosmology. However, I’m also quite sure that numerous others have quite independently thought somewhat similar, if not exact, thoughts as well. Therefore, I’ll take no credit for being right, if I don’t get blamed for being wrong!

SINGULARITIES AREN’T QUANTUM OBJECTS

Now just to contradict yesterday’s blog…

There are two main pillars of modern physics – relativity and quantum mechanics. Alas, the two pillars aren’t compatible, and thus, a Holy Grail for physicists is to find a ‘Theory of Everything’ (TOE) that merges the two. Now in the day to day life of physicists, a TOE isn’t essential, because relativity deals with the very big (the macro-universe) and quantum mechanics the very small (the micro-universe), and rarely do the twains meet. But, meet the two do in exceptional circumstances. Relativity deals with gravity (in the main), and on quantum scales, gravity is so weak that gravity can safely be ignored. But, there are objects that are very small, yet very dense – that is, tiny objects that have high gravity. There are basically two such objects – the Big Bang object/event and Black Hole singularities, or, to be honest, singularities. And thus, to come to terms with the physics of singularities, the relativity and quantum worlds need to combine. So, TOE is basically a search for a theory of quantum gravity, and there are various theoretical scenarios that fit the bill (not yet experimentally confirmed).

Now while theories of everything or theories of quantum gravity are, in the final analysis, necessary (it just doesn’t wash that relativity and quantum mechanics can’t be made compatible), it is my opinion that they aren’t necessary to come to terms with singularities, which are usually described as an object of zero (point) dimensions and infinite density. In fact the relevant and separate equations of relativity and quantum mechanics break down as one approaches such extremes, giving rise for the necessity of quantum gravity in order to come to terms with such an object.

However, it is my opinion that it is absurd, in the extreme; to even slightly entertain the idea that a (Big Bang or Black Hole) singularity even remotely approaches such limits, far less acquires them. One cannot have a zero (point) dimensional object; one cannot have an object of infinite density. A singularity must have some sort of volume, and must have a finite density, even if the volume is tiny, and the density is extreme.

Thus, a singularity could be large enough in volume that relativity theory alone can deal with the extreme gravitational conditions. The Big Bang object, containing the mass of the entire Universe, would be (the ultimate as) such a singularity. Massive (Galactic) Black Hole singularities, ditto. Singularities aren’t quantum objects. If you continue to add mass to a Black Hole, it gets bigger; the singularity at the centre gets bigger. To believe otherwise is, IMHO, entering the realm of scientific fantasy.

The upshot off all this is that the Big Bang was not a quantum event, and Black Holes are not quantum objects.

Cosmic Fun: Random Ramblings in Modern Cosmology: Quantum Cosmology 1

The following ideas are primarily mine alone, the good, the bad and the ugly, albeit based on and influenced by reading multi volumes of tomes in modern cosmology. However, I’m also quite sure that numerous others have quite independently thought somewhat similar, if not exact, thoughts as well. Therefore, I’ll take no credit for being right, if I don’t get blamed for being wrong!

IN THE BEGINNING (QUANTAM COSMOLOGY)

The origin of the Universe (the Big Bang) was a quantum event because the initial size of our Universe was such that quantum effects dominated. Quantum theory has to apply to cosmology (or astrophysics) anytime the tiny world where quantum effects need to be considered apply, such as in black hole singularities – or when the Universe itself was tiny, such as at the time of the Big Bang, or a Big Crunch – when things become singularities. Fortunately, there is such a thing as quantum time (the smallest time length possible) and quantum length (hence volume) – the smallest length (hence volume possible).

Assuming that the Universe will ultimately contract into a Big Crunch, what will happen? Well, as one gets ever closer to the Big Crunch, density increases (but will not, can not, become infinite) and temperature increases (but again, not infinitely so) and the volume of space decreases (but will never become infinitely tiny) and time just keeps ticking on. Further, we know there are lots of black holes out in the cosmos; both small and massive (such as exists at the centre of our galaxy). As the Universe contracts, these black holes will get closer and closer not only to each other, but to the rest of non black hole stuff as well. Ultimately, all the non black hole stuff will get sucked into existing black holes as the Universe shrinks and matter’s density increases. Of course large black holes will also suck in smaller black holes, until ultimately, at the time approaching Big Crunch, there will be one ultimate/universal black hole containing all that was. Then what happens? The conditions inside a black hole are still unknown, beyond the equations of current physics, but whatever parameters are present, infinities aren’t among them (which might put me at odds with most astrophysicists). My reasoning is that no matter what, there’s only a finite amount of stuff comprising the universal black hole. Squeezed into a tiny area, the density will be extreme, but not infinitely so. The volume will be tiny, but not infinitely so. That is because there is an ultimate limit to how small length (hence volume) can get. The smallest possible length is known as Planck length and anything less than that space ceases to exist. Planck length is 1.6 x 10 to the minus 35 meters. Gravity might be so intense that not even light can escape, but it doesn’t take an infinite amount of gravity to do that. And there can’t be a time equals zero, either at the beginning (Big Bang) or at the end (Big Crunch). Because time exists in discrete quantum units (Planck-Wheeler time units as noted above), one must go from a minus one (contracting phase) time unit directly to a plus one (expanding) time unit, as there can be no time unit where time equals zero.  In other words, you go from a Big Crunch directly to a Big Bang, expansion to contraction, endlessly cycling. Or, the universal black hole sucking in all matter and energy (Big Crunch) turns inside out and becomes a universal white hole (Big Bang) spewing out stuff (matter and energy). That’s one possibility.

That’s sort of akin to having four cars approach an intersection, on each from the north, south, east and west. If each car is one kilometre from the intersection, and each car is travelling at say 50 kilometres per hour, then it is clear this contraction of automobiles will result in a Big Crunch. However, it might be difficult to then go to an automobile expansion as the cars will be a wreck.

The other possibility is that it might be unrealistic to expect in a contracting Universe that each and every bit and piece will meet at exactly the same point in time and space. Using our car analogy, what if each car was one kilometre away from the intersection, but say the north car was going 46 kilometres per hour, the east car 48 kilometres per hour, the south car 50 kilometres per hour, and the west car 52 kilometres per hour. Then, we can go directly from automobile contraction to automobile expansion as each car passes through the intersection while only having near misses with the other vehicles.

Next blog I give another (and probably more accurate) point of view.

Cosmic Fun: Random Ramblings in Modern Cosmology: Antimatter

The following ideas are primarily mine alone, the good, the bad and the ugly, albeit based on and influenced by reading multi volumes of tomes in modern cosmology. However, I’m also quite sure that numerous others have quite independently thought somewhat similar, if not exact, thoughts as well. Therefore, I’ll take no credit for being right, if I don’t get blamed for being wrong!

THE MISSING ANTIMATTER AND MISSING MATTER: A CONNECTION?

In the beginning there was the Big Bang. Theory suggests that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created. Alas, we don’t see antimatter in our cosmos. Where is it, or where did it go?

Well it might be silly to expect an absolute exact 1 on 1 match. Nature isn’t always 100% symmetrical.

It’s probably valid enough to postulate a close, but not quite exact 1 on 1 match, say for every 1,000,000,000 bits of antimatter created, there were 1,000,000,001 bits of matter.

When matter and antimatter meet, the bits annihilate, but since stuff (matter  and antimatter qualify as stuff) can not be poof-ed out of existence, what results is energy – Recall Einstein’s equating of mass and energy, where a little bit of mass can be converted into a lot of energy (the A-Bomb is an obvious example).  

Anyway, over time, nearly all the matter, but all the antimatter annihilated, but with matter ever so slightly ahead in the creation stakes, what we now see is a matter-dominated cosmos.  And one hell of a lot of energy should be around too – the result of 1,000,000,000 bits of antimatter coming into contact with 1,000,000,000 units of matter.

Another troubling issue is that the cosmos is expanding as a result of the Big Bang. If there is sufficient matter in the cosmos, the collective gravity will be enough to slow down to a halt that expansion; hence reversing the situation into a contraction and an eventual Big Crunch (perhaps to then be followed by another Big Bang, and so on ad infinitum).  If there isn’t enough matter, the cosmos will go on expanding forever and ever, eventually resulting in an eternally dark and cold endless expanse. Alas, that would appear to be the fate of the cosmos. We’re missing enough matter to close the cosmos.

But wait, isn’t energy the same as matter according to Einstein (and proved at Hiroshima and Nagasaki)? If so, what about those 1,000,000,000 units of matter/antimatter annihilation energy. That, combined with the one unit of matter left over, you’d think, would be enough to halt the expansion, resulting in the Big Crunch, a renewed birth, hence a second, third, fourth (up to an infinite number of) chances for the cosmos.

Then there is the theory by the late physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard P. Feynman that antimatter is exactly the same as matter, but traveling backwards in time! If we were to travel backwards in time, we’d become antimatter! The upshot here is that if, at the time of the Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created, then matter traveled forward in time (and is still doing so 13.7 billion years later), while the antimatter traveled backwards in time. Of course antimatter didn’t have to travel more than a few micro-seconds, even nanoseconds back before returning to the beginning (and presumably to a beyond Big Bang state – whatever that is – or was). Anyway, that’s why we don’t see or detect any antimatter in the cosmos today!

Further readings about antimatter:

Close, Frank; Antimatter; Oxford University Press, Oxford; 2009:

Fraser, Gordon; Antimatter: The Ultimate Mirror; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; 2000:

Nir,Yossi & Quinn, Helen R.; The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter; Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey; 2008:

The Colonization of Space

We have seen via the Fermi Paradox that without any violation in the laws of physics, and given even modest technological assumptions, that the time that it takes to explore and colonize our galaxy (The Milky Way) is but a small fraction of the age of the Milky Way Galaxy. So where is everybody? Where are our cosmic neighbours? Let’s now assume that there is no everybody, or anybody, or neighbours, just us. We’re the proverbial “It” and the galaxy beckons as our cosmic playground. So what happens next? Do we boldly go, or do our machines?

UFO sceptics would have you believe that interstellar space travel is at best highly improbable, and at worst impossible. Therefore, UFOs cannot represent the technology of a space-faring race of extraterrestrials. Hogwash! Unfortunately for the sceptics, fact number one is that one doesn’t need any wormhole or theoretical ‘warp drive’ or other ‘Star Trek’ type techno-babble to explore the galaxy and boldly go where no alien has gone before.  Sure, space is really BIG! Planet Earth was really BIG to human society many centuries ago, but that didn’t stop the planet being explored from pole to pole, even if individual journeys took many years. And bacteria, insects, birds, and other life forms preceded us in exploring and colonizing Planet Earth. Terrestrial analogies aside, what if you have an alien race with life spans way, way surpassing ours?  Then there’s a possible likely alternative, a bit of the old genetic engineering to increase life expectancy? Or there’s the likelihood of enhanced bioengineering (part flesh; part machine) to accomplish the same goal. What if an exploring race were to adopt those old stand-by sci-fi concepts of suspended animation or a multi-generation interstellar spaceship?

But when crunch comes crunch, sure space is really BIG, but it is also very old. There’s lots of time available to explore and colonize starting a few light years outward at a time. Consolidate, and then expand some more. Repeat as often as required. The time it would take to explore and colonize the Milky Way Galaxy (that is, via interstellar travel) is but a small fraction of the age of that galaxy even if a race of ET’s never travelled at more that say 1% to 10% the speed of light. Such velocities, while pretty fast by our current abilities, shouldn’t be beyond the means of a technologically advanced race. Consult any elementary astronomy text for the relevant distances and volumes and ages and do the calculations for yourself if you doubt this.

And once here (within easy reach of, or in our solar system), having a nearby base of operations as it were, one can easily have a whole plethora of UFOs visiting Earth on a regular or routine basis.  It’s not a case of one UFO taking ten thousand years to visit, then returning home taking another ten thousand years in the process, and having hundreds or thousands of such alien spacecraft doing the same. If you want to explore the South Pole over the long term, you don’t make a daily commute from Sydney or New York – you set up a long-term base camp near or at the South Pole! 

If there are no advanced extraterrestrial races out there, and that’s a possibility that has to be considered, then eventually we’ll reach that hypothetical level of technology that we current assume aliens might have. Now while such significant, but still subluminal velocities are beyond the capacity of the human race today, eventually, perhaps 1000 years from now, maybe more, maybe less, we’ll advance towards and attain that level of technological sophistication. And 1000 years (give or take) is but a nanosecond in terms of cosmic and galactic time frames. Recall the level of technological sophistication humanity had 1000 years ago! Leaps and bounds have been made since then, and then some. What will another 1000 years bring?

[Note that intergalactic space travel (one galaxy to another galaxy) is quite another can of worms. The distance from one side of our galaxy to the other is tiny relative to the vast distances to our neighbouring galaxies. Even Star Trek stayed within our own galaxy, and they had warp drive!]

When viewing what exploration of space we’ve achieved to date, we note that the first pioneers weren’t the right stuff, flesh-and-blood human beings, but devices composed of hardier stuff, like metals and plastics. An orbiting metallic Sputnik preceded any journeys by Russian cosmonauts. The unmanned lunar surveyors preceded Project Apollo. Unmanned space probes have landed on Mars, Venus, Titan, boldly going where no human has yet even remotely ventured. And so that will probably be true as well as humanity extends its reach beyond our solar system.

Way back when, human society was mainly a rural one with manual back-breaking existences, not only for man, but animal as well. Then came the industrial revolution and labour got easier and machines took on more and more of the burden. Our mental burdens got easier too. We don’t have to read anymore as we have radio, TV, talking books and DVDs. We don’t have to add and subtract – calculators do it for us. We don’t need to spell as our PCs come equipped with spell checkers. Our technology isn’t just making our muscles less necessary, but our brains as well. And while human muscles and the human brain haven’t increased much in strength or potential intellectual capacity over the past multi-thousands of years, our technological muscles and brains have. It’s been pointed out that the average home PC today has vastly more ‘brain power’ than the computers used to guide Apollo to the Moon. And how many of us could beat a computer at chess, or checkers? Silicon chips are becoming ‘intelligent’ at a vastly faster rate than the brain stuff we are made out of - CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen & Nitrogen). Silicon’s ‘brain cells’ or computer chips, and the software to utilize them are becoming ever more sophisticated and at a rapid rate of knots. We’ve all seen a sci-fi robot, android, whatever. The phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ has entered into common usage.  How much longer before science fiction becomes science fact and silicon software replaces carbon wetware? 

The question has been posed whether or not artificial intelligence is the next logical evolutional step. And while humans may remain in control (or maybe not), they will be dependant on that technology, of that you can be assured. So, the question arises, why send CHON flesh-and-blood into space when silicon chips and software will do, and do better? It’s been argued that artificial intelligence can make the trip to the stars on our behalf. They don’t need life support – food, oxygen, a narrow range of temperatures, sleep, gravity, or as much protection from radiation, etc. They can exist on a minimal energy source, nuclear most likely.

It’s been postulated that artificial intelligent space probes could explore the cosmos, land on suitable abodes and using the local resources found there (minerals, metals, available energy supplies, etc.), ‘reproduce’ themselves from internal programming given before the fact, and thus spread throughout the galaxy. Such probes are called von Neumann probes, after the famous mathematician who advanced the idea.  Meantime, while they do all the dangerous dirty work, we humans just continue to inhabit Terra and live the good life.

Two objections can be raised to a galaxy filled with space travelling artificial intelligences. Firstly, it’s going to take a lot to extinguish the human spirit of exploration. We want to experience the cosmos, and exploring via a surrogate isn’t going to cut the mustard in the long term.

Secondly, I find it difficult to visualize a space probe, however artificially intelligent, that can somehow reproduce itself from scratch using the raw resources of another planet. I find that a pretty tall order.  Just visualize the various technological processes that would require. It would have to be able to mine, perform smelting operations, manufacturing, fine detailed precision work, all at various locations etc. I won’t say it can’t happen, but I somehow doubt it will happen.

All up, while silicone and steel might be the pathfinders, CHON, even if it’s alien CHON, will ultimately explore, colonize and rule the galaxy. Again, for the purposes of explaining the Fermi Paradox, there exists no extraterrestrial CHON, only terrestrial CHON, so that explains the ‘where is everybody?’ question.

Artificial intelligence apart, human beings have taken control of their own evolution, it’s no longer just natural selection, but artificial enhancement. For quite some considerable time now, we’ve augmented our flesh-and-blood with artificial materials and devices, cosmetic and life enhancing – plastic heart valves, hearing aids, artificial joints, wigs, dentures, etc. And while not quite artificial in terms of non-organic materials and devices, we now have artificial selection in the sense of genetic engineering, the era of the designer baby.

So, sooner or later, humanity’s flesh-and-blood, assuming we’re still flesh-and-blood and not composed mainly of sturdier materials (CHON plus iron and silicon and plastics and ceramics, etc.), we will desire to get away from it all (Earth and our solar system). That’s true even if we have evolved into something more akin to a hybrid of the biological and the artificial, and/or evolved ourself into a race of quasi-supermen (and women). 

But desire is one thing. Might there be something even stronger forcing us to ‘boldly go’?

So what’s that other more seriously driving incentive to ‘boldly go…’? I mean scientific curiosity is all well and good, but it’s going to be expensive to satisfy that curiosity. Wanting to vacation on some idyllic planet around another star system is fine, but extra-solar tourism is a luxury, not a necessity. There is another incentive, a far more powerful one, and that is survival. No star lasts forever. Sooner or later, our star is going to make our existence a misery. In fact, sooner or later, our sun will be the death of us all. If humans are still around when that peril makes itself apparent, we’ll need to escape to another star system. Finding a suitable one is going to call for us to be ‘boldly going…’! Of course other earlier disaster scenarios could force us to flee sooner – the threat of a swarm of killer comets dislodged from either the Oort Cloud and/or the Kuiper Belt heading our way or the likelihood of a nearby star going supernova would give us incentive to get the hell out of here!

Further readings:

Gilster, Paul; Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration; Copernicus Books, New York; 2004:

Macvey, John W.; Interstellar Travel: Past, Present, and Future; Stein and Day, New York; 1977:

Boldly Going: Part Two

Rather than having a spaceship carry a passenger, have the passenger be an actual part of the spaceship!

Okay, so you want to boldly go. The problem is, you’re not small and you’re not light and you require life support like oxygen and water and food and a bed and artificial gravity and things to keep you occupied and psychologically sound and healthy over hundreds to thousands of years spent travelling. But, again, on reflection, ultimately the only part of you that actually needs to boldly go is your mind. Why bother taking your big toe along for the journey, or your wisdom teeth or for that matter the rest of the biological you along for the ride? All those body parts are just going to age and create health issues and complicate things. They get in the way of efficiently boldly going. You can see where this is leading I’m sure!

If you want to boldly go, without all that additional biological baggage, just download the contents of you mind into your spaceship’s computer. Because that’s not quite feasible today, I’m assuming that this takes place in the future, albeit not that distant future relative to human history – say just 200 to 300 years distant. You and associated spaceship – call it the Enterprise is you wish to – boldly go, molasses style, into the cosmos, seeking out – well new worlds, even if not new life and new civilizations. You get to explore and colonize new extraterrestrial real estate. 

Of course for the sake of the reproduction apex, you’d need to have low weight, small sized; no real life support needed, eggs and sperm on board. Under your guidance, you get to play stepmother and father and raise a new generation, which, ultimately, in turn, will download and boldly go!

Throwing around the idea of transferring the contents of your mind from brain to computer needs a bit of rationalization and explanation. It just seems to me that if you can build a machine (a computer say) and give it artificial intelligence (AI), then you can build a machine (perhaps a futuristic quantum computer) and give it an existing human intelligence (the mind – same difference) by downloading it directly from brain to machine.

So, let’s compare and contrast your ‘mind in machine’ vs. your ‘mind in the brain’ options with respect to boldly going.

Mind in the brain: Your brain has a fixed/limited capacity. Your brain is subject to aging, disease and injury. Your brain is not replaceable. Your brain is one copy only.  Your brain has in coming to terms with sensory input a rather limited range (you can’t see ultraviolet (UV) or infrared (IR) for example and thus that range is denied to your brain and thus mind). Your brain needs to sleep, or at least rest a bit. Your brain has a lifespan of about three score and ten years.

Mind in the machine: The machine has a near unlimited capacity – there’s lots of room for your mind to keep on absorbing things. The machine will experience no loss of essential sensory input (audio and visual), and in fact be able to accommodate an expanded range of same (detect UV and IR for example). The machine can be hooked up to other machinery that will provide mobility. The machine is less subject to aging and injury and in any event it is easier to repair and replace as necessary. The mind in machine option means there can be more than one copy of your mind in existence (and let’s leave the ethics of that aside for future philosophers). If you wish to reproduce, your biological eggs or sperm could be separately stored for use on a rainy day (not that you have rainy days in space) – if you wish – but you don’t get unlimited reproduction out of that of course, but then again you don’t have that option in a biological body either in the here and now. The mind in the machine has no need of sleep, but you’d have the option of an ‘off’ switch if you wanted. The mind in the machine may not provide you with immortality, but certainly something a lot longer than three score and ten, and probably long enough to boldly go for hundreds to thousands of years.  

Assuming this scenario actually happens, we note that at this point humanity has split into two ‘species’ – the biological composed of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON), and the artificial of iron and silicon. Actually, what I suspect might eventuate is that you start off with eggs and sperm, flesh and blood, until your inevitable biological termination nears – then you download your mind into your iron/silicon equivalent and live to think and do another day.

An interesting scenario is that those initially boldly go, be they flesh-and-blood or mind-in-machine or a combination of the two – half-flesh and half artificial parts like bioengineered cybernetic organisms of which current humans are already bona fide examples  - well might these ‘humans’, when they get to their destination, be greeted by their great, great, great, great grandchildren? It’s possible, indeed probable, that advances in propulsion technology might increase the initial molasses-in-Antarctica style of boldly going astronautics to a more water-in-the-tropics rate of flow. If initial velocities are some 1% to 10% light speed, then 200 years later 20% plus the speed of light becomes achievable, then despite the original boldly goers having a long head start, later generations could overtake their slower ancestors and arrive first!

Let’s now turn the tables around – flip the coin. Will aliens boldly go, and in the manner I’ve outlined for humans? Actually, given that we’re the new boys on the block, that’s actually ‘have aliens already boldly gone’?

Aliens could have seeded Earth, either via remote probes with microbial payloads, or perhaps in a more up-close-and-personal manner all those billions of terrestrial years ago. There’s no way we could really ever know, but it can’t be ruled out that our ancestry might be traceable back before our solar system even existed.

Extraterrestrial equivalents of our Von Neumann probes might be in our solar system right now, mining say asteroids and reproducing like mechanical rabbits. They wouldn’t be large enough to be detectable out there. An interesting question, might they be programmed to ‘seek out new life forms and new civilizations’ at a distance, say by monitoring planetary atmospheres for telltale signatures like the presence of oxygen or methane, or in fact be scanning the solar system for, say radio or microwave electromagnetic radiation of an artificial nature. They could transmit their findings back to home base. Maybe that might result in an eventual visitation and first contact by the parents of extraterrestrial Von Neumann machines. It would be a relatively inexpensive way of exploring the galaxy for life.

Maybe, apart from Von Neumann machines, the aliens are here – here being in our solar system, including not only the near Earth environment, but Earth itself.

Let me ask this, could the UFO itself actually be the alien?

In the very early days of the UFO (nee Flying Saucer) phenomena, one suggestion was that UFOs were alive – space critters that inhabited our solar system but now and again entered our atmosphere. These critters weren’t an intelligence, just an alien animal type organism.

Apart from the contactees, claiming to meet with purely human appearing extraterrestrials, all blonde and blue-eyed hunks and beauty-queens, the actual flesh-and-blood aliens are fairly rare in the UFO literature – with one exception. Before we get to that, only a relatively few UFO close encounters feature occupants – like for example the Lonnie Zamora, Socorro, New Mexico (1964) encounter, and the second to third hand reports of bodies, in say the Roswell (1947) incident.

The main reports of actual alien beings rest mainly with the alleged UFO adduction phenomena, which should not be dismissed out of hand without due research and investigation. If abduction reports are taken at face value, then there’s little doubt that these extraterrestrials have boldly gone in the flesh-and-blood. Well, the very fact that they are here, or could be here, suggests that they must, of necessity, be technologically superior to ourselves, and thus have achieved interstellar travel at somewhat better than the 1% to 10% light speed velocities I’ve postulated. Of course we can’t judge an alien’s lifespan based on our own. For all we know, a journey of dozens to hundreds of light years, at molasses-in-Antarctica velocities, could be to them a big yawn.

Of course we haven’t actually dissected an extraterrestrial being (Roswell perhaps an exception) so we really don’t actually know if these alien beings are really flesh-and-blood. Appearances can be deceiving, or, you can’t always judge a book by its cover. Perhaps they are robotic with realistic skin covering (androids) or cybernetic beings.

Anyway, if UFOs are extraterrestrial sorties into our environment, there’s no evidence to rule out the possibility that they are under the guidance of, what I’ve suggested above, an iron and silicon housed intelligence, which may, or may not, have been CHON initially.

The UFO ETH (ExtraTerrestrial Hypothesis) is controversial at best, so perhaps extrapolating to what the exact nature of the potential alien’s boldly going is, is best left to the imagination – for now.

Boldly Going: Part One

Rather than having a spaceship carry a passenger, have the passenger be an actual part of the spaceship!

“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise: its five year [ongoing] mission; to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life forms and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man [no one] has gone before.”

Who can forget those immortal words from the TV shows Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation? But, will humans somehow ‘make it so’ in a Star Trek envisioned universe? I suggest it’s unlikely at best; more likely near impossible.

The whole premise for the exploration and colonization of space, in the Star Trek universe, rests on warp drive – faster than light (superluminal) travel. Without that, all that boldly going at faster-than-light velocities, comes pretty much down to a rate that molasses flows in Antarctica. Unfortunately, Einstein and generations of physicists after him all sing the same song. Superluminal travel is a big no-no. Also a big no-no for the sake of this essay are the common sci-fi ‘cheats’ of travel through wormholes and other hyperspace scenarios. While they have some theoretical underpinning; the obstacles for practical use are so high that I don’t see them as viable interstellar travel options. I also rule out velocities close to the speed of light because the energy required propelling an object ever faster and faster and closer and closer to near light speeds increases even faster. It does you little good to go from 90% light speed to 91% the speed of light if your energy requirements double or triple! And light speed itself is unobtainable because you’d need an infinite amount of energy to achieve it, and no starship can carry an infinite supply of energy on board.

However, it’s amazing what even sub-light speeds can achieve relative not to a human lifespan, but say to the too date lifespan of the human species. I other words, think thousands to tens-of-thousands, even hundreds-of-thousands of years duration. Is that thinking way too long term? Not when compared to the age of our own solar system, far less the age of our Milky Way galaxy!  Humans could, molasses style, explore and colonise the galaxy, with interstellar velocities physicists would be able to coexist with, in roughly the same order-of-magnitude time frame as it took humans to explore and colonize the Earth.

Faster-than-light (superluminal) propulsion is one of the main things glossed over in the various sci-fi space operas that have been on display, of which Star Trek is an obvious, but only one of many, examples. Where the spaceship’s gravity comes from is obviously another. You see all these Hollywood, etc. spaceships zipping around obviously providing artificial gravity for the occupants, but the ‘how’ is never really adequately explained. The relevant physics is probably even more glossed over that superluminal propulsion. The only way we know to provide a sense of gravity is to rotate your vessel or space station. 2001: A Space Odyssey got that bit spot-on, but it was the exception to the rule. Have you seen the Starship Enterprise rotate? Why don’t Kirk, Spock, Bones and the rest of the Enterprise crew float around the ship? Of course it might be possible to bioengineer humans to withstand zero-G for decades on end and then land on a high gravity planet or in a high gravity environment none the worse for wear, but that’s a pretty big ask. 

Propulsion or gravity aside, that’s not to say humans won’t ever boldly go, it’s just not likely to resemble anything seen on our TV screens (or the silver screen either, for that matter).

Why boldly go at all? There might be some economic benefit to be had in exploiting the resources (mineral and/or energy) of our solar system, maybe settling on the Moon, Mars, or some other real estate in the solar system, maybe just establishing space stations as colonies within a reasonable radius of the Sun. There’s enough real estate and/or space, to keep us confined to the solar system for millennia to come – and then some. There are little economic cost-benefits to be had by exploiting the resources of extra-solar solar systems. If you live in Sydney, why journey to New York for your food shopping when there’s a supermarket across the street!

As for seeking out new civilizations, well that’s what terrestrial SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) is trying to do. SETI is a heck of a lot easier and cheaper than fuelling up the Starship Enterprise!

As a kick-off point, let me suggest three apexes of a triangle than will propel us to eventually boldly go.

Exploration and colonization is in our genes. It’s what we do.

Reproduction is even more in our genes – it’s what we have to do.

Survival, the third apex of this triangle, is also in our genes and collectively is something we must do and must do well (even if all individuals eventually fail to survive and go kaput). Collectively, it’s unwise to put all ones survival eggs in just one real estate basket (Planet Earth). Bad things can happen and if they do you’d better be out of harms way. That one real estate basket also eventually includes our entire solar system, for Mr. Sun isn’t going to last forever. When Mr. Sun goes kaput, we go kaput.

So exploration/colonization, reproduction and survival are linked. Since one can reproduce more individuals per unit of time than die, to avoid ultimate crowding, there’s a need to find new virgin real estate territory. How do you do that? Exploration! The more spread out you are, the less likely something bad is going to cause a mass extinction of a species. Survival! So boldly going is ultimately more about reproduction, and spreading out and colonization, than pure exploration just for the sake of exploring. We’re not going to boldly go and just explore for the hell of it.

So how do we boldly go without faster-than-light Star Trek warp drives? Well, we do it the molasses-in-Antarctica way. Slowly! By slowly I mean somewhere between 1% and 10% light speed (which obviously is a tad faster than the flow of actual molasses in Antarctica).

One way to reproduce and survive is to send our ancestors to the stars, meaning our microbial ancestors, who are still around. If you’re going to boldly go, it’s unlikely that cost will be no object. Size and weight matter when it comes to boldly going. Microbes are small and light. Send out rocket after rocket after rocket filled with microbes that lie dormant in the cold of space (no life support needed). Send them towards the stars. Like the seeds of a plant, 99.9% fall by the wayside. But, every now and again one, eventually, will find a suitable extraterrestrial home; then another and another. We’re seeding other worlds, the shotgun hit or miss method. By the way, the ethics of this need not concern us, any more than a plant seedling has scruples about sprouting and out-competing other plants already established where it lands and takes root. Sending microbes to the stars would distribute and reproduce life-as-we-know-it, but that strategy wouldn’t of necessity end up producing clones of the human species.

A second way is to attach a bit of intelligence to what you send out, yet still keeping things small and light. Nanotechnology and miniaturisation of not carbon, but silicon is an option. It’s artificial intelligence in mankind’s image. So, we send out to the stars, molasses fashion, intelligent probes; the sort of probes that can make decisions about ultimate planetary destinations when they reach those stars. They chose real estate where they can land, use local resources to make copies of them, and boldly go onto another destination. These are known as Von Neumann probes. Note that again, no expenditure of life support resources is required. The drawback here is that Von Neumann probes spread out and colonize what amounts to our intelligence, but not our biology. Whether of not Von Neumann machines would evolve on their own would I guess depend on what sort of artificial intelligence they were programmed with initially.

The one huge drawback to boldly going by proxy, whether microbial or Von Neumann probes is that you get to stay at home. You don’t want to do that. You too want to boldly go. The only real incentive for starting out on a journey is to be there at the finish – journey’s end – even if the journey is fairly lengthy and time consuming like travel was back in the days of sailing ships and covered wagons. Still, you were there at the finish line. That’s why the idea of multi-generation space colony starships, the sort where migrations from one stellar system to another that takes hundreds to thousands of years, just doesn’t strike a responsive chord. You don’t finish what you start. The exception would be if the survival of mankind was in immediate jeopardy, say like the Sun going nova within a hundred years. If there’s no other option, it’s escape that matters, not the destination. You just gotta get out of Dodge by sundown, or else.

The alternative is hibernation for those hundreds to thousands of years the journey takes. Hibernation is akin to an eight hour overnight sleep. Sleep is like a sort of time travel where you journey to the future instantaneously. One minute it’s 11 pm; the next it’s 7 am! The problems here are 1) perfecting the required hibernation technology; 2) you still need minimal life support infrastructure; 3) you still got to expend energy to transport that near worthless big toe of yours. The only part of you that really needs to get from point A to point B is your mind. 

To be continued...

Are Black Holes Really So Weird? Part Two

Black Holes have a certain aura about them. They are associated, in the minds of the general populace, with a certain mystique or ultra-mystery about them – terrifying objects that gobble up everything within range – the ultimate devourer, doomsday machine, berserker and weapon of mass destruction (if you could figure out how to manipulate one of course) all rolled into one. But Black Holes have other aspects about them that are equally fascinating, and not really all that weird, though some bits are weirder than others. But you don’t have to be a geek to come to terms with these concepts. 

Now the common perception about Black Holes is that nothing gets out past the event horizon once it finds itself beneath it. That’s not quite the case. In theory, as discovered by cosmologist/physicist Stephen Hawking, radiation can escape – sort of – and this radiation is now called Hawking radiation. Macro objects, objects we associate with classical physics, can not get from inside an event horizon to outside an event horizon without traveling faster than the speed of light, which unfortunately, should you find yourself below and event horizon, is the ultimate cosmic speed limit. There’s no ‘get out of jail’ card. Traveling faster than light speed is not allowed.

But, any elementary particles, in the micro size realm and subject to quantum phenomena, can escape – again in theory; this hasn’t be verified by direct observation (which is currently in the too hard basket). It you are a fundamental particle, just below the event horizon, you might, just might, due to quantum fluctuations or jitters / the vacuum energy / the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, quantum tunnel your way, the tiniest fraction of a distance imaginable, past the mathematical event horizon boundary, to outside and potential freedom. Of course most particles might get sucked right back in again, but a tiny fraction gets away, carrying with it energy (thus the Black Hole has a temperature) and therefore mass, so the Black Hole loses a bit of mass and shrinks a bit. This quantum tunneling, crossing an energy barrier without having in theory sufficient energy to do so, is sort of like how a radioactive atom goes ‘poof’ and decays to a more stable state. Something in the nucleus, not having enough energy to break out, nevertheless quantum tunnels its way out – ‘poof’.   

Very much like a human being, from the very moment a Black Hole is born, say out of the gravitational collapse of a super-massive star that’s run out of nuclear fuel and stellar puff, it will start to die, to evaporate via Hawking radiation. However, in a Universe still very much dominated by matter and energy (including the all pervasive cosmic microwave background radiation), way more stuff finds its way into a Black Hole than gets out – by many orders of magnitude. For every bit (particle) that escapes, millions of bits (particles) get trapped inside. But (and here I assume an ever expanding Universe that never results in a Big Crunch), what happens when all the available matter and energy (all those particle bits) has been consumed and Black Holes can’t grow anymore (and here I assume that individual Black Holes are so far apart and expanding away from each other that they don’t consume each other). Then, evaporation – Hawking radiation output – exceeds input, and slowly, ever so slowly, and I do mean extremely slowly (as in measured over trillions of years), Black Holes get smaller and smaller until there’s nothing left. But our now ever more vastly expanded and immensely larger than it currently is Universe is filled (albeit to a much rarified extent) with just particles – particles adrift in the eternal cold of near absolute zero temperature (zero degrees Kelvin, the absolute theoretical minimum temperature possible).

However, the ultimate death of Black Holes has posed a significant problem to some physicists, causing quite a bit of controversy in the process.

What happens to the information content that a Black Hole can gobble up? Say you toss a book, or a CD, or a fully loaded human brain into a Black Hole. Is the information contained in that book (or whatever) lost to the Universe forever? [Perhaps given the state of information overload we suffer from that might be a blessing!]

You can not have macro stuff spew out of a Black Hole without violating basic physics. Macro stuff, say in the form of a book or a CD or a human, stuff full of information, falls in – that identical macro stuff, stuff full of information, does not, can not, come back out again. It is not only an improbable event, but an impossible one and a violation of the law of physics. But we have seen that in theory at least, Hawking radiation can get back out, because radiation isn’t macro, its micro, or in the realm of the quantum.

Note that it wasn’t Hawking radiation that was tossed into the Black Hole in the first place, but a book or CD or a human being or a whatever macro object, so escaping Hawking radiation isn’t that book or that CD or that whatever, but a bit of this and a bit of that and there’s no way of distinguishing the this from the that. Though there is apparently no way to reassemble the bits into all its separate meaningful messages; one-on-one, all the bits are nevertheless there.

If you were somehow able to reassemble bits of Hawking radiation emitted from all the bits and pieces which the Black Hole swallowed – which can escape – into a meaningful message(s), how would you know that message was something part and parcel of some information that went down the Black Hole gurgler in the first place? You’re more likely to have assembled one letter from one book, another letter from another book, yet a third letter from a third book, etc. The information (say sentence) you have assembled never entered the Black Hole in that form at all!

Still, a Black Hole, in theory, eventually spews out all the information it absorbed over its existence, ultimately via Hawking radiation. Some scientists insist there is, there must be, a way to reassemble the bits into all its separate meaningful messages; one-on-one.

So therein lies the controversy – macro stuff does go in; macro stuff does come out. Macro stuff ultimately escapes as micro stuff – Hawking radiation. Some scientists will say you can’t in theory reassemble and separate out the signal from the noise; others say you can, in fact it must be possible.

As indicated above, some physicists make a big deal over the loss of information via a Black Hole relative to any other way – probably because of the non-reversibility factor already described. Methinks personally it’s a non-event. Why? The fundamental question this all boils down to be that information – in any form – is a composite of elementary particles. A book, or a CD, or Morse code ink drops, or a human brain is a composite of particles. An electron, all on its own, isn’t telling you very much (for that matter, either is any individual letter in a book – by itself). Loss of information seems to be another example of dust-to-dust, ashes-to-ashes; only it’s a more fundamental case of elementary particles to elementary particles. It’s how the Universe began and its how the Universe will end up if the current observational astronomical trends continue into the indefinite future.

There’s one other solution to the ‘is information lost forever or is it not’ paradox. It’s considered a possibility that a Black Hole, because is so distorts time and space – in the extreme - ultimately buds off from our Universe and starts or enters another universe, or a baby universe (part of a Multiverse). In such a case, any information is budded off with it and lost to our Universe forever. Of course our loss is the other universe’s gain; maybe a Black Hole(s) in some other universe has dumped its information load (or overload) onto our Universe! 

There’s one further spin-off from the Black Holes make baby universes idea. In a Multiverse, different universes may have different laws of physics. There’s no reason why the laws of physics in our Universe need be identical in another universe. Thus, there might be some universes where the local physics favor the formation of Black Holes, and some universes where local physics can’t make Black Holes. Those universes that can easily make Black Holes will ‘breed’ and produce baby universes. Those universes that can’t readily make Black Holes will ‘breed’ less. Those universes that can’t produce Black Holes will be sterile. Do you see the connection with Darwinian ideas? Some universes are more ‘fit’ to reproduce than others!

Now that’s weird!  There’s one other bit of weirdness I like about Black Holes, and that is that what’s inside them may well be a new form of matter. Ordinary matter goes into a Black Hole, but the conditions inside them are so extreme that there’s some sort of phase transition (like when ice goes to water goes to steam or vice-versa) and while it’s still matter, it’s matter but not as we know it. The theoretical evidence for that idea is that if you have a matter star, and an antimatter star, and you introduce them to each other, what you get is one almighty Ka-Boom! But, if your matter star compresses into a Black Hole, and your antimatter star compresses into a Black Hole, and you combine the two, what you get is just a larger Black Hole!

Some more weirdness: It’s suggested that information going into a Black Hole is actually ‘stored’ in the event horizon, that two dimensional ‘surface’ marking the point of no return that surrounds the Black Hole’s singularity – whatever that actually is. The event horizon concept isn’t difficult to envision – Earth’s crust and oceans are a two dimensional surface surrounding the spherical three dimensional planet.

Now as more and more stuff enters a Black Hole, the event horizon expands accordingly – obviously - just like our crust (area) would get bigger if Earth’s volume increased. The event horizon is also the area where Hawking radiation is emitted from.

Now say you are inside a Black Hole’s event horizon – that’s the wrong side to be on, but this is just a thought experiment and I’ll assume you haven’t been crushed into a tiny pinprick of stuff, stuff that could equally be rusted automobiles or stuff formally made from gold, silver and diamonds. There’s lots of trapped radiation (photons) in there with you because light can enter a Black Hole. Those photons can struggle up, losing energy with each unit of distance gained, to reach the event horizon, but no farther. Their energy has exhausted itself. I gather they can just barely touch and ‘reflect’ off the underside of the event horizon and come back down again (in a direction towards the singularity), picking up the energy again that they expended in their futile gesture of escape. So, you, being also beneath the event horizon can see the event horizon from the inside via these trapped photons. You can also see beyond the event horizon via new photons entering the Black Hole from outside the event horizon – photons that will join their trapped or prisoner kin. It’s like a half-way mirror. If you are inside a Black Hole, you can see out, because light can pass through the Black Hole’s event horizon to you, but people on the good side or outside of the event horizon can’t see you because light reflecting off you can’t make it past that event horizon barrier.

One further question, could we actually be living within a Black Hole, or translated, is our Universe actually a Black Hole? Now one could (and people have) suggested that one could consider the entire Universe as being the inside of a Black Hole – after all, nothing can escape from the Universe. Well, if you can’t escape from inside a Black Hole, and assuming there’s no escape from our Universe (you are trapped in this Universe, like it or lump it), then a rose by any other name…

However, our Universe doesn’t exactly mirror a real Black Hole unless there is an outside to our Universe – a beyond the boundary or horizon that allows stuff to get into our Universe, our Universe ultimately trapping it.

So, Black Holes residing inside a Black Hole Universe, which maybe residing inside…

Russian dolls within Russian dolls within Russian dolls within Russian dolls.

Saving the best for last, could you become a Black Hole? Well, the short answer is presumably, ‘yes’. The reasoning goes as follows. If you travel at ever increasing velocities, under special relativity, your mass gets correspondingly greater and greater, and your length gets shorter and shorter. Translated, your density gets greater and greater; your own gravity gets higher and higher. At light speed (impossible to achieve), your mass would be infinite; your volume zero; your density and gravity infinite. Well, that’s not on. But, before even approaching that limit, your mass would be theoretically great enough; your volume low enough, your density and gravity great enough, that you’d warp space-time sufficiently enough to turn into a Black Hole! As noted above, what actually comprises a Black Hole is irrelevant. Any stuff will do – gold, silver and diamonds; rusted automobiles; or flesh-and-blood (i.e. – you).

Here are a few further recommended readings:

Begelman, Mitchell & Rees, Martin; Gravity’s Fatal Attraction: Black Holes in the Universe;  [2^nd Edition]; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; 2010:

Susskind, Leonard; The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics; Back Bay Books, New York; 2008:

Thorne, Kip S.; Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy; W.W. Norton & Company, New York; 1994:

Are Black Holes Really So Weird? Part One

Black Holes have a certain aura about them. They are associated, in the minds of the general populace, with a certain mystique or ultra-mystery about them – terrifying objects that gobble up everything within range – the ultimate devourer, doomsday machine, berserker and weapon of mass destruction (if you could figure out how to manipulate one of course) all rolled into one. But Black Holes have other aspects about them that are equally fascinating, and not really all that weird, though some bits are weirder than others. But you don’t have to be a geek to come to terms with these concepts. 

The aura of the Black Hole, even if not quite as dramatic as a doomsday device, is hardly less within the astronomical community, to quantum physicists, or relativists (scientists who special in general and/or special relativity).  Though there’s little doubt today of their actual existence, a logical consequence of Einstein’s theories of relativity, Einstein himself refused to give credence to them. The well-ordered universe just wouldn’t actually create such monstrosities he believed. He wasn’t alone in that point of view, and as their theoretical certainty became ever stronger, scientists tried to find ever more unique ways to prevent them from forming – to no avail.

But are Black Holes really as strange and mysterious and deserving of their aura and status as unique astronomical objects?

Black Holes may have no hair, which is to say they lack the individuality of whatever formed them so if you’ve ‘seen’ one Black Hole you’ve ‘seen’ them all. Translated, a Black Hole made out of rusted automobiles will ‘look’ the same as one made out of star-stuff, as one made out of pure gold, silver and diamonds. But Black Holes do have (or could have) certain properties. All Black Holes most certainly have mass and therefore gravity; they certainly have size (a volume, an area, a circumference, etc.); they certainly have a shape (spherical). Black Holes (against all intuitive prediction) have a temperature (Hawking radiation). They can have spin (rotation), and they may have an overall electric charge. So what’s unique about that?

The property we most associate with Black Holes is gravity, a function of mass - the more mass, the more gravity. Associated with that concept is escape velocity – how fast do you need to go to escape an object’s gravity well never to return. 

Now our moon has gravity and an associated escape velocity. Planet Earth has greater gravity and therefore a higher escape velocity (about seven miles per second). Planet Jupiter has an even greater gravitational field and thus you need even more oomph to escape. Our sun is another notch higher up, and so it goes. Keeping in mind that gravity is related not to something’s size, but to its mass, a White Dwarf star, while smaller than our sun, has greater gravity and therefore escape velocity. Then comes Neutron Stars (pulsars) and you really need some rocket power to get away from those babies!

However, there is a limit to velocity, escape or otherwise.  That limit is the speed of light, or about 186,000 miles per second (roughly 300,000 kilometers/second). So what happens when there is so much mass, or so much gravity, that the escape velocity exceeds that of 186,000 miles per second? The quick answer is nothing – you can’t escape; nothing can escape – not even light. That’s pretty straight forward and you don’t even need a course in relativity to figure it out! The absence of light is darkness, so any object that has an escape velocity greater than that of light will be dark – in other words, a Black Hole. The only difference twixt a Black Hole and any other macro object is that a Black Hole’s escape velocity exceeds that of light. That’s it; end of differences.

If you can’t see a Black Hole, how could you know they actually (as opposed to theoretically) exist? Simple – Black Holes have gravity, and the gravity of Black Holes can influence matter we can see. So, if you see a star going too and fro in orbit around something you can’t see, then that something is probably a Black Hole. Matter (interstellar dust and gas) spiraling into, but just prior to entering a Black Hole can also give off a tell-tale electromagnetic signature.

Because of such intense gravity, individuality is squeezed out. Planet Earth has highs (mountain peaks) and lows (ocean troughs) and a slight equatorial bulge, but if it’s size were reduced (while retaining mass) to the extent that her gravity created a greater-than-light escape velocity, then Planet Earth would become a perfect sphere of super dense crushed matter. No peaks, no troughs, no bulge – no personality, or no hair! 

Now objects tend to have a surface – an inside and an outside. In the case of Planet Earth, let’s call beneath the crust Earth’s inside; above the crust Earth’s exterior. The same goes for Black Holes. The inside center of a Black Hole is called a singularity. The ‘surface’ of a Black Hole is called the event horizon – it’s the purely mathematical line where the escape velocity goes from faster than light speed (event horizon and below) to a permitted escape velocity (event horizon and above). Earth’s usually quoted escape velocity is given to be at Earth’s solid surface or sea level. But even sat 100 miles above, there’s still as escape velocity, it’s just less than 100 miles further down. In like style, a Black Hole’s escape velocity decreases from the singularity outwards, but doesn’t become permissible (less than light speed) until the altitude of the event horizon is reached. Thus one can not see anything, any events that are below this mathematical event horizon because anything below can’t get out, including light. Finally, the distance between the singularity and the event horizon varies depending on the mass of the Black Hole.

It’s what’s below the event horizon that’s really of interest given that it can’t be seen; no information escapes to inform us or give us any real clues of the conditions beneath. One has to rely on physics’ theoretical equations to predict conditions – conditions that really can’t be verified by any direct observation.

Unfortunately, these equations, the equations of general relativity, break down when one approaches the singularity. That’s because in order to come to terms with what a singularity is like, one has to merge general relativity (gravity) with quantum physics (because the singularity is thought to be of a size within the realm of quantum phenomena), or produce a theory of quantum gravity. Alas, that has yet to be accomplished. So, understanding the physics inside a Black Hole is one of Mother Nature’s final frontiers!

For example, taken to their logical conclusions, physics’ equations (general relativity) dictate that a singularity must have zero volume and infinite density. Physicists are well aware that whenever ‘infinities’ pop up in their musings, something’s wrong and they need to go back to the drawing board (blackboard?) and refine things to a greater or lesser extent. Hopefully, a theory of quantum gravity will do that, but for the here and now, you’ll find texts which state that a singularity has zero volume and infinite density. That’s clearly a nonsense, for if one had infinity density, one must have infinite gravity as the greater the density an object has, the greater its gravitational attraction. Now even though gravity dilutes as it spreads throughout space and away from the object of its affection, any dilution of infinity is still infinity. Since Black Holes and associated singularities are thought to be common in the observable universe, there should be at least one that’s had time since the Big Bang to project its gravitational influence onto us – say the massive Black Hole singularity at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, less than 50,000 light years away. Quite obviously we’re not being subjected to an infinite gravitational attraction towards our galactic center, which tends to put the kibosh on, and confirms the breakdown as to what the equations predict for a Black Hole’s singularity.

So, if a Black Hole’s singularity doesn’t have zero volume and therefore infinite density, then it must clearly have a finite volume and a finite density which has implications for the origin of our Universe since conventional wisdom associates the Big Bang event with a singularity (and if there were to ever be a Big Crunch event, that would have to end up as a singularity).

The logic goes something like this. A singularity must have a finite density because having an infinite density is ridiculous. A singularity must have a finite volume because any object that has mass can’t be dimensionless – that too would be ridiculous – and Black Holes certainly have mass since they have gravity. If the Black Hole continues to grow, then the singularity continues to add mass to it, and its density increases. But, eventually the density reaches some sort of maximum possible – it’s finite after all and can’t become infinite. So as matter continues to be added to the singularity, the volume or size of the singularity must grow – and grow – and grow – and grow. Eventually, the volume of the singularity must be such that it falls outside of the realm of quantum physics. Translated, in other words, not only is a singularity of greater than zero volume, it may not even be tiny. It could be massive – stellar sized; even galactic sized! That then does away with the absurdity that our entire universe started out as something less than atomic sized something akin to a tiny pinprick!

Now the other interesting thing is that gravity probably isn’t really a force like electromagnetism or the strong and weak nuclear forces and shouldn’t be lumped in with them (which physics texts do). Rather, gravity, according to general relativity, is rather a manifestation of space-time geometry. As the saying goes, ‘matter (gravity) tells space-time how to bend; bent space-time tells matter how to move’. That movement we interpret as gravity.

So, space-time near, around or in a Black Hole is about as bent, or warped, as you can get, or conversely, the local geometry is so extreme or curved that not even light can get beyond the Black Hole’s event horizon. The geometry creates a sort of well, so deep and so steep, that the velocity needed to escape is greater than special relativity allows. [Special relativity covers the speed of light; general relativity deals with gravity and space-time.]

What does the extreme warping of space-time mean – apart from making the Black Hole, black? Well, presumably if you distort space-time sufficiently, then you, in theory, can make shortcuts through space and/or time.

Let’s have an analogy. Say you take a balloon and mark out a North and South Pole on the surface. The distance between the two is either half the circumference of the balloon (if you go via the surface or normal space), or the diameter (if you tunnel through, call that hyperspace). Now squeeze the balloon such that the North and South Poles are forced close together; maybe even touching. While this doesn’t help reduce the traveling distance if you stay on the surface (normal space), the tunneling (hyperspace) distance in the now warped balloon is vastly reduced. If it took you a year say to tunnel from North to South in the standard balloon, then post warping it might take you only a week (or less). In fact, if the Poles were squeezed into direct contact, then you could travel via normal space from one to the other instantaneously – no need for hyperspace. Of course if you actually wished to travel from some other point on the balloon’s surface to some other point, the squeezing might not do you much good. In fact, the East – West distance has increased! So, the odds that the warping will be just right for your travel needs could be highly problematical. A local Black Hole warping that favors you traveling to Sirius quick smart is of little consequence if you wish to actually go to Alpha Centauri.  But then as some old wise sage said, ‘life wasn’t meant to be easy’!

Now since space and time are intractably connected, points in time, like points in space, can be squeezed closer together. So the North and South Pole bits could easily have been a past and a future. Actually, because it’s really space-time, you probably have a combination of both. You don’t travel from 2000 AD Adelaide to 2000 AD Sydney in the wink of an eye; nor from 2000 AD Adelaide to 3000 AD Adelaide in that same wink, rather from (say) 2000 AD Adelaide to 3000 AD Sydney in an eye blink.

I’ve seen speculation that a Black Hole could warp space-time so greatly that it could ‘pinch’ itself off from our Universe and disappear entirely. Of course if it did so it could no longer have any influence within our cosmos. However, if something as massive as the Black Hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy isn’t enough to pinch space-time sufficiently to disappear, then perhaps it just doesn’t happen – or maybe it takes the mass of an entire universe to do it. Say one universe’s Big Crunch’s mother of all Black Holes plus singularity warps space-time so much that it becomes another universe’s Big Bang!

To be continued...