All Things Extraterrestrial: Goldilocks Universe

Showing posts with label Goldilocks Universe. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

The Russell Stannard Questions: Life

The following questions (Q) are taken verbatim from those poised by Russell Stannard in his 2010 book The End of Discovery [are we approaching the boundaries of the knowable?]; Oxford University Press, Oxford. I consider these typical of the sorts of modern Big Questions that are part and parcel of the philosophy of modern science, especially physical science.

My answers are based mainly with the thought of our being in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe that has been constructed by one or more Supreme Programmers. However, some of the answers apply regardless of what the nature of our ultimate reality is.

Q. Why is the universe life-friendly?

A. The universe is both bio-friendly and not bio-friendly. 99.999% (add a few more 9’s here) of the cosmic environment is decidedly bio-unfriendly and would snuff you out so quick-smart you wouldn’t know what hit you. Of course the cosmos is also bio-friendly otherwise you wouldn’t be here reading this. If you reject a supernatural explanation, that leaves coincidence, a multiverse, or software. Coincidence is stretching things since there are just so many dials that have to be set to a very narrow range. The multiverse appeals to probability statistics – think of those millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters one of whom will type “Hamlet” word-for-word – eventually. That leaves software, or in other words a Supreme Programmer programing our universe in a bio-friendly way.

Q. Is there extraterrestrial life, and if so, how do we humans stand in comparison as regards intellectual capacity?

A. Given the vastness of the cosmos, and the sheer number of galaxies in the observable cosmos, and the numbers of stars per galaxy with associated solar systems and the number of planets per solar system not to mention possible rogue/orphan planets and how interstellar cosmic organic chemistry associated with life is, well, cosmic, etc., you would have to be pretty brave to bet the family farm arguing Planet Earth being the proverbial cosmic IT when it comes to life. Even going up the chain from the origin of life ‘living’ molecules to unicellular life to multicellular life to intelligent life to technologically advanced life forms and advocating extreme difficulty in getting from one step to the next step on up the line, there must be – if you’re a betting person – millions of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations throughout the cosmos and a goodly number in our galaxy too. Further, we humans are the new boys on the block, so the odds are that any other extraterrestrial intelligences will have been around way longer that we have, and thus have evolved greater intellectual capacity that we have yet achieved. However, the interesting bit is that once intelligence is achieved, natural selection gives way to artificial selection, and part of that artificial selection might ultimately be the transition from biological intelligence to artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence which will further evolve via artificial selection as machine intelligence designs ever better machine intelligences.

Monday, January 2, 2012

The Rare Earth Hypothesis: Part Two

If the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a viable experiment and not a waste of time; if UFOs and ancient astronauts are facets that help document the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, then the very existence of an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence with technology has to be plausible in the first place. Unfortunately, it’s a long hard road to get from inorganic chemistry through to E.T. and there are many possible bottleneck hurdles that have to be overcome before the one evolves into the other. Goldilocks factors – not too this, not too that, but just right – have to be with you every step of the way. IMHO the major bottlenecks are the transition from unicellular to multicellular life and the evolutionary development and use of technology.

It’s been pointed out by others, and based on my readings I tend to have to agree, that astronomers (physical scientists) tend to be much more optimistic and supportive of the notion that advanced life forms in the Universe (extraterrestrial intelligence) are a dime-a-dozen relative to biologists (life scientists), who hedge their bets and who it must be said are presumably better qualified to pass judgments. So, taking things from a more biological perspective, what’s what?

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

But now we come to our first and major bottleneck.

It took 0.5 billion years for the unicellular origin of life on Earth, or for microbes from space to take root on Earth, but then it then took nearly another 3.5 billion years between the appearance of that ‘simple’ single proto-cell life form and the eventual evolution and the resultant Cambrian explosion of multicellular (complex) life forms. For some reason(s), it appears to be biologically difficult to go from the simple single cell to a complex multicellular organism based on the only example we have to judge such things. Probably the overall obstacle to the early quick-smart establishment of multicellular (complex) life is that heretofore microbes (single cells) were 100% self-sufficient generalists. Complex organisms require the evolution of single cells to give up being generalists, become specialists, and work as part of a team. That degree of organization apparently takes lots of time, especially to the stage of where it can leave a large fossil presence, if it takes place at all.

Once you get to the multicellular stage, and in order to evolve further, well the trick is to survive, for the Universe is a dangerous place.

Planetary environments tend to be dangerous and rarely stable, and thus you need a lot of factors in place to ensure that even simple life even survives the long term and get the chance to evolve into multicellular life. Or, if you have evolved multicellular life, the odds are pretty good it’s going to get the Big “E” – Extinction. I mean complex life is very vulnerable to environmental forces. A tornado probably isn’t going to bother bacteria, but it sure could tear you apart. That’s not to say bacteria can survive everything the cosmos can throw at them, but when nasties come, you stand a better chance of survival if you’re a microbe. So, in order to get to the first proto multicellular critter, and from that to us, you need a lot of Goldilocks factors operating in your favour.

But there are apparently just too many planetary Goldilocks factors at play to grant the probability that complex, multicellular, animal, life is common throughout the cosmos. You need to be in a quiet part of the galaxy – no nearby supernovas, black holes to suck you in, gamma ray bursters, etc. You need a long lived stable single star. You need a gravitationally stable solar system so that planets are not gravitationally disturbed out of their orbit and either plunged into the parent star or cast out of the parent system altogether. You should have a good Jupiter(s) to absorb and/or gravitational deflect comets and asteroids that would otherwise slam into your otherwise environmentally-friendly planet causing havoc to established life forms. You need a planet that’s in a pretty circular orbit, one that doesn’t stray too close or too far from the habitable zone surrounding the parent star. The planet must have a fairly stable temperature range over geologic time periods, and so you must have an atmosphere, and thus has to be massive enough to retain an atmosphere, without being so massive that you end up with a brown dwarf - a quasi-stellar body. The axis can’t have an extreme tilt, and it would greatly assist if the planet had a large moon around it to assist its long term stability. You need some sort of plate tectonics to ensure land building and the recycling of materials. If it’s intelligence, with technology you seek, the planet can’t be a water world. The planet must have formed in a region abundant in the heavier chemical elements (oxygen, sulphur, carbon, silicon, nitrogen, various metals, etc.). When you take all those factors (and more) into account, the number of suitable abodes where simple life can slowly evolve into complex life decreases rather quickly. And there’s no guarantee that there is really any directed purpose to evolution in that evolution doesn’t require simple life to become complex life. Survival and leaving offspring is what it’s all about, and if single cell critters do that what more is needed?

One note about planetary disasters or catastrophes is that these cut both ways. They can’t be frequent enough and/or large enough to wipe out the entire biosphere in total, especially the biosphere comprised of complex life forms, but on the other hand, infrequent small disasters can spur on evolutionary change by opening up environmental niches, but depending on who or what you are, when you are, and where you are, a disaster can be a double edged sword. I mean if you’re a T-Rex sixty five million years ago, its bad news. On the other hand, without the bad news for T-Rex, we wouldn’t be here, so for us, an asteroid impact 65 million years ago turned out to be good news!

It’s also difficult to naturally transport complex life around the galaxy, unlike microbial life. If a meteor hit Earth and blasted a chunk of terra firma off towards Mars, pity the poor cockroach going along for the ride. Cockroaches are tough, but not that tough. And even if a cockroach did make it alive to the surface of, say Mars, it wouldn’t survive long.

Anyway, once you have multicellular critters that have survived and thrived in a reasonably stable part of the Universe over many generations, will they evolve intelligence? I mean finding an extraterrestrial equivalent of a trilobite is all well and good, but we want to find beings more like ourselves.

IMHO, intelligence, the ability to figure things out, has evolutionary survival value and will tend to be selected for, and thus over time, there will tend to have evolved life forms with ever higher IQ’s. Here on Earth, just about all mammals and birds, and some exceptional invertebrates (the cephalopods like squid and the octopus), have reasonable IQ’s at least when compared to bacteria, plants, insects, fish, etc. Of course just as some kinds of organisms are faster than others, or have keener senses of sight or smell or hearing, not all advanced organisms are going to end up equal in the IQ stakes. But, the fact remains, the ability to think, to figure things out, can only increase your odds of survival and leaving behind more offspring.

Finally, for SETI to succeed, for UFOs to be alien spaceships, one needs our intelligent species to develop technology, and here’s where I see bottleneck number two. The evolution of technology isn’t inevitable and has a lot of just-so factors attached.

Firstly, your home planet has got to come equipped with the right sorts of materials like oxygen and metal ores and other objects than can be turned into useful tools, and of course a suitable supply of various energy sources. That’s not a given.

Water worlds are out of the running since it’s difficult to discover and utilise fire in that sort of environment.

You can’t have all your required locomotive appendages in contact with the ground – some have to be free to manipulate objects in your environment. Birds have wings that are off the ground, but since wings aren’t good at making tools, that seems to rule out wings and birds of a feather pretty much as well

So, we’ve already ruled out dolphins and whales and the cephalopods being water based creatures, and the birds with their useless wings as far as building things is concerned, and all the four-footed walking mammals.

It might be conceivable that you can build up a technology using your mouth parts and/or using a tail to manipulate and build things, but we don’t have obvious terrestrial case studies, although you might argue that bees and wasps and termites and ants and birds can build elaborate structures using just their mouths.

It’s not all that obvious that technology actually adds all that much value towards ultimate long-term survival. Lots of technological advancements do, like controlling fire, developing agriculture, the rise of modern medicine and food technologies. But then lots of modern technological wonders, the automobile, CDs, sofas, microwave ovens, and thousands of other consumer products don’t really contribute to our overall survival – certainly cars don’t when considering the road toll! Then that brings up the fact that things technological can sometimes work in the opposite direction. Toxic this, pollutant that, nuclear the next thing; then throw in a bit of global warming; the rise of urban city living with overcrowding and in general overpopulation; chemical, biological and radiological warfare/terrorism; instruments of warfare in general, like guns; the overuse of antibiotics and the rise of antibiotic resistant germs; exposure to electromagnetic fields – well, the list of horrors or potential horrors goes on and on.

It makes for an interesting question: would mankind ultimately survive longer had technology never entered the equation, or not? It’s an unanswerable question in that 1) we can’t run the contrary as a controlled experiment, and 2) that the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and there’s probably no turning back now.

So, overall, SETI might not be able to detect our technological and communicating kin out there, and UFOs might not be alien spaceships right here, because it’s 1) hard to evolve multicellular organisms, and 2) technology isn’t inevitable and might even be counterproductive. Thus, Earth, with its multicellular critters and humanity with its technology, is quite the rare planet within the Universe – according to some.

The main proponents of what is now called the ‘Rare Earth Hypothesis’ are the scientists Brownlee and Ward (see below), and they have certainly stirred up an astrobiological hornet’s nest with the idea. That’s good for science in the long term. The belief in an unproved but accepted scientific proposition, in this case that that there are lots of complex alien critters out there, needs to be challenged if fields of inquiry aren’t going to stagnate. However, make no mistake, it is the ‘Rare Earth Hypothesis’, not the ‘Unique Earth Hypothesis’, so religious fundamentalists who have taken this hypothesis to their hearts; who still need Planet Earth, and human beings, as some sort of religious special creation, should really not take comfort from these ideas. The Copernicus Revolution is still alive and well.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

The Rare Earth Hypothesis: Part One

For starters, our Universe is a Goldilocks Universe in that the fundamental laws, relations and principles of physics unite in such a way as to be ultimately bio-friendly. If the Universe wasn’t bio-friendly, we wouldn’t be here to comment on that. That’s not to say however, in relative contrast, that many (most) parts of the Universe aren’t overly bio-friendly. You’d be hard-pressed to survive and thrive in the depths of a stellar core, heading down a Black Hole, vacationing on the surface of a White Dwarf or in the hard vacuum of space itself. So, overall the physics of the Universe displays the physics of a Goldilocks Universe, but actually very few addresses within an overall Goldilocks Universe are really, by our definition, Goldilocks. However, starting with bio-friendly physics, where do we go from that point? Well, physics begat inorganic chemistry. That’s step number one, and clearly that’s easy because there’s an awful lot of inorganic chemistry in our Universe.

Going from inorganic chemistry to organic chemistry isn’t difficult either. Interstellar space is full of dust and gases made up of organic chemicals; ditto many of the planets and moons within our solar system (i.e. – Titan, a moon of Saturn) have organics being part and parcel of their composition, and comets, asteroids and meteors too can contain organic compounds.

Judging by how quickly organic chemistry turned into biochemistry (the origin of life) on the early Planet Earth, it’s not difficult to generate simple proto-cellular to unicellular life forms if the conditions (adequate energy, temperatures, environments) are Goldilocks conditions.

Yet life, even microbial life, is still very, very complex (try making a microbe from scratch if you doubt it). The fact that life arose from scratch on Earth within a very, very short span of geological time after the planet formed is a bit suspect IMHO. But what if Earth were seeded by microbial life forms already in existence from space (or deliberately seeded by extraterrestrials as the Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick has proposed)? Now I realize that just puts off the origin of life question to another time(s) and place(s). However, given the vastness of the cosmos is far greater than that of our finite globe, and given that the cosmos existed for vastly longer periods of time before our sun, solar system and home planet came into existence, such additional time and space easily turns the improbable into a near certainty. And once established somewhere, then life could spread throughout that time and space, until it reached our young planet.

Earth arose billions of years after the universe and our galaxy had evolved, ample time for life to have arisen elsewhere, and seed the early Earth. This is the concept of panspermia. We know that comets, meteors, and the cosmic dust of outer space are chock-o-block full of complex organic molecules. We know that simple terrestrial life can survive the outer space environment if suitably shielded – and it doesn’t take much to do the shielding. We know that surface bits from planets/moons can be ejected into space, carry a cargo of microbes, and land on another planet, even eons later with the microbes still viable. Of course 99.999% of all such microbial life will be doomed to forever wander in space or crash onto a cold, surface of a planet with no atmosphere or water, or plunge into a star, etc. But, sheer numbers will insure that now and again some microbes will land on a hospitable abode and be fruitful and multiple and evolve. The interesting bit is that if then, then now. And thus panspermia will be happening today. Certainly some meteorites which have impacted Earth have inside them ‘organized elements’ suggestive of microbial structures – the Murchison Meteorite from

Australia

is one such stone. The problem is terrestrial contamination as there are often lengthy time periods between their fall and subsequent discovery. As an aside, if Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe are correct (and I believe they are), microbes (bacteria and viruses) impacting Earth today are largely responsible for some select or various disease epidemics and pandemics, past present, and no doubt future.

On Earth, microbes rule, OK? The biomass of all the bacteria, etc. put together easily equals the biomass of every other multicellular plant and animal added together. And microbes can live in environments where multicellular critters fear to tread and often can’t: from the coldest terrestrial environments, up to the near boiling temperatures, from deep underground to the heights of the atmosphere, from inside water-cooled nuclear reactors and the interior of rocks, to intensely saline, acidic and alkaline environments, to ecosystems where the sun never shines, like the abyssal depths.

They can even survive outer space. Bacteria survived on the surface of the Moon – on Surveyor Three. This was possibly the most significant discovery of the entire Apollo Moon program and it hardly even rated a mention. Astronauts from the Apollo 12 mission brought back to Earth parts of the unmanned Surveyor Three Lunar Lander. Terrestrial bacteria on those parts survived the lunar vacuum, solar radiations (UV, etc.), the massive temperature extremes, and lack of water and nutrients. Experiments since then in low earth orbit have confirmed that given just minimal shielding, bacteria can boldly go!

You’d be aware of how difficult it is to totally sterilize something, be it hospital equipment or a spacecraft bound for a Martian landing. They’re tough – have you ever read about a mass extinction event where a bacterial species, unlike say the multicellular dinosaurs, went poof? Microbes are easy to transport. They can be blasted off the surface of the Earth, shielded from radiation by the debris, and survive to land on another world and be fruitful and multiply. There’s little doubt that somewhere way out there, terrestrial bacteria have hitched a ride to the stars, bolding going where lots of microbes have gone before! Translated, I firmly expect that the universe is teaming with life in all sorts of places. The less than glamorous catch is that LGM is not going to stand for Little Green Men, but Little Green Microbes.

To be continued...

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Cosmic Fun: Random Ramblings in Modern Cosmology: The Goldilocks 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 GOLDILOCKS UNIVERSE REVISITED

As noted in an earlier blog, our Universe is a Goldilocks Universe, in as much as the physical parameters that make it up allow life-as-we-know it (such as you and me) to exist. There are three standard explanations why this is so. The first is dumb luck. Even in poker you sometimes get dealt a royal flush or four aces first go! Of course that stretches credibility a tad.

The second is the concept of an intelligent designer – “God” if you will. God created the Universe and the parameters it has because God wanted the Universe to be populated with life forms that would worship He, She or It.

The third is the concept of the Multiverse. There are umpteen zillion universes out there, all natural, all with different physical parameters, some of which will permit the evolution of life-as-we-know-it. It’s therefore not surprising that we exist in such a bio-friendly Universe. If you deal a zillion poker hands, sooner or later you’ll get a royal flush or four aces! Just as it takes probably billions of planets around millions of stars to give a near certain probability that at least one planet will be a Goldilocks planet, so too it probably takes millions to billions of universes to guarantee a Goldilocks universe. Fortunately, there seems to be lots of ways to create universes, or an ultimate Multiverse.

However, I have a fourth suggestion. That is, no matter what the physical parameters of our Universe happened to be, be it akin to a royal flush or one pair or zip, even if such parameters don’t allow for life-as-we-know-it (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen-based), perhaps ‘life’ of another sort (life-not-as-we-know-it) will come to pass. In other words, any Universe will produce life, not only possibly life, but inevitably life. Science fiction is full of life-not-as-we-know-t, from Hoyle’s ‘Black Cloud’ to ‘Star Trek’s’ Horta to Asimov’s ‘Soft Ones’ and Forward’s aliens who live on a neutron star.

Thusly, my suggestion is no matter what the physical parameters of a universe happen to be, ‘life’ will find a way. Each poker hand has an equal chance of being dealt; nearly every possible poker hand is a bio-winner. Nearly every universe is a Goldilocks universe – for something – but that something would be wondering why they lucked out!

Monday, October 31, 2011

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

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...

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Dial L for Life*

You exist. You are a biological life form. Therefore, the Universe must be the sort of place that has the sorts of physics that permits the origin and evolution of life forms. That that weren’t the case, you wouldn’t exist. Now the question is, why is this - our bio-friendly Universe – so?

The fact that you exist makes some people quite uncomfortable. Specifically, the fact that the Universe – translated, the laws, constants and relationships of physics – is bio-friendly and allows for the origin, development, evolution, and overall the existence of living things makes some cosmologists and physicists uncomfortable. Current explanations of why the Universe should be bio-friendly don’t sit well with some subsets of this professional community.

Well, we’re here, and so are they, and so are millions of other species (past as well as present), so they just gotta deal with the situation as it presents itself.

Before we get to the ways and means they deal with as explanations for the bio-friendly situation, and why those ways and means can be uncomfortable, I need to point out that all these same laws, constants and relationships of physics also can be very bio-unfriendly – in spades; in the extreme.

Take the entire volume of our observable universe (we don’t know what the volume is of the Universe as a whole). What fraction of that volume is bio-friendly to you? If you were somehow transported at random, by chance, to some other coordinates somewhere in that expanse of space, what are the odds you’d live to tell the tale? Bugger all! Winning a million dollar lottery a million times in a row I’d be happy to give you better odds on. In the vacuum of space, nobody can hear you die; if you happen to hit a star, nobody will see you fry.

Even Planet Earth is largely bio-unfriendly. Ten kilometres straight up, you’re dead; ditto ten kilometres straight down. You’re odds don’t improve greatly if you’re in your birthday suit and land in Antarctica, or the Sahara Desert, and how long can you tread water if dumped in the middle of the North Atlantic?

So, 99.999 (add a few more nines and then some) percent of our observable universe is NOT bio-friendly. The only place you know for sure of surviving, and even then maybe not for very long, is just on the very thin surface of the third rock outwards from Mother Sun.

Now that’s a rather bio-unfriendly observable universe to you, and other terrestrial complex life forms like cats and dogs – even cockroaches. It’s not quite as bio-unfriendly to simpler life forms, although the odds don’t improve all that much. Some microbes might survive inside outer space, but they’re not going to thrive, far less reproduce, and otherwise live the good microbial life. Now some non-terrestrial abodes in our solar system (and presumably other extra-solar systems) might be suitable habitats to our microbial ancestral kin, so from their point of view, the observable universe is a slightly more bio-friendly place – but suitable bio-friendly real estate is still pretty marginal relative to the overall volume of same.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the Universe is ultimately a bio-friendly place. How is this possible? And what are the uncomfortable aspects of explaining this?

Firstly, we assume that there was an alternative. Our Universe could have turned out to be an absolutely bio-unfriendly place. For sake of visualization, imagine that all those laws, constants and relationships part and parcel of physics are all represented by dials on this machine that ultimately runs or controls the Universe. Let’s say that all the dials that control the Universe (and its bio-friendliness) are all set at position #5. All dials at setting #5 make for a bio-friendly Universe.

We can perform imaginary thought experiments, a ‘what if’ game, by altering the position or setting of any one of those dials. Say one dial represents gravity. If we turn the gravity dial to #4, the force of gravity is weaker. If we turn the gravity dial to setting #6, gravity is stronger.

It turns out, nastily so, that changing the positions of even any one of the dials by even a small amount makes our Universe 100% bio-unfriendly. The position of the dials is fine-tuned to an incredible degree of precision to allow for a bio-friendly Universe; to allow for you and for me and for cats and dogs and cockroaches too.

Take the gravity dial. If gravity were ever so slightly weaker, stuff wouldn’t clump together; interstellar gas wouldn’t coalesce into stars, and if stars wouldn’t form, then no life. Life needs stars, because ultimately stars cook the heavier elements out of which life is made – like carbon and oxygen and nitrogen.

If gravity had been a shade greater, then the newly Big Bang expanding universe would have been aborted quick-smart as expansion would have turned into a contraction in fairly short order resulting in a Big Crunch. There would never have been time for life to even get started before Armageddon!

So, how did all the dials get stuck on the #5 position?

Well, maybe it all just happened by a random throw of the dice – all by chance. Some combination had to come up and bio-friendliness was one whose number came up. That makes some professionals queasy or uncomfortable in the same way as explaining someone winning a million dollar jackpot a million times in a row would. The odds are just too great against the possibility.

Well, maybe our bio-friendly Universe was the outcome of an intelligent designer. It was deliberately created to be bio-friendly, just like we humans can design a car to be driver-friendly. Lots of gadgets are advertised as being user-friendly. Why not therefore an entire Universe? Of course the agent(s), the designer(s), would have to have been outside our space-time continuum since presumably he / she / it / they existed before the creation of our space-time continuum. I guess that means that creator person(s) or thing(s) must have been supernatural in origin – God, in other words. Now the God concept or hypothesis, or intelligent designer theory also puts some professionals’ teeth on edge. Lots of folk reject that idea; lots of folk embrace that idea too.

Lastly, what if there are lots of universes – I means lots and lots and lots of them. Nearly all of them would have few, if any, dials set at #5. Maybe several have nearly all dials at #5 – close, but close don’t count. However, based on sheer probability, a couple, maybe just one, maybe two or three – a select few, won the all #5 dial lottery. Alas, multiple universes, the Multiverse concept, doesn’t sit well with all and sundry either. If you have lots of universes, maybe you have an infinite number, which then implies an infinite number of copies of everything – of you, of me, of every cat and dog – and every cockroach too.

But what if there’s no Multiverse in space, only a Multiverse in time. That is, a cyclic universe. Sooner or later, one cycle is going to produce #5, #5, #5, #5, #5, #5, etc. right on down the chain. Is ours, are we, that lucky cyclic Universe? Therein lies the rub. Our Universe doesn’t appear, based on current observational evidence, to be heading in a cyclic direction – towards a Big Crunch - now, or ever. So, if we are the last production of a previously endless cyclic process or chain, then we broke it!

So, all ideas explaining a, and in particular our, bio-friendly Universe have their plusses and minuses.

But wait, there’s more! What if our ‘what if’ game isn’t possible? Maybe there’s one, and only one physics possible. Maybe all the dials are super-glued at position #5 and just can’t be moved. I believe it was Einstein who asked whether God had any choice in creating our Universe’s parameters. Maybe not, in which case maybe God isn’t as all powerful as he / she / it / they is/are cracked up to be – but that’s another topic. If all dials are set on position #5, therefore any other laws, constants and relationships of physics are purely in the realm of abstract or hypothetical thought-experiments

There is however one other scenario, actually scenarios, that have a bearing on the issue. The laws and constants of physics have interrelationships, and thus, it might not be possible to alter one dial without affecting the position of other dials. The prime argument is that altering the position of any one dial makes the Universe bio-unfriendly. However, I wonder whether altering more than one dial might restore a bio-friendly Universe. Translated, we probably move into the life-not-as-we-know-it area, which traditionally has played around with replacing silicone for carbon; liquid methane or liquid ammonia for liquid water. But altering more than one dial has near limitless possibilities way above and beyond traditional life-not-as-we-know-it scenarios. Maybe changing dial one from #5 to number #4 makes a universe bio-unfriendly, but if dial seven is then changed to position #9 and dial number three is altered to position #2, then maybe a non-carbon based life-form might be possible. The possibilities, again, are near endless, although in general nearly all combinations of dials produce lifeless universes, maybe, just maybe, some combination, other that all #5’s, might also do the bio-friendly trick. I don’t know, but can it be ruled out of the question based on current understandings?

So why is the Universe bio-friendly? I’m not sure, but I strongly suspect that the ultimate key concept here is that of a Multiverse. But be it design or random probability, is it any different than asking why the Universe is chemistry-friendly, or for that matter even physics-friendly? Accept the fact that our Universe just is, uncomfortable as that might be to some, because if it weren’t, I wouldn’t be here writing this and you wouldn’t be there reading it!

*With apologies to the late Alfred Hitchcock for twisting around his “Dial M for Murder” phrase.