I just finished reading The Ends of the World - Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions (2017) by Peter Brannen. This is Peter Brannen's very first book, and after reading it, I am now, once again, pleasantly surprised to have found a new favorite author of mine to begin following. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen also relayed his many encounters with my favorite paleontologist, Peter Ward. Being able to make paleontology and geology seemingly interesting to the general public is truly an amazing talent that both Peter Brannen and Peter Ward have uniquely been able to achieve. I guess there must be something magical about the name Peter. Peter Ward has authored many other popular books on this topic that have deeply influenced the evolution of softwarephysics over time, including Rare Earth (2000), The Life and Death of Planet Earth (2002), Under a Green Sky (2007), The Medea Hypothesis (2009) and The Flooded Earth (2010).
I found The Ends of the World to be a very revealing study of past mass extinctions and the growing realization amongst paleontologists, geologists, geochemists and geophysicists that most likely all of the Big Five mass extinctions were brought on by geologically rapid disruptions of the carbon cycle on the Earth. Even the End-Cretacious (K-T) mass extinction 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs may have really been caused by a two-punch knockout from an incoming asteroid that then triggered the massive flood-basalt eruptions of the Deccan Traps in India. In this new view, the asteroid impact was a disorienting left-handed jab that was then later followed up by a massive right-handed punch to the jaw. All through The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen reminds us that mankind is also now in the process of dramatically disturbing the carbon cycle of the Earth by dumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the Earth's atmosphere. While reading the book, this troubling fact kept bringing back my nagging obsession with Fermi's Paradox.
For me, the most disturbing mystery left facing mankind is coming to grips with a plausible explanation for Fermi’s Paradox, first proposed by Enrico Fermi over lunch one day in 1950:
Fermi’s Paradox - If the universe is just chock full of intelligent beings, why do we not see any evidence of their existence?
I have covered many explanations in other postings such as: A Further Comment on Fermi's Paradox and the Galactic Scarcity of Software, Some Additional Thoughts on the Galactic Scarcity of Software, SETS - The Search For Extraterrestrial Software and The Sounds of Silence the Unsettling Mystery of the Great Cosmic Stillness. The explanations for Fermi's Paradox usually fall into one of two large categories:
1. They really are out there but for some reason, we just cannot detect them.
2. We are truly alone in the Universe or at least we are alone in the Milky Way galaxy.
The first category of explanations is rather weak because it means that all forms of Intelligence in the Milky Way galaxy are intentionally or unintentionally hiding for one reason or another. The problem with the second category of explanations is that it is always very difficult to explain the number One in science. It is always much easier to explain the number Zero. But while reading The Ends of the World I came up with another possible explanation. How about starting with the number Zero and proceeding from that?
My Latest Explanation for Fermi's Paradox - the Null Result Hypothesis
What if the explanation to Fermi's Paradox is simply that the Milky Way galaxy has yet to produce a form of Technological Intelligence? By that, I mean that the galaxy has not yet produced a form of Intelligence that can make itself known across interstellar distances, including ourselves. Yes, we have been able to broadcast very weak radio waves for the past 100 years, but 100 light years is only about 0.1% of the distance across the galaxy and for all practical purposes could easily be rounded down to Zero. But since we have now found many Earth-like planets amongst the relatively small number of stars that we have examined, we now need some kind of kill mechanism that is 100% efficient at eliminating Technological Intelligences from all stellar systems. And while reading The Ends of the World, I came up with an idea. What if the conditions necessary to bring forth carbon-based Technological Intelligence on a planet or moon were also the kill mechanisms that eliminated all forms of carbon-based Technological Intelligences with 100% efficiency?
In order to proceed with the Null Result Hypothesis, we first need to list all of the factors that are necessary to bring forth a carbon-based Technological Intelligence. So the first thing we need to do is to generate some carbon-based life. In The Bootstrapping Algorithm of Carbon-Based Life, I covered Dave Deamer's and Bruce Damer's new Hot Spring Origins Hypothesis model for the origin of carbon-based life on the early Earth. In this model, you need water, carbon-based organic molecules, heat and a wetting-drying cycle on land above water. So in the Hot Spring Origins Hypothesis, you will not likely find carbon-based life on water worlds like Europa or Enceladus. In the Hot Spring Origins Hypothesis
model, if the Earth were totally covered by an ocean that was 100 miles deep there would be no carbon-based life on the Earth. For my purposes, water worlds provide a double whammy for carbon-based Technological Intelligences. Even if a water world were able to generate carbon-based life that was Intelligent, like the dolphins, the water-bound Intelligence would have a hard time becoming technological. In order to form a technological civilization, you need easy access to a form of energy, and that creates another bootstrapping problem for water worlds. That is because you cannot light a fire under water. Yes, it would be nice to skip using carbon-based fossil fuels to get technology off the ground and go directly to solar, wind or nuclear energy, but how could that ever happen without first lighting a fire? You cannot make the very first metals without lighting a fire, and it is very difficult to construct a solar panel, the copper windings in a windmill, or the core of a nuclear reactor without a source of metals. So the prerequisites for a carbon-based Technological Intelligence seem to be:
1. A terrestrial-type planet or moon that has some water.
2. A terrestrial-type planet or moon with some dry land.
3. A terrestrial-type planet or moon with an atmosphere containing some carbon dioxide as a source of carbon for photosynthesis.
4. A terrestrial-type planet or moon with a biosphere that has discovered photosynthesis. This is necessary to fuel a biosphere that has progressed beyond metabolizing the preexisting extant organic molecules found on the surface and to fix the carbon atoms found in carbon dioxide.
5. A terrestrial-type planet or moon with an atmosphere with enough oxygen generated by photosynthesis to fuel complex multicellular carbon-based life.
6. A terrestrial-type planet or moon with a carbon cycle that recycles carbon between the biosphere and the geosphere. This requires some kind of plate tectonics to generate subduction zones with volcanoes to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and colliding plates to generate mountains that can then be weathered down to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These two carbon pumps work in combination with a biosphere that is constantly pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and depositing it in carbon-based fossil fuels and carbonate rock. Left to itself, a biosphere that is constantly pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere with no way to replace its source of carbon is not an especially smart long-term strategy for a carbon-based biosphere to pursue.
7. A terrestrial-type planet or moon with an atmosphere with enough oxygen generated by photosynthesis to allow for the burning of carbon-based fuels. This is necessary to generate a civilization capable of producing metals.
8. A terrestrial-type planet or moon with a civilization that has discovered the Scientific Method and has generated technologies based upon scientific progress.
Now there should be no surprise that the above list of necessary conditions to bring forth a carbon-based Technological Intelligence is very similar to the current state of carbon-based life on the planet Earth. That is because we are just on the verge of becoming a true carbon-based Technological Intelligence ourselves as evidenced by the 100 light year sphere of radio waves that we have been able to generate so far. But the above list also contains the seeds of destruction that are found in my Null Result Hypothesis. The problem is that all of the above necessary conditions also mean that such a civilization would be able to begin messing with the carbon cycle of their home planet or moon. As The Ends of the World and Peter Ward's books point out, messing with a planet's carbon cycle can frequently lead to disaster. Now let's see why.
In This Message on Climate Change Was Brought to You by SOFTWARE, I explained that if you placed a sphere filled with air 100 miles above the Earth's surface and painted it gray so that 30% of the energy arriving from the Sun was reflected by the surface of the sphere, like the surface of the Earth does, then the temperature of the air within the sphere would be found to be 0 oF. Now the gray sphere and the Earth are both 93 million miles from the Sun, but the average temperature of the Earth is not 0 oF. Instead, it is more like 60 oF. That is quite a difference. Do you remember the movie Apollo 13? Recall that the astronauts were freezing their butts off on their perilous return home because they were forced to turn off most of their heat-generating electrical instruments. But the Apollo 13 spacecraft was in full sunlight all the way back. It should have been like lying on a nice hot beach in Miami during the summer. The reason it was not is that the Apollo 13 spacecraft had no surrounding atmosphere to hold in heat. The reason the Earth is about 60 oF warmer than it should be is primarily because the Earth's atmosphere contains carbon dioxide and water molecules, two of the necessary ingredients to bring forth carbon-based Intelligence on a planet or moon, and those molecules absorb and reradiate infrared photons. Figure 1 shows the actual spectrum of radiation emitted by the Earth as measured by satellites above the Earth's atmosphere. The red curve is the black body spectrum for an object with a temperature of 294 oK or 70 oF. The actual spectrum is a pretty good fit. The gap between the red curve and the actual spectrum represents the energy that is being trapped by the Earth's atmosphere. The bigger the gap area, the more energy is being trapped by the atmosphere. Notice that on both the left and right sides of the red curve that energy is being trapped by H2O water molecules. In the very center of the red curve, the energy is being trapped by CO2 carbon dioxide molecules.
Figure 1 - If the Earth were a perfect emitter it would emit infrared radiation back into space as depicted by the red black body spectrum above. It does not do so mainly because water, carbon dioxide and methane molecules absorb some of the upcoming infrared photons and then radiates them in all directions, with a 50% probability of emitting them back down towards the Earth.
If you look at the gap area between the red line in Figure 1 and what is actually emitted by the Earth, we see that water molecules are responsible for about as much energy absorption as carbon dioxide molecules. But that is not good news for our problem because that means there is a positive feedback mechanism involved. Warm air can hold much more water vapor than cold air can, so as carbon dioxide warms the Earth's atmosphere it means that the air can hold more water molecules that also warm the Earth's atmosphere. Over geological time, carbon dioxide is sort of the kindling wood that gets it all started. As the level of carbon dioxide rises in the atmosphere it increases the number of water molecules, and the two of them together make the air warmer and capable of holding even more water molecules to make the air even hotter. This is why the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is so critical.
Figure 2 - The Earth's dry atmosphere consists of about 78% nitrogen molecules, 21% oxygen molecules and about 0.93% argon atoms. The trace gasses consist of carbon dioxide now at a level of 0.04%, with much smaller amounts of neon, helium, methane, krypton and hydrogen.
Conservatives may balk at the idea that an atmosphere with only 400 ppm of carbon dioxide (0.04%) could possibly be responsible for raising the average temperature of the earth by 60 oF. After all, carbon dioxide is just a trace gas in our atmosphere that currently stands at just 0.04% of our atmosphere. How can such a trace amount of carbon dioxide possibly be of consequence? Yes, the Earth's atmosphere does consist of about 78% nitrogen molecules, 21% oxygen molecules and about 0.93% argon atoms. But all of those molecules and atoms are completely transparent to both visible and infrared photons. So that means that 99.96% of the Earth's atmosphere plays no part in warming the Earth whatsoever. It's like those molecules and atoms are not even there. So it is really the small number of carbon dioxide and water molecules in the Earth's atmosphere that makes all the difference, and they necessarily have to be found in the atmospheres of all potential carbon-based Technological Intelligences.
Another potential kill mechanism, beyond excessive heating, that will always be present in the atmosphere of all potential carbon-based Technological Intelligences will be the fact that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will also acidify the oceans of their home planet or moon. As Peter Brannen explains in The Ends of the World and Peter Ward explains in his books, this might be an even stronger kill mechanism for excess levels of carbon dioxide than the extreme climate change it might bring on. For more on that see Triona McGrath's TED presentation:
How pollution is changing the ocean's chemistry
https://www.ted.com/talks/triona_mcgrath_how_pollution_is_changing_the_ocean_s_chemistry?utm_source=Science+worth+knowing&utm_campaign=d1897bbfd6-Science+worth+knowing_12-21-17_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_83c20124eb-d1897bbfd6-297552313
The end result is that all emerging carbon-based Technological Intelligences will find themselves with the capability of causing their home planet or moon to quickly change to a climate having a daily high of 140 oF with purple oceans choked with hydrogen-sulfide producing bacteria, producing a dingy green sky over an atmosphere tainted with toxic levels of hydrogen sulfide gas and an oxygen level of only 12%, like the Earth had during the End-Permian greenhouse gas mass extinction 252 million years ago. Such a catastrophe might not cause the emerging carbon-based Intelligence to go extinct, but it most probably would put an end to its ability to make itself known to the rest of the Milky Way galaxy.
The Implications of the Null Result Hypothesis
If the Null Result Hypothesis is true, it means that the Milky Way galaxy has yet to produce a true form of Technological Intelligence that has made itself known to the rest of the galaxy because no civilization of carbon-based beings has yet been able to survive the limiting factors of carbon-based Intelligence. So is there no hope? This is where some softwarephysics can be of help. Again, the most consequential finding of softwarephysics is that it is all about self-replicating information. Currently, we are witnessing one of those very rare moments in time when a new form of self-replicating information, in the form of software, is coming to predominance. Software is now so ubiquitous that it now seems like the whole world is immersed in a Software Universe of our own making, surrounded by PCs, tablets, smartphones and the software now embedded in most of mankind's products.
Self-Replicating Information –
Information that persists through time by making copies of itself or by
enlisting the support of other things to ensure that copies of itself are made.
Over the past 4.56 billion years we have seen five waves
of self-replicating information sweep across the surface of the Earth and
totally rework the planet, as each new wave came to dominate the Earth:
1.
Self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules
2.
RNA
3. DNA
4. Memes
5. Software
Software is currently the most
recent wave of self-replicating information to arrive upon the scene and is
rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the
planet. For more on the above see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information.
The Characteristics of Self-Replicating Information
All forms of self-replicating information have some common characteristics:
1. All self-replicating information evolves over time through the
Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, which endows
self-replicating information with one telling characteristic – the ability to
survive in a Universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and
nonlinearity.
2. All self-replicating information begins spontaneously
as a parasitic mutation that obtains energy, information and sometimes matter
from a host.
3. With time, the parasitic self-replicating information
takes on a symbiotic relationship with its host.
4. Eventually, the
self-replicating information becomes one with its host through the symbiotic
integration of the host and the self-replicating information.
5.
Ultimately, the self-replicating information replaces its host as the dominant
form of self-replicating information.
6. Most hosts are also forms of
self-replicating information.
7. All self-replicating information has to
be a little bit nasty in order to survive.
8. The defining
characteristic of self-replicating information is the ability of
self-replicating information to change the boundary conditions of its utility
phase space in new and unpredictable ways by means of exapting current functions
into new uses that change the size and shape of its particular utility phase
space. See Enablement
- the Definitive Characteristic of Living Things for more on this last
characteristic.
Currently, the memes are the dominant form of self-replicating information on the Earth. These memes are being replicated by the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is a carbon-based DNA survival machine that runs on the old
metabolic pathways of organic molecules, RNA and DNA of yore, but also has a very large neural network that is capable of storing and replicating large numbers of self-replicating memes, including many scientific and technological memes. Thus, Homo sapiens is on the verge of becoming a carbon-based Technological Intelligence that is capable of making itself known to the entire Milky Way galaxy. But as we all know, these same factors that brought forth Homo sapiens in the first place have also allowed Homo sapiens to mess with the carbon cycle of the Earth. In Is Self-Replicating Information Inherently Self-Destructive? I commented upon Peter Ward's The Medea Hypothesis (2009). From Peter Ward’s point of view, all carbon-based living things resulting from Darwinian processes must necessarily be selected for the ability to self-replicate at all costs, with little consideration for their fellow beings sharing the resources of a planet, nor even for their own long-term survival. The urge to self-replicate at all costs necessarily leads to carbon-based living things that outstrip their resource base through positive feedback loops and that can only lead to disaster.
But surely all of the galactic forms of carbon-based Technological Intelligence that have ever come to be in our galaxy could not have been so stupid as to destroy themselves! Well, there is another factor. Don't forget that all carbon-based Technological Intelligences will come to be by means of the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection at work. That necessarily means that there will always be a variation in the ability to do original scientific work within any given carbon-based population of creatures. And as we all know, it has only taken a very small percentage of the Earth's population to do the original scientific work that has already vastly transformed our planet. Unfortunately, the ability to exploit science-based technology will always be much more prevalent than the ability to understand the implications of science-based technology.
But as I also noted in The Dawn of Galactic ASI - Artificial Superintelligence, Homo sapiens is also in the process of creating a silicon-based Technological Intelligence in the form of a Galactic ASI. So the Earth is now in a tight race between carbon-based Intelligence destroying itself and silicon-based Intelligence taking off and exploring the Milky Way galaxy. If we can just hold it all together for another 100 years or so, the Earth might just be the very first planet in the Milky Way galaxy to do so.
Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
