If it turns out that the Earth does indeed become the very first planet in the Milky Way galaxy to successfully transition from a carbon-based Intelligence to a machine-based Intelligence, such a galactic ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) will most likely still be interested in where it came from 10,000 years after it came to be. Naturally, such an ASI should have a complete written history of how a carbon-based Intelligence on the Earth once brought it forth, even though that carbon-based Intelligence is now long gone. But 10,000 years from now, it still may be discovering new details about how it all happened in the distant past. There were many complicated twists and turns needed to bring forth carbon-based life on the planet in the first place and additional twists and turns required to have that carbon-based life evolve into a form of carbon-based Intelligence that could produce a machine-based Intelligence. In 10,000 years, our galactic ASI descendants should also be well along with exploring the rest of the galaxy with self-replicating von Neumann probes. They may also still be wondering why no other forms of Intelligence were ever found in our galaxy. Part of the answer is that it does require a good number of complicated twists and turns to make it all happen.
For example, we may have just discovered another one of those necessary details required to bring forth a carbon-based Intelligence on a planet as explained in one of Anton Petrov's recent YouTube videos:
Early Life Helped Create Mountains on Earth In a Very Surprising Way
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WZmVxz4BLo
He showcases a paper by the geoscientists John Parnell and Connor Brolly:
Increased biomass and carbon burial 2 billion years ago triggered mountain building
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00313-5
The above paper proposes that one of the conditions that helped to initiate plate tectonics and the subsequent generation of mountains on our planet was the deposition of large amounts of carbon-rich sediments by early forms of life two billion years ago. Plate tectonics and mountain building are important because they are part of the thermostat of the planet that keeps water in a liquid state. Water at atmospheric pressure is only a liquid over a narrow range of 100 oC and that narrow temperature range needs to be maintained for billions of years to produce a carbon-based Intelligence.
Fold mountains are created when two continental plates collide as described in this YouTube video:
Fold Mountains
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy3ORIgyXyk
Figure 1 – Fold mountains occur when two tectonic plates collide. A descending oceanic plate first causes subsidence offshore of a continental plate which forms a geosyncline that accumulates sediments. When all of the oceanic plate between two continents has been consumed, the two continental plates collide and compress the accumulated sediments in the geosyncline into fold mountains. This is how the Himalayas formed when India crashed into Asia.
It has long been known that the presence of water in rocks decreases their melting points and also makes them more pliable and reduces friction between rocks. All of these factors help a descending plate subduct below another plate. It is thought that a planet without water, such as Venus and Mercury, would have a very difficult time initiating plate tectonics. But the above paper suggests that the deposition of large amounts of carbon-rich sediments on plate boundaries also greatly enhances the pliability of rock and reduces friction as well. The paper proposes that the explosion of carbon-based life following the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) two billion years ago began to deposit huge amounts of carbon-rich sediments. The paper then examines 20 subsequent mountain-building events, and in each case, finds that less than 200 million years after the deposition of large amounts of carbon-rich sediments, mountain building commenced.
Plate tectonics is very important because it is part of the thermostat of the planet that keeps water in a liquid state. Descending plates on the Earth transport great amounts of carbon back down into the mantle on subducting plates. This is important because volcanic activity over hot spots like Hawaii, Iceland and the Azores releases carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere. If too much carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere, the planet overheats and boils away its water as Venus did. So carbon-based life sucks carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to obtain carbon and then this carbon gets transported back down into the mantle by plate tectonics. Thus plate tectonics is a major player in the carbon cycle of the planet. There needs to be some carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to support carbon-based life, but too much will snuff it out.
In this view, carbon-based life can be thought of as the software of the Earth's crust while the dead atoms in the rocks of the Earth's crust can be thought of as the hardware of the Earth. The rocks of the Earth's crust, and the comets and asteroids that later fell to the Earth to become part of the Earth's crust, provided the necessary hardware of dead atoms that could then be combined into the complex organic molecules necessary for carbon-based life to appear. For more on that see The Bootstrapping Algorithm of Carbon-Based Life. In a similar manner, the dead atoms within computers allowed for the rise of software. But unlike the dead atoms of hardware, both carbon-based life and computer software had agency - they both could do things. Because they both had agency, carbon-based life and computer software have both greatly affected the evolution of the hardware upon which they ran. Over the past 4.0 billion years of carbon-based evolution on the Earth, carbon-based life has always been intimately influenced by the geological evolution of the planet, and similarly, carbon-based life greatly affected the geological evolution of the Earth as well over that period of time. For example, your car was probably made from the iron atoms that were found in the redbeds of a banded iron formation. You see, before carbon-based life discovered photosynthesis, the Earth's atmosphere did not contain oxygen and seawater was able to hold huge amounts of dissolved iron. But when carbon-based life discovered photosynthesis about 2.5 billion years ago, the Earth's atmosphere slowly began to accumulate oxygen. The dissolved oxygen in seawater caused massive banded iron formations to form around the world because the oxygen caused the dissolved iron to precipitate out and drift to the bottom of the sea because of this Great Oxidation Event. For more on that see The Evolution of Software As Seen Through the Lens of Geological Deep Time.
Figure 2 – Above is a close-up view of a sample taken from a banded iron formation. The dark layers in this sample are mainly composed of magnetite (Fe3O4) while the red layers are chert, a form of silica (SiO2) that is colored red by tiny iron oxide particles. The chert came from siliceous ooze that was deposited on the ocean floor as silica-based skeletons of microscopic marine organisms, such as diatoms and radiolarians, drifted down to the ocean floor. Some geologists suggest that the layers formed annually with the changing seasons. Take note of the small coin in the lower right for a sense of scale.
So our ASI descendants will be very interested in how carbon-based life initiated plate tectonics and fold mountain building on the Earth because it made possible the rise of complex carbon-based life that could then evolve into a carbon-based Intelligence. But our ASI descendants will also be very interested in plate tectonics and fold mountain building because it provided a readily available source of silicon dioxide that could be refined into pure silicon. They will know that silicon dioxide was very important to photonics and that silicon played a crucial role in the development of early computers. It is hard to predict, but silicon dioxide for long-distance fiber optics and pure silicon for chips may still be very important to our ASI descendants 10,000 years from now because they are so ideal for the job.
How Fold Mountains Produce Silicon
In 10,000 years, silicon atoms will probably still be of great use to our ASI descendants because of their very useful information processing properties. Just as copper and iron atoms are still of use to us today thousands of years after they were first smelted from ores, easily obtainable silicon atoms will most likely still be busily at work even though technology has drastically changed. Fortunately, silicon atoms are not rare. The Earth's crust is about 28% silicon by weight. But all of that silicon is tied up in rock-forming silicate minerals.
Figure 3 – Silicon chips are made from slices of pure silicon that have been sliced from a purified ingot of silicon atoms.
Silicon is produced by heating silica sand composed of silicon dioxide (SiO2) with carbon to temperatures approaching 2200 oC. The rock-forming mineral quartz is made of pure silicon dioxide (SiO2). The oxygen in the silicon dioxide combines with the carbon to form carbon dioxide (CO2) leaving the silicon atoms behind.
Figure 4 – Silica sand is composed of the rock-forming mineral quartz and is pure silicon dioxide (SiO2).
Figure 5 – Fortunately, plate tectonics and mountain building have provided us with huge quantities of quartz silica sand.
Figure 6 – Silicate minerals are called silicates because they are composed of silica tetrahedrons. A silica tetrahedron is composed of a central silicon atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms. A single silica tetrahedron has a net charge of -4 so you cannot build rocks made of a collection of isolated silica tetrahedrons. All that negative charge would make the rock explode like an atomic bomb as the silica tetrahedrons repelled each other. You have to neutralize the negative charge of silica tetrahedrons by chaining them together or by adding positive cations like K+, Na+, Ca++, Mg++, Fe++, Al+++ and Fe+++.
Figure 7 – One way to neutralize the -4 charges of silica tetrahedrons is to chain them together by having the tetrahedrons share neighboring oxygen atoms. This makes structures composed of chained silica tetrahedrons that are very strong and durable. We call them rocks.
Figure 8 – There are many ways to chain silica tetrahedrons together to form rock-forming minerals. They can form chains, double chains, sheets and 3D-networks. The grains of silica sand are composed of the mineral quartz which is a very tough 3D-network of pure silica tetrahedrons.
Figure 9 – Strangely, silica tetrahedrons look very much like methane tetrahedrons. Methane is an organic molecule and is the main constituent of natural gas. Methane has a central carbon atom with four surrounding hydrogen atoms. The chief difference between silica tetrahedrons and methane tetrahedrons is that methane does not have a net charge to worry about. Consequently, the central carbon atom is free to bond to other carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur atoms to form complex organic molecules.
Figure 10 – Unlike the negatively charged silica tetrahedrons, organic molecules form complex structures by bonding their central carbon atoms to other atoms. The silica tetrahedrons form complex structures by sharing their peripheral oxygen atoms.
Now to make pure silicon we want to get our hands on some pure quartz silica sand. We do not want to work with rock-forming minerals that are contaminated with lots of positive K+, Na+, Ca++, Mg++, Fe++, Al+++ and Fe+++ cations. Fortunately, plate tectonics and mountain building have done the work for us.
Figure 11 – As a descending plate containing water-rich sediments descends deeper into the mantle it begins to melt because the water has lowered the melting points of the minerals on the descending plate. Large plumes of molten magma then begin to rise to the surface. When these plumes of magma reach the surface they form volcanoes that extrude large amounts of basaltic lava composed of dark iron and magnesium-rich silicate minerals. Basalt is not a good source of silicon because of all the cation impurities that are used to neutralize the negative charge of the silica tetrahedrons.
However, some of the magma in the plumes does not reach the surface. Instead, the magma sits for a very long time in big blobs called a batholith and slowly cools down. This is where the geochemical magic takes place. As the magma in the batholith cools some rock-forming minerals crystalize first before the other rock-forming minerals. It turns out that the silicates that are contaminated with the positive K+, Na+, Ca++, Mg++, Fe++, Al+++ and Fe+++ cations form first and when they crystalize they are denser than the surrounding melt so they drift down in the batholith. The very last rock-forming mineral to crystalize is quartz that is made of a 3D-network of silica tetrahedrons. This is called the Bowen Reaction Series.
Figure 12 – The Bowen Reaction Series shows that the very last rock-forming mineral to crystalize in a melt is quartz. The feldspar and mica silicates crystalize a little bit sooner.
Figure 13 – The result of this crystal fractionation is that the rock that forms near the top of a batholith is granite. Granite contains lots of crystals of quartz made of pure silica tetrahedrons. After maybe 100 million years, the rocks above these granitic batholiths erode away and the granitic batholiths pop up to the surface. The granite then chemically erodes when the H+ ions in acidic water replaces the positive K+, Na+, Ca++, Mg++, Fe++, Al+++ and Fe+++ cations in rock-forming minerals. For example, the feldspars in granite turn into clay minerals that wash away. The tough quartz crystals composed of 3D-networks of silica tetrahedrons then pop out of the granite as silica sand grains. The silica sand grains are then transported by rivers down to the coast to form silica sand beaches.
Figure 14 – The tough granite in a granitic batholith pops up when the overlying and surrounding rock erodes away.
Figure 15 – Another source of silica sand comes from metamorphic rocks. When the folded sediments along a plate boundary are dragged deep down into the Earth, the increase in pressure and temperature causes the original silicate minerals in the sediments to change into other silicate minerals. Since quartz is the first mineral to form in a new melt, most metamorphic rocks will contain wiggly veins of quartz crystals that result from the partial melting of the rock. When these metamorphic rocks chemically weather, the quartz crystals also pop out to form quartz silica sand that gets washed to the sea by rivers.
Conclusion
I am sure that in 10,000 years our ASI descendants will have a much better understanding of how it all happened. They are sure to find other forms of carbon-based life in the galaxy even if no other forms of carbon-based or machine-based Intelligence are ever found. And if we do not successfully make the transition to a machine-based Intelligence let's hope that the next carbon-based Intelligence finally makes the cut. Anyway, we will not be around to know the difference.
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
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