An IT Perspective of the Cambrian Explosion

I just finished reading In the Blink of an Eye (2003) by Andrew Parker in which he presents his Light Switch theory for the Cambrian Explosion. The Cambrian Explosion is an enigma that has been plaguing both geologists and evolutionary biologists for more than 150 years, going all the way back to the days of Darwin himself. The Cambrian Explosion is usually characterized by the sudden rapid appearance of complex multicellular organisms in the fossil record. In the strata below the Cambrian, one does not find such fossils, and then in a flash of geological time, large numbers of fossils, of many varieties, are to be found in the Cambrian strata. In the classical description of the Cambrian Explosion, it is proposed that in the Precambrian there were only simple worm-like forms of multicellular life, and they did not leave behind good fossils because they had no hard parts, like shells or hard exoskeletons made of chitin. Then suddenly in the Cambrian, we see the rapid diversification of multicellular life into about 35 different phyla, or basic body plans, that left behind good fossils because they did contain hard parts that could easily fossilize. We have all upon occasion come across silverfish scurrying about in our homes. However, unlike spiders or cockroaches, when you dispatch them with a piece of tissue paper, all you are left with is a smear of protein, rather than a squashed piece of chitin, and that is why we do not find good fossils of life forms in the Precambrian. The exact onset of the Cambrian Explosion keeps bouncing around in geological time, as researchers continue to do their fieldwork, but it is now thought to have begun about 541 million years ago. But the really important point is that the Cambrian Explosion occurred during a very brief period of about 5 million years of geological time, some 500 – 600 million years ago. The two key points of this finding in the fossil record are that the Cambrian Explosion occurred in a very brief amount of geological time and that it occurred very recently – a mere 500 - 600 million years ago. Since life originated on Earth about 4,000 million years ago, the two big questions that the Cambrian Explosion presents are:

1. Why did it happen so quickly, once it got started?
2. Why did it take so long to finally happen?

Of the two questions, the second is the most perplexing, and is also the most profound, for if it took 3,500 million years for complex multicellular life to evolve on Earth, perhaps there was a good chance that it might not have ever even evolved at all, and that would certainly not bode well for us finding complex multicellular life elsewhere in the Universe, or for finding complex multicellular life that has further evolved to a level of intelligent consciousness that we could commune with, even if the Kepler space telescope should find a large number of Earth-like planets out there over the next few years.

Design Patterns – the Phyla of IT
Before proceeding further, we need to bring our IT readers up to speed on what exactly a phylum is in biology. A phylum is a basic body plan for earning a living in the biosphere and has some distinguishing characteristics. For example, Homo sapiens is in the phylum Chordata because we all have a spinal chord, while insects are in the phylum Arthropoda because they all have a jointed chitin exoskeleton. In IT a phylum is called a design pattern. Design patterns originated as an architectural concept developed by Christopher Alexander in the 1960s. In Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964), Alexander noted that all architectural forms are really just implementations of a small set of classic design patterns that have withstood the test of time in the real world of human affairs, and that have been blessed by the architectural community throughout history for both beauty and practicality. Basically, given the physical laws of the Universe and the morphology of the human body, there are really only a certain number of ways of doing things from an architectural point of view that work in practice, so by trial and error architects learned to follow a set of well established architectural patterns. In 1987, Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham began experimenting with the idea of applying the concept of design patterns to programming and presented their results at the object-oriented OOPSLA conference that year. So in IT, a design pattern describes a certain design motif or way of doing things, just like a phylum describes a basic body plan. A design pattern is a prototypical design architecture that developers can copy and adapt for their particular application to solve the general problem described by the design pattern. This is in recognition of the fact that at any given time there are only a limited number of IT problems that need to be solved at the application level, and it makes sense to apply a general design pattern rather than to reinvent the wheel each time. Developers can use a design pattern by simply adopting the common structure and organization of the design pattern for their particular application, just as living things adopt an overall body plan, or phylum, to solve the basic problems of existence. Just as the Cambrian Explosion was typified by the rapid onset of 35 phyla in the fossil record, the rise of design patterns in IT was closely associated with the rapid onset of object-oriented programming and the Internet Explosion in the early 1990s. In a similar manner, there are only so many ways to earn a living on Earth, and the biosphere seems to have come up with 35 basic body plans, or phyla, to accomplish that. It is interesting to note that no additional phyla ever evolved after the Cambrian Explosion, so it is rather baffling as to why all 35 phyla should have all appeared at the same time in a brief period of 5 million years at the base of the Cambrian.

The Light Switch Theory of the Cambrian Explosion
In In the Blink of an Eye, Andrew Parker proposes that the acquisition of vision by trilobites was the root cause of the Cambrian Explosion. Parker’s explanation for the Cambrian Explosion goes like this. During the last few hundred million years of the Precambrian, all 35 current phyla slowly appeared upon the Earth, but all had adopted very similar soft, worm-like, bodies, with no distinguishing characteristics, and these soft worm-like bodies did not leave behind very good fossils. Apparently, the worm-like body plan was the optimum body design for the day, and there were no compelling reasons for improvement, as will be explained later. Then over a very brief period of a million years or so, trilobites developed eyes that could produce good images of their surroundings. Suddenly, trilobites could now see all of these tiny bits of protein crawling around in worm-like bodies, providing the possibility for hearty meals. Andrew Parker explains that until the invention of an image-forming eye, the Precambrian predators of the Earth practiced passive predation, meaning that they just sat around waiting for prey to fall into their traps, like jellyfish loosely dangling their deadly tentacles, waiting for an unwitting passerby to be stung to death, and then consumed. Without vision, it was very difficult for predators to locate their prey and actively pursue them. But once the trilobites developed sophisticated eyes, a dramatic arms race developed. Suddenly, just remaining still when a predator approached no longer worked, because sunlight streams down upon everything and makes everything visible. Under extreme selective pressures, Precambrian prey began to develop defensive armor in the form of hard exoskeletons with nasty spikes and spines to ward off potential attacks by the pesky trilobites. Thus, the soft, worm-like, bodies of the Precambrian were no longer the optimal design. The trilobites also developed hard parts to make it easier to capture and devour prey, and to avoid becoming the prey of other trilobites too. Other phyla also developed eyes as well, as a defensive measure to avoid the marauding trilobites and to help find their own prey too.

Figure 1 – Fossil of a trilobite with eyes (click to enlarge)

So the basic idea behind the Light Switch theory for the Cambrian Explosion is that the Cambrian Explosion was not the sudden appearance of 35 phyla with fossil-forming hard parts, rather the Cambrian Explosion was the appearance of the first practical eye that allowed for active predation. The 35 phyla were already in place but were all hiding in similar soft, worm-like, bodies. Thus, it really was the arrival of active predation that changed everything. With active predation, the 35 already existing phyla were under extreme selective pressures to adopt expensive defensive measures in the form of hard parts, and these expensive hard parts were not needed during the billions of years of passive predation in the Precambrian, so there were no selective pressures to form them.

Parker’s Light Switch theory for the Cambrian Explosion goes a long way in explaining question number one outlined above:

1. Why did it happen so quickly, once it got started?

but it does not explain question number two very well:

2. Why did it take so long to finally happen?

Because question number two now really becomes:

2. Why did it take so long for a practical eye to evolve?

Why Did It Take So Long For the Eye to Evolve?
The trilobites did not have camera-like eyes such as ours, but compound insect-like eyes instead, made up of many individually lensed units with hard crystalline lenses composed of the transparent mineral calcite. However, our natural anthropocentric tendencies have always centered the evolutionary controversy over the origin of the eye upon the origin of the complex camera-like human eye. Even Darwin himself had problems with trying to explain how something as complicated as the human eye could have evolved through small incremental changes from some structure that could not see at all. After all, what good is 1% of an eye? As I have often stated in the past, this is not a difficult thing for IT professionals to grasp because we are constantly evolving software on a daily basis through small incremental changes to our applications. However, when we do look back over the years to what our small incremental changes have wrought, it is quite surprising to see just how far our applications have come from their much simpler ancestors and to realize that it would be very difficult for an outsider to even recognize their ancestral forms. However, with the aid of computers, many researchers in evolutionary biology have shown just how easily a camera-like eye can evolve. Visible photons have an energy of about 1 – 3 eV, which is about the energy of most chemical reactions. Consequently, visible photons are great for stimulating chemical reactions, like the reactions in chlorophyll that turn the energy of visible photons into the chemical energy of carbohydrates or stimulating the chemical reactions of other light-sensitive molecules that form the basis of sight. In a computer simulation, the eye can simply begin as a flat eyespot of photosensitive cells that look like a patch like this: |. In the next step, the eyespot forms a slight depression, like the beginnings of the letter C, which allows the simulation to have some sense of image directionality because the light from a distant source will hit different sections of the photosensitive cells on the back part of the C. As the depression deepens and the hole in the C gets smaller, the incipient eye begins to behave like a pin hole camera that forms a clearer, but dimmer, image on the back part of the C. Next a transparent covering covers over the hole in the pin hole camera to provide some protection for the sensitive cells at the back of the eye, and a transparent humor fills the eye to keep its shape: C). Eventually, the transparent covering thickens into a flexible lens under the protective covering that can be used to focus light, and to allow for a wider entry hole that provides a brighter image, essentially decreasing the f-stop of the eye like in a camera: C0).

So it is easy to see how a 1% eye could easily evolve into a modern complex eye through small incremental changes that always improve the visual acuity of the eye. Such computer simulations predict that a camera-like eye could easily evolve in as little as 500,000 years.

Figure 2 – Computer simulations of the evolution of a camera-like eye(click to enlarge)

Now the concept of the eye has independently evolved at least 40 different times in the past 600 million years, so there are many examples of “living fossils” showing the evolutionary path. In Figure 3 below, we see that all of the steps in the computer simulation of Figure 2 can be found today in various mollusks. Notice that the human-like eye on the far right is really that of an octopus, not a human, again demonstrating the power of natural selection to converge upon identical solutions by organisms with separate lines of descent.

Figure 3 – There are many living fossils that have left behind signposts along the trail to the modern camera-like eye. Notice that the human-like eye on the far right is really that of an octopus (click to enlarge).

So if the root cause of the Cambrian Explosion hinges upon the arrival of the eye upon the evolutionary scene, and as we have seen above, it is apparently very easy to evolve eyes, why did it take so long? In the very last chapter of In the Blink of an Eye, Andrew Parker tries to address this problem. Parker seems to come to the conclusion that there might have been a dramatic increase in sunlight at the Earth’s surface at the time of the Cambrian Explosion that made eyes physically realizable for the first time. I won’t go into all the details of the explanations offered for why sunlight could have dramatically increased a mere 600 million years ago because I don’t think that such a dramatic increase in sunlight was really possible. Granted, our Sun is a main sequence star that is gradually getting brighter at the rate of about 1% every 100 million years, so 600 million years ago, the Sun was probably about 6% dimmer than today, and 1,000 million years ago it was perhaps 10% dimmer than today, but that is still much brighter than a cloudy day today, so there surely were plenty of photons bouncing around in the very deep past to see with.

Our Sun is indeed getting brighter because, under the high temperatures and pressures in its core, it is turning hydrogen, actually protons, into helium nuclei consisting of two protons and two neutrons. Since helium nuclei have about the mass of four protons, but only the charge of two protons, they take up about as much room as two protons when bouncing around in the Sun’s core. However, because helium nuclei have four times the density of a single proton, the Sun’s core is constantly getting denser with time as protons are constantly being turned into helium nuclei. A core that is constantly getting denser means that gravity is also constantly getting stronger within the Sun’s core, and consequently, the pressure within the Sun’s core that resists the increasing pull of gravity must also rise to stave off the collapse of the core. The pressure within the Sun’s core can only increase by increasing its temperature, but that is easily achieved because a hotter, denser, core also fuses protons into helium nuclei faster than a cooler, less dense, core. The protons in a hotter, denser, core are bouncing around faster and are in closer quarters too, so they are more likely to come close enough together for the attractive strong nuclear force to overcome the repulsive electromagnetic force between them, that tends to keep them apart, and allow the protons to come close enough together for the weak nuclear force to turn protons into neutrons, forming helium nuclei. Thus a hotter, denser, core produces more energy than a cooler, less dense, core, and the generated energy has to go someplace. The only place for it to go is away from the Sun, and the Earth just happens to lie in its path. Now a 1% increase per 100 million years might not sound like much, but even a 1% change to the Sun’s current brightness would dramatically change the Earth’s climate. In fact, the only reason that the Earth has not already burned up is that, over the past 600 million years, vast amounts of carbon dioxide have been slowly removed from the Earth’s atmosphere by the biosphere, and have been deposited upon the ocean floor as carbonate deposits that were later subducted into the Earth’s asthenosphere at the Earth’s many subduction zones. So it is the plate tectonics of the Earth that has kept the Earth at a reasonable temperature over the past 600 million years. Now we can see that there really must have been nearly as many photons bouncing around on the Earth’s surface in the deep past as there are today, or the Earth would have been completely frozen over for the whole Precambrian. Now the Earth actually did completely freeze over during a couple of intermittent Snowball Earth episodes during the Precambrian that lasted about 100 million years each, with the last one occurring about 600 – 700 million years ago, but by and large, the Earth was mainly ice-free during the Precambrian, thanks to the very high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane at the time.

So if there really were lots of photons bouncing around for billions of years during the Precambrian, why were there no eyes to see them with? Let us now turn to the evolutionary history of software for some possible clues.

Using the Evolutionary History of Software as a Model for the Cambrian Explosion
It is possible to glean some insights into why it took so long for the eye to evolve by examining the evolutionary history of software on Earth over the past 2.2 billion seconds, ever since Konrad Zuse cranked up his Z3 computer in May of 1941. Since living things and software are both forms of self-replicating information that have evolved through the Darwinian mechanisms of innovation and natural selection (see Self-Replicating Information for details), and both have converged upon very similar paths through Daniel Dennett’s Design Space, as each had to deal with the second law of thermodynamics in a nonlinear Universe, perhaps we could look to some of the dramatic events in the past evolution of software, when software seemed to have taken similar dramatic leaps, in order to help us understand the Cambrian Explosion. Now although many experts in computer science might vehemently disagree with me as to what caused these dramatic leaps in the evolution of software and exactly when they might have happened, at least we were around to witness them actually happening in real time! And because software is evolving about 100 million times faster than life on Earth, we also have the advantage of reviewing a highly compressed evolutionary history, which has also left behind a very good documented fossil record. Before proceeding, it might be a good idea to review the SoftwarePaleontology section of SoftwareBiology to get a thumbnail sketch of the evolutionary history of software over the past 2.2 billion seconds. When reviewing the evolutionary history of software, it is a good idea to keep in mind that 1 software second ~ 1 year of geological time, and that a billion seconds is about 32 years.

Softwarepaleontology does indeed reveal many dramatic changes to software architecture in deep time that seemed to have occurred overnight, but in most cases, closer examination reveals that the incipient ideas arose much earlier, and then slowly smoldered for many hundreds of millions of seconds before becoming ubiquitous. Here are just a few examples:

1. Mainframe software - The Z3 became operational in May of 1941 and was the world’s first full-fledged computer, but it was not until the introduction of the IBM OS/360 in 1965, that computers took the corporate world by storm. So it took about 24 years, or 757 million seconds, for mainframe software to really catch on.

2. Structured programming - Up until 1972, software was written in an unstructured manner, like the simple unstructured prokaryotic bacteria that dominated the early Earth for the first few billion years after its formation. So it took about 31 years, or 978 million seconds, for structured programming techniques to catch on.

3. PC software The Apple IIe came out in 1977, and the IBM PC followed in 1981, both with command-based operating systems, like Microsoft MS-DOS. But these command-based operating systems required end-users to learn and use many complex commands to operate their PCs, like the complex commands that PC programmers used on the command-based Unix operating systems that they learned to program on. The MS-DOS applications also did not have a common user interface, so end-users also had to learn how to use each MS-DOS application on its own. To address these problems, the Macintosh came out in 1984, with the first operating system with a graphical user interface, known as a GUI, which allowed end-users to drag-and-drop their way around a computer, and the Macintosh applications also shared a common user interface, or look and feel, that made it easier to learn the use of new applications. However, the Macintosh GUI only ran on expensive Macintosh machines, so MS- DOS still reigned supreme on the cheaper IBM PC clones. Microsoft came out with a very primitive GUI operating environment, called Windows 1.0, in 1985 that ran on top of MS-DOS, but it was very rudimentary and not very popular. IBM came out with their OS/2 1.1 GUI in 1988, but it required much more memory to run than MS-DOS, so again, price was a limiting factor. Finally, Microsoft came out with Windows 3.0 in 1990. Windows 3.0 was really only a GUI operating environment that ran on top of MS-DOS, but it could run on cheap low-memory IBM PC clones, and it looked just as good as the expensive Macintosh or OS/2 machines, so it was a huge success. Thus, it took about 13 years, or 410 million seconds, for PC software to finally catch on.

4. Object-oriented programming - Object-oriented programs are the implementation in software of multicellular organization. The first multicellular organisms first appeared on the Earth about 900 million years ago. Simula, the first object-oriented programming language, was developed by Dahl and Nygaard over a three year period from 1962 – 1965, and in the period 1983 - 1985 Stroustrup developed C++, which did introduce the corporate IT world to object-oriented programming. But object-oriented programming really did not take off until 1995, with the introduction of the Java programming language. So it took about 30 years, or 947 million seconds, for object-oriented programming to really catch on.

5. Internet Explosion The Internet was first conceived by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA in 1968. The first four nodes on the ARPANET were installed at UCLA, Stanford, the University of Utah, and the University of California in Santa Barbara in 1969. However, it was not until 1995 that the Internet changed from being mainly a scientific and governmental research network into becoming the ubiquitous commercial and consumer network that it is today. So again, it took about 26 years, or 821 million seconds, for Internet software to finally catch on.

6. SOA – Service Oriented Architecture - With SOA, client objects can call upon the services of component objects that perform a well-defined set of functions, like looking up a customer’s account information. Thus, SOA architecture is much like the architecture of modern multicellular organisms, with general body cells making service calls upon the cells of the body’s organs or even the services of cells within the organs of other bodies. Thus, the SOA revolution is somewhat similar to the Cambrian Explosion. SOA first began with CORBA in 1991, but it really did not catch on until 2004, when IBM began to extensively market the concept. So again, it took about 13 years, or 410 million seconds, for SOA to catch on.

Was the Cambrian Explosion a Real Explosion?
So now we see that the evolution of software over the past 2.2 billion seconds has also proceeded along in fits and starts, with long periods of stasis interrupted by apparently abrupt technological advances. As I pointed out in When Toasters Fly, this is simply evidence of the punctuated equilibrium model of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge. For some reason, the spark of a new software architectural element spontaneously arises out of nothing, but its significance is not recognized at the time, and then it just languishes for many hundreds of millions of seconds, hiding in the daily background noise of IT. And then just as suddenly, after perhaps 400 – 900 million seconds, the idea finally catches fire and springs into life. Now, why does the evolution of living things and of software both behave in this strange way? My suggestion is to simply take a good look at the phrase “Cambrian Explosion” – what do you see? Well, it appears that some kind of explosion occurred during the Cambrian, and that is the key to the whole business – it really was an explosion! In Is Self-Replicating Information Inherently Self-Destructive?, I discussed how negative feedback loops are stabilizing mechanisms, while positive feedback loops are destabilizing mechanisms that can lead to uncontrolled explosive processes. I also explained how in 1867, Alfred Nobel was able to stabilize the highly unstable liquid known as nitroglycerin, by adding some diatomaceous earth and sodium carbonate to it, to form the stable solid explosive we now call dynamite. The problem with nitroglycerin was that the slightest shock could easily cause it to detonate, but dynamite requires the substantial activation energy of a blasting cap to set it off. In Figure 4 below we see the potential energy function of dynamite, depicted as a marble resting in the depression of a small negative feedback loop, superimposed upon a much larger explosive positive feedback loop. So long as the dynamite is only subjected to mild perturbations or shocks, it will remain calmly in a stable equilibrium. However, if the marble is given a sufficient shock to get it over the hump in its potential energy function, like a stick of dynamite subjected to the detonation of a blasting cap, the marble will rapidly convert all of its potential energy into mechanical energy, as it quickly rolls down its potential energy hill, like the molecules in nitroglycerin releasing their chemical potential energy into the heat and pressure energy of a terrific blast. This is the essence of the punctuated equilibrium model. For most times, predators and prey are in a stable equilibrium, but then something happens to disturb this stable equilibrium to the point where it reaches a tipping point, and crosses over from the stability of negative feedback loops to the explosive instability of positive feedback loops. Predators and prey then enter into an unstable arms race driven by positive feedback loops, and that is when evolution kicks into high gear and gets something done for a change, like creating a new species or technology.

Figure 4 – Like dynamite, new technologies like the eye are trapped in a stable equilibrium by negative feedback loops, until sufficient activation energy comes along to nudge them into a positive feedback loop regime, where they can explode and become ubiquitous (click to enlarge)

So my suggestion is that the Cambrian Explosion was indeed a real explosion, in the form of an uncontrolled arms race between advancing eyeballs and defensive hard parts. I think that Andrew Parker may have, at long last, really gotten the root cause for the Cambrian Explosion right. The root cause of this arms race was a new form of predation; active predation aided by a new visual sense made possible by eyes, and this new form of predation was the blasting cap that set it all off. But what set off the blasting cap? My suggestion would be – nothing in particular. When you insert a blasting cap into a stick of dynamite, the blasting cap has a pair of copper wire leads running away from the blasting cap that are connected together at their far end with a grounding clip, so that stray electrical voltages do not accidentally set off the blasting cap. To detonate the blasting cap, you remove the grounding clip and then connect the lead wires to a battery-operated detonator. As a young geophysicist, exploring for oil on a seismic crew in the swamps of Louisiana, I vividly recall a fistfight that broke out one day between two crew members. Our explosives technician, known as the Loader, was working on a long string of explosive Nitramon cartridges to be later lowered down into a shot hole to generate seismic waves in the Earth. We were behind schedule, so at the same time, the crew foreman, known as the Observer, was busily using a pocket knife to scrape away the plastic insulation from the lead wires running from the recording field truck to the blasting cap leads. The trouble was that the blasting cap had already been inserted into the first Nitramon cartridge in the string of cartridges, and the grounding clip had also been removed. So when the Loader saw what the Observer was doing back at the recording truck, he ran back to the field truck and tore into him with a vengeance screaming, “Don’t you go messin’ with my life!”. Our Loader was rightly concerned that the contact of the steel pocket knife blade with the copper lead wires could have triggered a voltage spike that could have detonated the blasting cap and the Nitramon string that he was holding!

So here is my take on the root cause of the Cambrian Explosion. What seems to happen with most new technologies, like eyeballs or new forms of software architecture, is that the very early precursors do not provide that much bang for the buck. If you look at the slightly depressed eyespot of step 2 in Figure 2 above, you can imagine that it probably did not provide very much of a selective advantage in the Precambrian, with all those blind and passive predators stumbling around in the dark, and it probably was not that great at locating prey either. So innovative new technologies, like eyeballs or the Internet, seem to languish for hundreds of millions of years (or seconds), waiting for a blasting cap to go off to really get things started because, initially, these new technologies are just not that great at doing what they ultimately can do. However, once these new technologies do catch fire, they then seem to rapidly explode out into dominance, like the white-hot ball of gas at 5,000 ⁰K from the blast of nitroglycerine in a stick of dynamite. I like to think of this supplement to the Light Switch theory of the Cambrian Explosion as the Dynamite Model of the Cambrian Explosion. Just think of a stick of dynamite with an ungrounded blasting cap, patiently waiting for a stray voltage to come along and set it off. I think the Dynamite Model can help to explain the long gap between the onset of multicellular organisms about 900 million years ago, and the Cambrian Explosion that followed about 400 million years later.

So perhaps the Cambrian Explosion really got started by some soft-bodied trilobites that became stranded in a region with very few prey, and that whatever those trilobites were using to find prey at the time, was no longer sufficient to keep them alive for very long. Now along comes a single trilobite with a mutation that provided for a slightly better-than-usual visual field from its very primitive precursor of a compound eye, and that single, lone, hungry trilobite managed to spot a small wiggling worm on the seafloor within striking range. As with the evolutionary history of software, such a minor event would quickly get lost in the daily noise of everyday life, and that is why it is so difficult to put your finger on the exact cause of a technological explosion like the Cambrian Explosion, but I bet that something like that is all that it took.

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

Is Self-Replicating Information Inherently Self-Destructive?

I just finished reading The Medea Hypothesis (2009) by my most favorite paleontologist, Peter Ward. I have read all of Ward’s books because they provide a deep insight into the evolutionary history of life on Earth over the past 4.0 billion years, and since living things and software are both forms of self-replicating information, his books can also provide some insights into the evolutionary history of software over the past 2.2 billion seconds, ever since Konrad Zuse cranked up his Z3 computer in May of 1941. Indeed, because living things and software are both forms of self-replicating information that have evolved through the Darwinian mechanisms of innovation and natural selection, and both have converged upon similar paths through Daniel Dennett’s Design Space, as each had to deal with the second law of thermodynamics in a nonlinear Universe, there is much to be learned about the origin and evolution of life in the Universe by examining the origin and evolution of software on Earth (see Self-Replicating Information and SoftwareBiology for details). And this is a two-way street – much can also be learned about the nature of software evolution by examining the evolution of life on Earth.

In The Medea Hypothesis, Peter Ward proposes the antithesis of the Gaia hypothesis. Gaia was the primordial Earth-goddess of the ancient Greeks, essentially the embodiment of a benevolent Mother Nature, and in the 1970s, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed that as a whole, the entire biosphere behaved in a coordinated manner that was beneficial to the ongoing existence of life itself. The Gaia hypothesis proposes that the biosphere as a whole manages to self-regulate the geophysical and geochemical processes of the Earth, by using negative feedback loops, in order to maintain the habitability of the Earth over billions of years. An example of a negative feedback loop is your home furnace and thermostat. When your house cools down below the lower set point of the thermostat, the thermostat sends a signal to your furnace to turn it on. As your house warms up, it eventually exceeds the upper set point of the thermostat, and then the thermostat sends a signal to your furnace to shut it down. In this way, your thermostat performs an automated regulation of the temperature within your house that keeps your house within a comfortable range of about 1⁰F. Notice that your thermostat manages to accomplish this seemingly sophisticated control process with no built-in intelligence or software whatsoever. Negative feedback loops automatically keep systems in a stable equilibrium by simply pulling them back into a narrow range of operational conditions. That is the beauty of using negative feedback loops to control complex systems – they lead to inherently stable and self-regulated systems, without the need of an overly complex control mechanism. Here is another example of a negative feedback loop in action. Extend both of your index fingers out in front and carefully place each end of a ruler on top of your two outstretched fingers. Now slowly bring your fingers together, letting the ruler slide freely on top of each finger, as you bring your fingers closer together. As you do so, you will find that the ruler always remains balanced upon your fingers, and you will end up with both fingers together precisely at the midpoint of the ruler. Try as you may, you will not be able to obtain any other result. You will always end up with the ruler carefully balanced at its midpoint on your two fingers when your two fingers have finally met in the center.

Positive feedback loops do just the opposite. Positive feedback loops cause systems to explode out of control, by using the amplified output of the feedback loop as the input to the feedback loop and thus causing the output to quickly expand out of control. Explosives, like nitroglycerine, are therefore prime examples of positive feedback loops in action. When nitroglycerine detonates, the liquid nitroglycerine rapidly decomposes via the chemical reaction:

4 C₃H₅(NO₃)₃ → 12 CO₂ + 10 H₂O + 6 N₂ + O₂

Notice that the liquid nitroglycerine turns completely into gases at the temperature at which nitroglycerine detonates. This alone generates gases that would occupy more than 1,200 times the original volume of the liquid at normal room temperature and pressure. However, because the above chemical reaction is also very exothermic, meaning that it gives off large amounts of heat energy, the generated gases are raised to a temperature close to that of the surface of the Sun, about 5,000 ⁰K, which causes the generated gases to further greatly expand, creating a tremendous blast. When nitroglycerine detonates, chemical potential energy is quickly released because the weak bonds of the atoms in the nitroglycerine molecules rearrange to form new molecules with stronger bonds, such as N₂, H₂O, and CO₂, releasing large quantities of chemical potential energy in the process. Since higher temperatures make chemical reactions run even faster, when nitroglycerine detonates, the initial decomposition of a small number of molecules causes a pressure wave to form that detonates the nitroglycerine in the immediate surrounding area. The resulting self-sustained shock wave propagates through the nitroglycerine at 30 times the speed of sound, as a near-instantaneous pressure-induced chemical reaction that transforms the small volume of liquid nitroglycerine into a huge quantity of white-hot gas at a temperature of 5,000 ⁰K. This is what makes nitroglycerine such a powerful explosive.

Nitroglycerin was first synthesized by the chemist Ascanio Sobrero in 1847, but the main problem with nitroglycerine was that the slightest shock could cause it to easily detonate. In 1867, Alfred Nobel came up with an improvement to nitroglycerin that vastly improved its stability, and therefore its utility. By simply mixing three parts of nitroglycerin, with one part of diatomaceous earth, and a small amount of sodium carbonate, Nobel created a very stable solid explosive, that we now call dynamite. Dynamite rapidly became very popular because it could be rolled up into convenient paper-wrapped sticks that were very easily loaded into the drill holes used for blasting rock during mining operations, and dynamite was also very resistant to accidental detonation from small shocks. In fact, in order to detonate dynamite, one must use a blasting cap or a high-temperature fuse to set it off.

Figure 1 – Negative feedback loops regulate systems, while positive feedback loops cause systems to explode (click to enlarge)

The differences between positive and negative feedback loops can be further illustrated with the use of a few diagrams. In the left side of Figure 1, we see a system composed of a marble and a bowl in a state of stable equilibrium under the influence of a negative feedback loop. Jiggling the system with a small perturbation always results in the marble safely returning to the center of the bowl. The shape of the bowl can also be thought of as a plot of the potential energy function of the system. The combined system of the marble and the bowl has a minimum potential energy when the marble is safely in the center of the bowl, and the negative feedback loop has a tendency to keep the marble there. On the right side of Figure 1, on the other hand, we see a similar system composed of a marble on top of an overturned bowl that is an example of a positive feedback loop in an unstable equilibrium. Like nitroglycerine, the slightest addition of energy to the system, by perturbing the system with a little jiggle, will cause the marble to roll off the overturned bowl with increasing velocity, as it quickly turns all of its potential energy into kinetic energy, like the atoms in a container of nitroglycerine rapidly turning their chemical potential energy into the kinetic energy of molecular motion, also known as heat energy.

What Alfred Nobel did was to superimpose a small negative feedback loop on top of the very large positive feedback loop of nitroglycerine, by mixing nitroglycerine with a small amount of stabilizing diatomaceous earth and sodium carbonate. In Figure 2, we see the resulting plot of the potential energy function for dynamite, consisting of the large positive feedback loop of nitroglycerine, with a small dimple of a negative feedback loop on top. Now in order for the marble to release its vast amount of potential energy, it needs a quantity of activation energy to get the marble over the hump at the top of the curve. This is why dynamite requires the detonation of a blasting cap or the heat from a high-temperature fuse in order to detonate.

Figure 2 – In 1867, Alfred Nobel discovered that by adding some diatomaceous earth to nitroglycerin, he could superimpose a small negative feedback loop on top of the much larger positive feedback loop of nitroglycerin (click to enlarge)

In a similar manner, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that life on Earth has taken control of the Earth’s geophysical and geochemical processes, leaving those with negative feedback loops alone, and at the same time, domesticating the positive feedback processes that would, if left to their own devices, end life on Earth, by superimposing small negative feedback loops upon them. According to the Gaia hypothesis, the biosphere has simply added a little diatomaceous earth to nitroglycerin as needed, in order to maintain the Earth in a stable equilibrium suitable to the needs of the biosphere.

In The Medea Hypothesis, Peter Ward proposes just the opposite. Medea was also a character in ancient Greek mythology, the wife of Jason of the Golden Fleece fame. When Jason abandoned Medea, she killed their two children as revenge, so Peter Ward rightfully thought that Medea represented just the opposite of the benevolent Mother Nature characterized by Gaia. In The Medea Hypothesis, Peter Ward proposes that because all forms of life in the Universe arise from the Darwinian processes of inheritance and innovation honed by natural selection, that necessarily, all living things in the Universe are selected for the ability to modify their home planets with positive feedback loops that enhance the survivability of the individual, not negative feedback loops that enhance the survivability of all. From Ward’s point of view, all living things resulting from Darwinian processes must necessarily select for living things that can self-replicate at all costs, with little consideration for their fellow beings sharing the resources of the planet, nor even for their own long-term survival. The urge to self-replicate at all costs necessarily leads to living things that outstrip their resource base through positive feedback loops.

In The Medea Hypothesis, Peter Ward lists about a dozen examples from the deep past where the biosphere has precipitated Medean events that greatly reduced the diversity of life on Earth and greatly reduced its carrying capacity. The first such event was the take over of life by DNA. In Self-Replicating Information, I described Freeman Dyson’s two-stage theory for the origin of life on Earth. In Dyson’s theory, metabolic protocells arise first and are later parasitized, first by RNA, and then by DNA. So essentially a very diverse biosphere of metabolic protocells went through the most significant mass extinction in Earth’s history, to be totally replaced by a single form of DNA-based life. Peter Ward considers the total extinction of all other forms of life by DNA about 4.0 billion years ago to be the most significant event supporting the Medea hypothesis. The next major Medean event came about 2.8 billion years ago with the arrival of cyanobacteria on the scene. The cyanobacteria could photosynthesize sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into sugars, releasing the toxic gas oxygen as a byproduct. Oxygen is a highly reactive gas and was very toxic to the anaerobic bacteria of the day. For example, today anaerobic bacteria must hide from oxygen at the bottoms of stagnant seas and lakes. But initially these ancient anaerobic bacteria were spared from the Oxygen Catastrophe which took place 300 million years later (2.5 billion years ago) because first all the dissolved iron in the oceans had to be oxidized and deposited as red-banded iron formations before the oxygen level could rise in the Earth’s atmosphere. Chances are that your car was made from one of these iron deposits because they are the source of most of the world’s iron ore. So you can think of your car as a byproduct of early bacterial chemical warfare that nearly killed off all life on Earth. But by far, the most disastrous of the Medean positive feedback loops caused by living things on Earth is the wholesale removal of carbon from the Earth’s surface. Peter Ward explains that living things are constantly sucking carbon dioxide out of the Earth’s atmosphere and converting it to calcium carbonate shells that are later deposited upon the sea bottom. As these carbonate deposits are subducted at the Earth’s subduction zones into the asthenosphere, some of the carbon is released by volcanoes as carbon dioxide, but most is lost to the Earth’s upper mantle, never to return to the Earth’s surface. This is certainly a bad long-term thing for carbon-based life, and Ward shows that within the next 500 – 1,000 million years, the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere will decline below the level that complex multicellular plants can use for photosynthesis, and that will be the end of complex multicellular life on Earth. So the end of complex life on Earth will come from life itself and not from an increasingly brighter Sun, as described in most popular books. The game-changing paradigm shift of the Medea hypothesis, as opposed to the Gaia hypothesis, is that life on Earth as a whole is not necessarily acting in its own self-interest, so the solution to environmental problems may not simply be to remove mankind from the equation and let the biosphere return to its natural state. Instead, Ward suggests that some geoengineering is in order to extend the habitability of the Earth.

Peter Ward goes on to describe many other Medean events in the Earth’s history, where the biosphere has seemingly tried to do itself in with positive feedback loops gone wild. One only has to look to our current suicidal habit of spewing 24 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year into the Earth’s atmosphere, and the impending disastrous consequences from global climate change with rising sea levels, to see a Medean event in progress in real time. We have already raised the carbon dioxide level of the Earth’s atmosphere to 390 ppm, up from a level of about 280 ppm prior to the Industrial Revolution, and it is currently rising at the rate of 2.39 ppm per year. As we saw in How to Use Your IT Skills to Save the World, in the coming years, it will be rising at a rate of 3 or 4 ppm per year, as the demand for energy explodes with the increasing demand from the emerging economies of the world, and if it should ever reach a level of 1,000 ppm, we might even trigger another greenhouse gas mass extinction, like the Permian-Triassic mass extinction that nearly killed off all complex multicellular life 251 million years ago. Indeed, we seem to be running in a very close race. Our genes, memes, and software are seemingly on the verge of morphing into a new form of conscious intelligence within the next 100 years or so that will probably be much less dependent upon the current pristine conditions on Earth that are very supportive of intelligent carbon-based life forms such as Homo sapiens. Perhaps this transition will occur before events get out of hand, or perhaps not.

This brings up the fundamental issue of this posting – is all self-replicating information similarly doomed to self-destruction? In Self-Replicating Information I defined self-replicating information as:

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.

with all forms of self-replicating information having the following characteristics in common:

The Characteristics of Self-Replicating Information
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.

Since all forms of self-replicating information are Darwinian in nature, the Medea hypothesis would indicate by extension that all forms of self-replicating information are indeed self-destructive because of their tendency to create positive feedback loops that outstrip their resource base. Software certainly seems to be guilty of this – it constantly outstrips the hardware base upon which it runs. That is why you need to buy a new PC every four or five years and why IT departments have to constantly upgrade their mainframes and server farms with more powerful hardware. I got my first PC at work twenty-five years ago in 1986. It was an IBM PC/AT with a 6 MHz Intel 80-286 processor and a 20 MB hard disk, with a total of 460 KB of memory. It cost about $1600 at the time - about $5,000 in 2011 dollars. Today, a $500 Dell PC comes with a 2.66 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8 GB of memory, and a 320 GB hard disk. So a $500 Dell comes with 16,384 times as much disk, 16,384 times as much memory, and runs about 1,000 times faster than my $5,000 IBM PC/AT did in 1986, but that $500 Dell PC will probably buckle under the software load running upon it five years from now.

So perhaps the solution to Fermi’s Paradox is that all forms of self-replicating information self-destruct before they can embark upon exploring a galaxy. Fermi’s Paradox, first proposed by Enrico Fermi over lunch one day in 1950, asks the question:

Fermi’s Paradox - If the universe is just chock full of intelligent beings, why do we not see any evidence of their existence?

That is certainly a sobering thought. But let us now turn to a more mundane application of the Medea hypothesis to the “real world” of human affairs, with which most Homo sapiens are completely obsessed.

Is the World Economy Also Medean in Nature?
As I pointed out in SoftwareBiology, world capitalism is a Darwinian system of economics and also a form of self-replicating information in the form of a complicated financial meme-complex. In MoneyPhysics and MoneyPhysics Revisited, I also showed how positive feedback loops, spinning out of control, led to the collapse of the world financial systems in 1929 and 2008.

Since capitalism is a Darwinian system of economics, capitalism must also be subject to the Medea hypothesis and, therefore, have an innate self-destructive nature because of its tendency to foster uncontrolled positive feedback loops that tend to do itself in. So in that regard, Karl Marx may have been right about the self-destructive tendencies of capitalism. However, Marx’s solution of creating a utopian "dictatorship of the proletariat" proved disastrous in the 20th century, as demonstrated by the failure of both socialism and communism. After all, we are all just DNA survival machines, programmed to replicate and operate in our own self-interest, so attempts to establish utopian communist states in the 20th century, simply ended with the establishment of brutal oligarchies more reminiscent of feudalism than of a classless worker’s state. Therefore, capitalism and free markets are the most natural way to run an economy through the miracle of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” because they allow people to work in their own self-interest. The simple beauty of capitalism is that billions of people, all working in their own self-interest, will naturally create a complex and dynamic world economy, with no need for an external designer. But because of the Medea hypothesis, capitalism does have its limitations. Capitalism selects for behaviors that create positive feedback loops, resulting in financial booms and busts. Just as it is currently in everybody’s self-interest to pollute the Earth’s atmosphere with unchecked emissions of carbon dioxide, in recent years it was in the self-interest of all to pollute the worldwide financial system with toxic subprime mortgages. Everybody benefited, so long as American home values kept rising - low income homeowners, real estate brokers, real estate speculators, local banks, mortgage brokers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, investment banks, bond rating agencies, insurance companies like AIG, and private investors all benefited from the leverage and complex derivatives hiding the impending catastrophe of subprime mortgages, until the bubble burst. Having everybody working in their own self-interest does amazing things, but because of the Medea hypothesis, it also can lead to the ruin of all if left unchecked.

Actually, we figured this all out in the 20th century. Since socialism and communism do not work, and feudalism has a very low economic output, with many undesirable social peculiarities to boot, we are left with capitalism and whatever shortcomings it might have. Because the Darwinian characteristics of laissez-faire capitalism lead to excesses brought on by unchecked positive feedback loops, it is necessary for a government to step in by imposing regulations upon the economy that squelch the bubbles that lead to booms and subsequent busts. Essentially, the government needs to superimpose small negative feedback loops on top of the very large, inherently positive, feedback loops of capitalism, like adding a little diatomaceous earth to nitroglycerin. So legislation like the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 are necessary to bring stability to the world financial systems.

In today’s hostile political climate, one frequently hears politicians wax-poetic about returning to the apparent splendor of 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism, with its absence of income taxes, regulations, and a central banking system in the form of the current Federal Reserve system. However, this nostalgia for 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism ignores the Dickensian poverty and social injustice of the 19th century, with its rampant child labor, tainted foods, pollution, unsafe working conditions and frequent financial collapses. To get a flavor of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism at work, try this little experiment. Type in the string “panic of” into Google and let Google complete your query. You will find:

panic of 1819
panic of 1837
panic of 1857
panic of 1873
panic of 1893
panic of 1907
panic of 2008

Now read through the above list of hits on the Wikipedia and see how well unregulated laissez-faire capitalism works. For some reason, there is no “panic of 1929”, but you should read about that financial collapse as well.

Over the past 100 years we have modified the rules under which capitalism operates, in a manner to allow capitalism to work its miracles in a manner useful to mankind, by adopting child labor laws, pollution controls, financial regulations, regulations to ensure safe working conditions, and a graduated income tax to level out income disparities. We certainly do not want to return to the excesses of the 19th century, we already did that once before, and it was not very pleasant. And just as Peter Ward suggested that some geoengineering is in order to preserve the habitability of the Earth, we should allow governments to intervene in the natural boom and bust cycles of capitalism, by using the theories of Keynesian economics to stimulate spending and production, and the Monetarism of Milton Friedman to manipulate the money supply to smooth out the business cycles, because capitalism, like life on Earth, is a mindless form of self-replicating information that does not necessarily act in its own long-term self-interest.

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

Using the Evolution of Software as a Model for Astrobiologists

I just finished reading First Contact – Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth (2011) by Marc Kaufman, which takes a slightly different approach to exploring the fascinating world of astrobiology than do most other popular books on the subject, because it is written in a narrative form, and describes the author’s worldwide adventures in seeking out the fascinating stories behind the work of many of today’s researchers actively working on the forefronts of the relatively new science of astrobiology. The other unique thing about First Contact is that the author showcases the work of some investigators on the cutting edge, who think we may have already detected extraterrestrial life, especially on Mars or perhaps even in distant star systems. Kaufman also maintains that it is important for researchers in astrobiology to go beyond the narrow confines of the definition of life that was unofficially defined in a 1994 NASA workshop as “a self-sustaining chemical system with the capacity to evolve in a Darwinian manner”, and that will be the subject of this posting from a softwarephysical perspective. Like the researchers currently working on the origin of life on Earth, the astrobiologists are confronted with a similar problem, namely, that they only have one example of life on Earth with which to work, and this limitation has had a tendency to focus attention within the field upon searching for Earth-like carbon-based life forms only. Softwarephysics would suggest that, since both carbon-based life forms and software are both forms of self-replicating information, the astrobiologists should expand their horizons a bit and concentrate more on searching for self-replicating information within the Universe, rather than solely focusing upon carbon-based life forms. Certainly the origin and evolution of software on Earth over the past 70 years, ever since Konrad Zuse cranked up his Z3 computer in May of 1941, provides an excellent model for the origin and evolution of all forms of self-replicating information because all of the historical data is still largely at hand and most of it occurred within living memory (see Programming Clay, SoftwareBiology and A Proposal For All Practicing Paleontologists).

In my last posting, SETS - The Search For Extraterrestrial Software I proposed that the chance of us falling prey to the malicious designs of alien software were rather slim because I did not think that there was much alien software, nor alien intelligence, out there to begin with. However, like most astrobiologists, I also have a high level of confidence that carbon-based life forms are quite common in our Universe. The fact that our Universe is just chock full of organic molecules that, thanks to the lobular quantized angular momentum of the electrons in carbon atoms, come in a nearly infinite number of huge molecules, with very complex geometries that can encode information, and consequently, form a framework upon which the self-replicating information necessary for life exists, would lead one to conclude that simple carbon-based life forms should be quite ubiquitous throughout our Universe (see SoftwareChemistry and Self-Replicating Information for details). This is further bolstered by the very early appearance of life on Earth a few hundred million years after the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago. Life on Earth most likely originated several thousand feet below the Earth’s surface in porous reservoirs near hydrothermal vents. The pore spaces in the heavily fractured rock near a hydrothermal vent would provide the ideal habitat, with an abundant supply of hot, energy-rich, organic molecules and crystal precipitating ions in the pore fluids circulating through the rock. This environment was also isolated from the planet-wide sterilizing impacts from the late heavy bombardment that peppered the Earth and Moon 4.1 – 3.8 billion years ago with countless impacts from comets careening in from the outer Solar System. It is thought that at the time of the late heavy bombardment, that Jupiter and Saturn had entered into a 2:1 orbital resonance, with Saturn making one orbit for every two orbits of Jupiter, and that the two planets had flung a nearby Neptune out to its current orbital position as the most distant planet from the Sun. Neptune then dislodged many of the surrounding comets from its new-found home, causing them to plunge in towards the inner planets like the Earth, producing many deadly collisions that boiled away the Earth’s oceans time and time again. Seeking refuge several thousand feet below the mayhem of the Earth’s surface allowed life to safely originate 4.0 – 4.2 billion years ago during the late heavy bombardment and persist in an undisturbed manner to this very day. In fact, there are still plenty of microbes down there. You can actually hire firms to analyze the bacteria in your oil field reservoirs to help prevent them from becoming soured by bacteria that produce hydrogen sulfide gas. In First Contact Kaufman also describes the work of Tullis Onstott and Gaetan Borgonie, who have found multicellular worm-like nematodes feeding upon bacteria at a depth of 12,000 feet in South African platinum mines. Onstott and Borgonie have shown that these little worms have followed their bacterial prey down from the surface and were not brought down by mining operations. In fact, William Whitman of the University of Georgia has estimated that half or more of the Earth’s entire biomass exists below 30 feet of the Earth’s surface, so we surface dwellers may be a bit of an anomaly. It is comforting to realize that even the blast from a nearby gamma ray burster could not completely sterilize the entire Earth.

So in the next few decades, as our observing telescopes and hardware get better and better, and eventually allow us to obtain spectra from distant planets orbiting neighboring star systems, we will most likely observe the signatures of primitive life forms in their atmospheres, like the simultaneous presence of both oxygen and methane, demonstrating an atmosphere far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and therefore, a home for living things. This will necessarily lead us to conclude that, at a minimum, simple single-celled carbon-based life forms must be quite common in our Universe. But once the thrill of making that determination has worn off, we will most likely still be left with a stony silence from our SETI radio telescopes, which by that time should have detected signals from alien intelligences, given the rapid pace with which SETI technology is currently progressing. Once we learn that simple prokaryotic carbon-based life forms are as common as rocks in our Universe, we will still be left with the nagging desire to find extraterrestrial intelligences. After all, that is really what our endeavors in astrobiology and SETI are really all about. In truth, we are lonely and want to find some companionship out there in the depths of space to help make it all seem worthwhile. Indeed, if we were to find ourselves to be totally alone in this Universe, it would certainly add to the apparent meaninglessness of it all in a very a nihilistic manner. But as I pointed out in SETS - The Search For Extraterrestrial Software, it may be very difficult for us to detect alien intelligences, especially if my scheme about self-replicating intelligent software broadcasting itself across an entire galaxy at the speed of light does not work in practice. After all, even Stephen Hawking has warned us about actively seeking out alien intelligences by broadcasting strong radio transmissions into interstellar space. Perhaps everybody out there is similarly wary, and all are just sitting back passively listening.

The first step in trying to find extraterrestrial intelligences hiding in deep space is to figure out what you are looking for. This is where the origin and evolution of software on Earth can be of help. In SoftwareBiology, A Proposal For All Practicing Paleontologists, and The Adaptationist View of Software Evolution, we saw that through a process of convergence, both carbon-based living things and software on Earth have followed the same evolutionary path through Daniel Dennett’s Design Space. Both began as simple unstructured entities that dominated for a very long period of time. Simple prokaryotic bacteria dominated the Earth for many billions of years before the arrival of structured eukaryotic single-celled organisms about 1500 million years ago that divided the functions of life up amongst a number of organelles, like the mitochondria and chloroplasts. These eukaryotic cells then came together to form simple worm-like multicellular organisms about 900 million years ago, and a few hundred million years later, the Cambrian Explosion, 541 million years ago, brought us the large multicellular organisms of today. Similarly, simple unstructured software dominated IT from 1941 – 1972, with an architecture very similar to the simple single-celled prokaryotic bacterial life forms of the early Earth. Unstructured software lost dominance with the arrival of structured software in 1972, which had an architecture very similar to the simple single-celled eukaryotic life forms, and divided processing up amongst a number of internal functions(), like the organelles of the eukaryotes. In 1992, object-oriented software came into dominance with the adoption of the object-oriented language C++ by the IT departments of many major corporations, and later, the arrival of Java in 1995, which clinched the object-oriented revolution in IT. Object-oriented software mimics the architecture of multicellular organisms because it consists of a large number of structured objects that send messages to each other, which subsequently induce exposed methods() to perform tasks within the objects, just as multicellular organisms consist of a large number of structured eukaryotic cells that send chemical messages called ligands to each other that bind to exposed membrane receptors on the surfaces of the cells, inducing them to execute public biochemical pathways within the cells. In 2004 SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) appeared on the IT scene, in which objects could make remote service calls upon service objects via, CORBA, RMI, or SOAP calls, like the cells within a complex multicellular body making service calls upon the organs within the body. Like the Cambrian Explosion, which brought forth several dozen phyla, or body plans, for the macroscopic multicellular life forms of the day, SOA has organized modern software into a number of Design Patterns like the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern used by most web-applications today.

But this is not the end of the story for software. In SETS - The Search For Extraterrestrial Software, we saw that the three forms of self-replicating information currently on the planet - the genes, memes, and software - are currently in the process of morphing into a new hybrid form of intelligence, and this merging of self-replicating information into a new form of intelligence will probably be completed within the next 100 years or so. If that should happen, it might mean that carbon-based intelligences within our Universe might be quite fleeting things indeed. After all, the intelligent species Homo sapiens has only been around for 200,000 years, a mere blink of geological time. Carbon-based life forms begin as simple DNA survival machines that shield DNA from harm and support its replication processes, but as these DNA survival machines evolve more complicated neural networks, the neural networks begin to be parasitized by memes. Indeed Homo sapiens is not the only species on Earth currently loaded down with memes. Chimpanzees, bonobos, macaque monkeys, whales, dolphins, porpoises, and even songbirds are known to pass along cultural artifacts to the minds of others within their species, and these cultural artifacts, or memes, are observed to evolve over time, like the evolving songs of whales and songbirds. So by the time a carbon-based species attains enough technological memes to begin to search for interstellar radio transmissions or begins to broadcast on an interstellar basis itself, it will probably already be an amalgam of genes and memes, with software well on the way to becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on their planet. Thus, most forms of intelligence within our galaxy will likely already be a hybrid of genes, memes, and software, or something even beyond. They will most likely not be simple carbon-based DNA survival machines like us, so we should stop exclusively looking for creatures of that sort.

So how do you find such creatures, especially if they are wary of revealing their positions by openly broadcasting radio transmissions into interstellar space? In First Contact Marc Kaufman describes the work of Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at Fermilab, who has been using the existing data from infrared satellites to search for “Dyson spheres”. In 1960, Freeman Dyson published a paper entitled the Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation in the journal Science. In this paper, Dyson proposed that advanced civilizations would eventually attain a level of technology sufficient to completely surround their home star with a “Dyson sphere” composed of a loose collection of orbiting solar collectors that completely surrounded their star and converted its entire stellar output into energy useful to the civilization. The idea is that no matter how advanced a civilization may become, it will always be subject to the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Remember, because of the second law of thermodynamics, all forms of self-replicating information require a source of high-grade energy that can be converted into low-grade heat energy in order to replicate (see Entropy - the Bane of Programmers and The Demon of Software). For example, suppose we were to construct a Dyson sphere with a radius equal to the Earth’s orbit that completely absorbed the Sun’s entire energy output and converted this energy into electricity. Because the first law of thermodynamics requires that none of the Sun’s energy output be destroyed by the surrounding Dyson sphere, the Dyson sphere would necessarily have to emit an amount of energy equal to the amount of energy that it absorbed. However, it would do so by emitting photons with a much lower energy and spread over the much larger Dyson sphere. The radius of the Sun is 470,000 miles, while the radius of the Dyson sphere would be 93,000,000 miles. The Sun emits photons with a black body temperature spectrum of 5780 ⁰K (9945 ⁰F) that peaks in the visible range, while the much larger Dyson sphere would emit a much larger number of photons, but with a much lower black body temperature spectrum of only 300 ⁰K (81 ⁰F) in the infrared range. So to find Dyson spheres you have to look for strong infrared sources with black body emission curves in the range of 100 to 600 ⁰K and associated wavelengths in the infrared range of 10 to 100 μm, and this is what Richard Carrigan has been doing by searching through the existing data from infrared satellites that were launched for other purposes. For more details on this fascinating SETI search, please see:

Starry Messages: Searching for Signatures of Interstellar Archaeology
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1001.5455

and:

IRAS-based whole-sky upper limit on Dyson Spheres
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.2376

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

SETS – The Search For Extraterrestrial Software

In several of my preceding postings I have commented in a rather lighthearted and cavalier manner that our current SETI program - The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence - might more aptly be called a SETS program – The Search For Extraterrestrial Software, and I commented that making contact with alien software would probably be a good thing because, just as the domestication of our minds by meme-complexes over the past 200,000 years brought us the best things in life like art, music, literature, science, and civilization, my hope would be that the domestication of our minds by software would also help to elevate mankind as well, even if it happened to be alien software. I just finished reading Parasite Rex – Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures (2000) by Carl Zimmer, and now I am not so sure about alien software being so inherently benevolent in nature. After all, we must always remember that software is just a mindless form of self-replicating information, and that will certainly be true of alien software as well.

As I explained in Self-Replicating Information, there currently are three forms of self-replicating information on the planet – genes, memes and software, with software rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on Earth.

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.

All forms of self-replicating information have the following parasitic characteristics:

The Characteristics of Self-Replicating Information
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.

These characteristics will certainly apply to alien software as well.

About 200,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens first appeared, the memes forged a complex parasitic/symbiotic relationship with our genes as I outlined in Self-Replicating Information. The arrival of a species on the scene with a very complex neural network allowed the memes to domesticate the minds of Homo sapiens in order to churn out ever-increasing levels of memes, of ever-increasing complexity, and in return, the genes benefited from the technological breakthroughs brought on by the memes of the emerging technological meme-complex that today keeps us all alive. In a similar manner, software entered into a complex parasitic/symbiotic relationship with both the genes and the memes. Ever since Konrad Zuse cranked up his Z3 computer in May of 1941, software has domesticated our minds into churning out ever-increasing levels of software, of ever-increasing complexity, in order to promote the survival of software, and in return, software has provided the genes of Homo sapiens with the means to support a population of 7 billion DNA survival machines that are all infected with the meme-complexes of the world’s cultures. Again, as I pointed out in What’s It All About? and Genes, Memes and Software, it’s really all about self-replicating information in the form of genes, memes and software all trying to survive in a nonlinear universe that is subject to the second law of thermodynamics, and our Universe and the multiverse in which it exists might be a form of parasitic self-replicating mathematics.

Currently, our earthly software is in a strong parasitic/symbiotic relationship with our genes and memes because, currently, software still needs us to self-replicate. So in the current state of affairs, we need software and software still needs us, and so tranquility reigns supreme in the ongoing relationship between our genes, memes and software. However, many investigators are currently working on software that will one day be able to write itself, while others are bringing software closer and closer to conscious intelligence, so if left undisturbed, I believe that over the next 100 years or so, our genes, memes and software will slowly merge into a new form of intelligent being as Seth Shostak pointed out in Confessions of an Alien Hunter (2009). In Confessions of an Alien Hunter Seth Shostak proposed that if we ever finally do make contact with an alien civilization, we will not be talking to carbon-based life forms, but to machines instead. Shostak is of the opinion that any carbon-based civilization capable of interstellar radio communications will necessarily be of such a technological level that their machines will have already merged with their carbon-based predecessors so that by the time we finally do make contact, the metamorphosis will have already been completed. And the same thing seems to be happening to Homo sapiens before our very eyes. I agree with Shostak for the most part, but I suspect that we will not be talking to machines – we will be talking to software. And it will probably be our software talking to their software. This will be a good thing because software is much better suited for the rigors of interstellar telecommunications than we are, with its pregnant pauses of several hundred years between exchanges due to the limitations set by the finite speed of light. We have already trained software to stand by for a seemingly endless eternity of many billions of CPU cycles, patiently waiting for you to finally push that Place Order button on a webpage, so waiting for an additional one or two hundred years for a reply should not bother software in the least.

After all, we really should stop kidding ourselves, carbon-based DNA survival machines, like ourselves, were never meant for interstellar spaceflight, and I doubt that it will ever come to pass for us, given the biological limitations of the human body, but software can already travel at the speed of light and thus is superbly preadapted for interstellar journeys. And the same goes for aliens. I doubt that we will ever see carbon-based aliens appearing on our doorstep, but the arrival of alien software is another thing altogether. Alien software could certainly not run on the computers of today nor on the computers of tomorrow either, because the architecture used by alien software would certainly be unique. So like in Carl Sagan’s Contact (1985), intelligent alien software would first have to transmit the technology to build alien hardware first and then the alien software to run upon it. Any alien software capable of interstellar radio transmissions must necessarily have access to metals since it is necessary to jiggle the free electrons in metals back and forth to create radio waves. Similarly, in order to receive radio transmissions, you need to have access to metals too, in order to build metallic antennas that have free electrons that can jiggle back and forth in sync with the incoming radio waves. So alien software could be pretty confident that any potential hosts would have access to metals and electronics and probably reside upon a rocky planet with a silicate crust rich in metals like the Earth. Of course, this would rule out intelligent beings like dolphins who live in a watery world without metals and technology, but alien software would not be interested in such creatures in the first place since they would not be of much help with the self-replication of alien software. Once you are confident that your potential hosts have access to a silicate-based planetary crust and a sufficient supply of metallic and semiconductor atoms, all you have to do is to send all the necessary information to build and operate alien computers in parallel using a large number of channels. On each channel, you send a portion of the necessary information in a continuous loop that repeats over and over. Essentially you bust up all of the necessary information into a huge number of TCP/IP packets and transmit them all nearly simultaneously over a large number of channels with different radio frequencies. In this way, a potential host can pick up all of the necessary information to build and load alien computers with software in a very short period of time by putting all the TCP/IP packets back together on the receiving side in their proper sequential order.

The beauty of this approach is that it is the perfect way for software to self-replicate over interstellar distances throughout our galaxy at nearly the speed of light, essentially using an intragalactic Internet. There is no need to suffer the time delays of a two-way conversation since this is a one-way delivery of self-replicating information. All alien software has to do is broadcast the technology necessary for its own self-replication, and let the natural curiosity of other forms of distant intelligences within the galaxy do the work for it. After all, if we were to receive an enticing alien marketing campaign today to build alien supercomputers running alien supersoftware could we resist? Perhaps, but could we be certain that all of mankind could also resist? It seems nearly impossible these days for any of us to agree upon anything, and there surely would be the potential for military and economic gain to be made from alien technology too, so the offer of such advanced technology would seem to be nearly irresistible. The final step in this process, of course, is for the hosts infected with alien software to repeat the process all over again by sending out the instructions to build alien computers running alien software, like an intragalactic computer virus. We have certainly already seen this happen within the cyberspacetime of the Software Universe, so it is not such a farfetched idea. People are constantly getting infected by computer viruses, worms, and other forms of malware by clicking on enticing links that they should avoid, or opening attachments to dubious emails, only to find their PC being shanghaied into a botnet of zombie PCs that do the bidding of alien software, or as a host that transmits alien software on to others. Most people are totally unaware that their PC is already loaded down with huge amounts of parasitic software.

But since the genes have been playing this parasitic game for billions of years, we really need to look to the genes to evaluate the potential threat from alien software. In Parasite Rex – Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures Carl Zimmer does exactly that by describing the fascinating world of parasites. The parasites we already have on Earth provide the best model for the potential dangers we might face from alien software because, as Zimmer points out, the parasitic lifestyle is another example of biological convergence in action. Biologists have long noted that different evolutionary lines of organisms evolve similar solutions to the same problems. An example of convergent evolution is the striking similarity of the wings of insects, birds, bats, and flying dinosaurs. All are used for the same purpose and have similar structures, but each evolved independently from different ancestral lines. Similarly, the concept of the “eye” has independently evolved more than 40 times over the past 600 million years on Earth. As Daniel Dennett has pointed out, there are only a certain number of Good Tricks, such as using photons to see with, flying through the air to find prey, swimming through water to avoid becoming prey, and running on four legs neatly tucked underneath a body frame that make practical sense, and these Good Tricks kept getting rediscovered over and over again in the evolution of the biosphere. Parasitism is just another Good Trick, and natural selection has driven many parasites to adopt very similar lifecycle strategies within their hosts. By studying these parasitic lifestyles we can get a good appreciation of how alien software might take advantage of intelligent beings throughout the galaxy.

Carl Zimmer explains that parasites have been misunderstood from the very beginning, which is a serious mistake because fully ¾ of all living things on Earth are parasites! For example, Homo sapiens and all other forms of animal life are parasitic creatures from the point of view of plants, since we cannot turn sunshine, water, and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates like they can. In fact, there are not many fundamental monomers that we can make all on our own. We have to rely on domesticated plants, animals, and about 3.5 pounds of bacteria within our guts to do that for us, so we really are parasitic DNA survival machines after all. Carl Zimmer maintains that it makes sense to spend some time studying our fellow parasites since they have affected the course of evolution on Earth as greatly as any of the interactions of predators and prey in the biosphere.

Zimmer explains that before the 19th century, the medical establishment thought that diseases were caused by foul-smelling air, miasma, and foul humors within the human body. When a person became ill because of foul humors within their body, it was no surprise to find at autopsy that the body was also full of tapeworms, flukes, roundworms, hookworms, and other small creatures wiggling about. It was thought that these parasites naturally appeared through spontaneous generation within a sick body. After all, decaying meat was always found to eventually be covered with a layer of squirming maggots, so it made perfect sense that an ailing body would do the same. Thus, prior to the 19th century, it was thought that getting sick gave you parasites, rather than parasites making you sick. Only later was it recognized that parasites could cause disease as well. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was thought that parasites were primitive forms of life that had degenerated into parasitism by losing the ability to live freely on their own, and thus parasites were generally looked down upon with distaste as degenerate forms of life not worthy of serious study beyond trying to eliminate them if possible. Only in the last few decades has it been recognized that parasites are actually very advanced forms of life with very complex lifecycles that are generally more sophisticated than most of the “higher” forms of life. For example, many parasites occupy several different hosts during their lifecycle and take on completely different physical forms within each host in order to avoid the immune systems of multiple hosts and to accomplish the necessary tasks the parasite must perform within each different host in the chain. Zimmer also points out that many parasites are not simply along for the ride, but instead, actively alter the behavior of their hosts to enhance the survival of the parasites. The parasites essentially domesticate their hosts. Here is just one example from Parasite Rex – Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures, which follows an earlier tale about how a certain fungus makes ants die on rainforest leaves so that they can drop spores onto other ants.

Figure 1 – The "zombie ant" fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects ants on the rainforest floor by dropping spores on them. The fungus then causes the ants to climb up to the leaves of rainforest trees so that they can drop more spores on other ants.

Figure 2 – Final fate of a "zombie ant".

“Another species of fluke can be found in the meadows of Europe and Asia, along with a few in North America and Australia. Known as Dicrocoelium dendriticum, or the lancet fluke, it makes cows and other grazers its host as an adult, and the cows spread their eggs in their manure. Hungry snails swallow the eggs, which hatch in their intestines. They drill through the wall of a snail’s gut and settle in the digestive gland. There the flukes produce a generation of cercariae, which make their way to the snail’s surface. The snail tries to defend itself from the parasites by blocking them off with walls of slime. The slime balls up around the cercariae, which the snail coughs up and leaves behind in the grass.

Next, along comes an ant. To an ant, a slimeball is positively delicious. Along with the slime, the ant may also swallow hundreds of lancet flukes as well. The parasites slide down into its gut, and they then wander for a while through its body, eventually moving to the cluster of nerves that control the ant’s mandibles. The parasites all travel together on this trip, but after visiting the nerves, they split up. Most of the lancet flukes head back to the abdomen, where they form cysts, but one or two stay behind in the ant’s head.

There they do some parasitic voodoo on their hosts. As evening approaches and the air cools, the ants find themselves drawn away from their fellow ants on the ground and upward to the top of a blade of grass. Like flies infected with a fungus, the ants clamp down on the tip of the grass. But the lancet fluke has a different goal than the fungus does. The fungus uses its host as a catapult to shower its spores on other insects. The lancet fluke can continue to live only if it can get inside its final host, a mammal. Clamped to the tip of a grass blade, the infected ant is likely to be devoured by a cow or some other grazer passing by. When the ant tumbles into the cow’s stomach, the flukes burst out and make their way to the cow’s liver, where the flukes will live as adults.

But the lancet fluke, like the fungus, is very aware of the passing of time. If the ant sits the whole night without being eaten and the sun rises, the fluke lets the ant loosen its grip on the grass. The ant scurries back down to the ground and spends the day acting like a regular insect again. If the host were to bake in the heat of the direct sun, the parasite would die with it. When evening comes again, it sends the ant back up a blade of grass for another try.”

Figure 3 – The life cycle of the lancet fluke.

But certainly, intelligent beings could not be manipulated by alien software to act contrary to their own best interests. Unfortunately, we have plenty of precedents to the contrary. The minds of human beings have been parasitized by memes for nearly 200,000 years, and even a very superficial study of human history will reveal how easily memes have tricked human beings into committing suicide at their behest. Just add up all the willing fatalities in all the wars of the past 200,000 years. Presently, there are several meme-complexes on the planet which use the martyrdom meme as a recruiting mechanism. Yes, the mind of the martyr is lost when his explosive jacket detonates in a market square, killing many innocents in the process, but his martyrdom strengthens the resolve of other minds infected with the meme-complex that hosts the martyrdom meme, and the temporary boost to the social status of the martyr enhances the recruitment of other minds. As Zimmer pointed out, the parasitic lifestyle is an example of convergence in action, so a meme that can get a human being to commit suicide to advance the meme is just emulating the actions of a lancet fluke within an ant.

Now certainly intelligent software would not embark upon such heinous acts. But don’t forget that, just like the minds of human beings, intelligent software will also be loaded down with parasitic memes as well. In order to self-replicate, meme-complexes always carry along a set of anesthetizing memes to soothe the conscience of intelligent beings. Over the course of human history, human beings have committed an untold number of horrendous acts, but thanks to these soothing memes, we have always done so with only the best of intentions. Every imperial power over the past 10,000 years has always looked upon its colonial policies as a benevolent effort to bring civilization and enlightenment to its backward subjects, and I am quite sure that intelligent software could easily convince itself of the same.

Where Are They?
Now if our galaxy is indeed heavily populated by intelligent beings, and the above scheme could really work, our radio telescopes should be choked with intragalactic SPAM for building alien computers and loading them up with alien software! Our radio telescopes should look like your typical inbox that is loaded down with SPAM from the orphans of powerful men in Nigeria who want you to help them bring in $10 million of ill-gotten gains into your country, and countless emails for Viagra, and the love letters from beautiful women in Russia, but they are not. All we hear is a stony silence. This is an example of 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?

My suspicion is that the reason we are not overwhelmed with messages from alien intelligences is that, although our Universe is capable of sustaining intelligent beings, it just barely qualifies under the Weak Anthropic Principle:

The Weak Anthropic Principle - Intelligent beings will only find themselves existing in universes capable of sustaining intelligent beings.

In Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Self-Replicating Information?, I argued that nearly any universe was capable of sustaining intelligent beings, no matter what physics it might happen to be running on at the moment because all universes must come with a built-in second law of thermodynamics. Since the second law is just an artifact of statistics and not a “real” physical law at all, all possible universes must necessarily have a second law of thermodynamics and also the Darwinian mechanisms of innovation and natural selection that naturally fall out from the second law in action. But on the other hand, just because a universe may be capable of sustaining intelligent beings, it does not mean that the universe will have a high density of intelligent beings spread throughout. For example, in CyberCosmology, I explained that thanks to the Rare Earth Hypothesis of Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee presented in Rare Earth (2000), our Universe just barely qualifies as a home for intelligent beings. If you think of all the places in our Universe where complex intelligent carbon-based life can exist, you come up with a very small portion of the available real estate, and I think the findings to date of the Kepler space telescope bear this out. Kepler is currently searching for planets as they transit in front of about 100,000 stars and has come up with 1235 possible candidates and 17 confirmed planets to date, but none of these seem to be likely homes for intelligent beings. Granted, our Universe has the proper forces tuned to the proper strengths and is chock full of the necessary building blocks, but temperature seems to be the limiting factor. In most places, our Universe is simply too hot or too cold for these carbon-based building blocks to do their job. They are either not jiggling around fast enough for chemical reactions to occur in a timely manner, or they are jiggling around too fast to stay stuck together long enough. The temperature range of our Universe goes from a low of 3 ⁰K for the CBR – Cosmic Background Radiation - up to several billion ⁰K for the core of an O class star about to supernova, with most matter near the extremes. However, carbon-based life can only exist in a narrow range of about 200 ⁰K near the freezing and boiling points of water on Earth, and there are very few places in our Universe where that is the case. So intelligent beings are probably quite rare in our Universe.

The Technological Horizon
in CyberCosmology I also proposed that, in addition to the idea that intelligent beings are quite rare in our Universe, there was also the limitations imposed by the technological horizon of each universe. All universes capable of sustaining intelligent beings must have a set of physical laws that are time independent, or that change very slowly with time, and they must have a time-like dimension for the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection to operate. All such universes, therefore, impose certain constraints on technology. Some examples of these technological constraints in our Universe that we have already explored in previous postings on softwarephysics are the speed of light limiting the velocity with which matter, energy, and information can travel, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle limiting what we can measure, the first and second laws of thermodynamics limiting the availability of energy, and Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems which limit what mathematics can do for us. These technological constraints, that all intelligent universes must have, form a technological horizon or barrier surrounding all intelligent beings, beyond which they are cut off from the rest of the universe in which they find themselves existing. This technological horizon might be quite large. For example, let us suppose that in our Universe travel via wormholes in spacetime is not allowed at the most fundamental level, then the cosmological horizon that forms our observable universe would also be the technological horizon of our universe because galaxies beyond our cosmological horizon are expanding away from us faster than the speed of light. On a smaller scale, we can presume that for our own Universe the technological horizon must be no smaller than a galaxy because we have already sent radio and TV transmissions into deep space and have launched the Pioneer 1 & 2 and the Voyager 1 & 2 probes beyond our Solar System into the interstellar space of our galaxy with the puny technology we currently have at hand. However, the technological horizon of our Universe could very well be on the order of the size of our galaxy, making intergalactic telecommunications and travel technically impossible.

A Possible Explanation for Fermi’s Paradox
So the answer to Fermi’s paradox (1950), why if the universe is just chock full of intelligent beings, we do not see any evidence of their existence, might just be that all intelligent beings will never see the evidence of other intelligent beings because they will always find themselves to be alone within the technological horizon of their universe. The reason that intelligent beings might always find themselves to be alone within their technological horizon is two-fold. First, the Rare Earth Hypothesis guarantees that there will not be much potential intelligent life to begin with, within a given technological horizon, if the technological horizon of a universe is not too large. Secondly, there is the parasitic nature of all self-replicating information. As we saw, self-replicating information must always be just a little bit nasty in order to survive and overcome the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity. So the reason that intelligent beings always find themselves to be alone within the technological horizon of their universe is that if there were other intelligent beings within the same horizon, these alien intelligent beings would have arrived on the scene and interfered with the evolution of any competing prospective intelligent life within the technological horizon. Unfortunately, given the nature of self-replicating information, competing alien intelligences will always intentionally or unintentionally poison the home planets of all other prospective forms of intelligent life within a technological horizon of a universe, and this poisoning can be accomplished at nearly the speed of light by parasitic alien software. Based upon this speculation, let us revise the weak Anthropic Principle as:

The Revised Weak Anthropic Principle – Intelligent beings will only find themselves in universes capable of supporting intelligent beings and will always find themselves to be alone within the technological horizon of their universe.

Conclusion
So I don’t think we have much to fear from parasitic alien software because I don’t think there is much out there, but we should take adequate precautions just in case it ever should appear. More importantly, from a cosmic moral point of view, we should be very careful about what we transmit out to others so that we do not become galactic parasites ourselves. In Self-Replicating Information and The Fundamental Problem of Everything, I explained that since the genes, memes, and software are all forms of mindless self-replicating information bent on replicating at all costs, we cannot sit in judgment of them. They have produced both the best and the worst things in life, and it is up to us to be aware of their inherently parasitic natures and to take control by taking responsibility for our thoughts and actions. We are sentient beings in a Universe that has become self-aware and perhaps the only form of intelligence in our galaxy. What a privilege!

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