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LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION SPECIAL REPORT
LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION SPECIAL REPORT
IT TAKES A GIANT COSMOS TO CREATE LIFE AND MIND
By Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member James Gardner.
Print report!
The following text is the introduction from
The Intelligent Universe, reprinted with permission of the
publisher.
There is a time machine clearly visible right outside your front door.
It's easy to see — in fact, it's impossible to overlook
— although
its
awesome powers are generally ignored by all but a discerning few. The
unearthly beauty, the ineffable grandeur, and the ingenuity of
construction of this time machine are humbling to every human being who
makes an effort to probe into the enigma of its origin and the mystery
of its ultimate destiny.
The time machine of which I speak
is
emphatically not of human origin. Indeed, a few venturesome scientists
are beginning to entertain a truly incredible possibility: that this
device is an artifact bequeathed to us by a supreme intelligence that
existed long, long ago and far, far away. All knowledgeable observers
agree that the scope of its stupendous powers and the sheer delicacy of
its miniscule moving parts seem nothing short of
miraculous.
A second amazing but incontrovertible fact confronts those trained in
the science of cosmology: We human beings are living our daily lives in
the midst of extraterrestrial entities. These entities are
everywhere — in the air we breathe, in the food we eat, in the
ground
beneath our feet, and inside our bodies.
These
extraterrestrials have
made an incredible journey from the venue of their birth to reach planet
Earth. Their epic migration, spanning millions of light-years, dwarfs
the fictional interstellar voyages of the starship Enterprise. They are
the real star trekkers, with more mileage on their odometers than we are
capable of imagining. And perhaps most astonishing, we could not
possibly survive without their constant presence, and the unfailing
exercise of their special powers.
Could the existence of this purported time machine be anything but
outrageous science fiction? And how could there be extraterrestrials
among us that we have never noticed? Surely not even an inebriated
television producer would find these ideas sufficiently credible to
weave into an X-Files plot!
Yet I can assure you that both propositions are correct. Indeed, they
are indisputable.
The time machine is the universe itself. We see its local features every
night in the starry sky above us. The firmament we observe is not a
picture of the stars and galaxies as they exist today, but rather a kind
of cinematic image of our corner of the cosmos as it existed years
ago — in the case of the great galaxy Andromeda, millions of years
ago.
Because starlight travels through the immensity of interstellar and
intergalactic space at a finite pace, and because of the inconceivable
vastness of the cosmos, we look backward in time with every glance at
the nighttime sky.
With powerful spectacles to aid our vision — massive instruments
such as
the telescopes that dot the peak of Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Hubble
Space Telescope — we can extend our gaze incredibly far back into
the
past, indeed virtually to the moment of the Big Bang.
And
with even more
sophisticated observational instruments, such as the Advanced Laser
Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the
space-based Big Bang Observer (BBO) that NASA hopes to deploy by 2025,
there is hope that we will be able to glimpse the moment of cosmic
creation itself — the very genesis of space and time.
What about those extraterrestrials? They are the atoms that combine to
form the molecules from which our bodies and virtually everything else
in our world and the solar system are made. These extraterrestrials were
not, for the most part, born ex nihilo in the fireball of the Big
Bang.
Instead, they were hammered into existence in the forges of supernova
explosions — rare conflagrations that release more energy in a
flash than
the normal output of the billions of ordinary stars in a typical galaxy.
Of all these extraterrestrial entities, the one with the most unusual
birth story is carbon, the essential foundation of life as we know it.
The peculiar process of stellar alchemy by which elemental carbon is
coaxed into existence is so delicate and improbable that it prompted a
giant of British astronomy, Sir Fred Hoyle, to utter the most famous and
controversial remark of his storied career:
"Would you not say to yourself, "Some super-calculating intellect must
have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of
my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be
utterly minuscule?" Of course you would... A common sense
interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed
with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are
no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one
calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this
conclusion almost beyond question."1
Hoyle's remark is the inspiration for
The Intelligent Universe. The book
is the story of an idea, and the idea is quite simple: The best way to
think about life, intelligence, and the universe is that they are not
separate things, but are different aspects of a single phenomenon. To
take liberties with a popular ballad, "We are the world, we are the
people, and we are the universe." To state this
proposition from the
opposite perspective, the universe is coming to life and waking up
through the processes of our lives and thoughts, and, very probably,
through the lives and thoughts of countless other beings scattered
throughout the cosmos.
One startling implication of this idea is that the true story of the
origin of the human species is longer than the saga of terrestrial
evolution conceived of by Charles Darwin and his intellectual progeny.
Thanks to the discoveries of Hoyle and other cosmologists, it is now
beyond dispute that the life history of humanity includes the entire
history of the cosmos itself.
Why? Because an
inconceivably ancient and
immense universe is needed to create even one species of minuscule
living creatures on a single planet orbiting a nondescript star in the
outer reaches of an ordinary galaxy.
If the cosmos were not so old and large, multiple generations of stars
could not have formed, burned brightly for billions of years, and then
blown themselves to pieces in titanic supernovae explosions, thereby
synthesizing all the higher elements in the periodic table. Absent those
elements (especially carbon and oxygen), there could be no life anywhere
amid the countless galaxies that fill the universe.
A second implication of this concept is that if extraterrestrial life
and intelligence should exist, it will inevitably be related to mankind.
No, I am not talking about a government-suppressed history of alien
visitation and cross-breeding, or even the slightly more plausible
scenario outlined by Nobel laureate Francis Crick of directed
panspermia.
DIRECTED PANSPERMIA
In
Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature2
Nobel laureate Francis Crick,
co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, put forward a
hypothesis about the origin of life on Earth that many of his scientific
colleagues viewed as outlandish, even scandalous.
The
essence of Crick's
scenario was that, contrary to Darwin's speculation that the first
living things may have emerged spontaneously in a warm little pond,
terrestrial life was deliberately seeded by an advanced alien race
billions of years ago. Crick's ideas built on those of Swedish physicist
Svante August Arrhenius, who suggested in the late 19th century that
life did not get started on Earth, but was seeded by microorganisms
drifting in from outer space under the gentle pressure of ambient
starlight.
A perceived weakness of Arrhenius's theory — called simply
panspermia,
which translates literally as seeds everywhere — was that it
was
thought
unlikely that spores or microorganisms could survive the harsh radiation
of space for the decades, centuries, or even millennia that would be
required for bacteria to slowly waft from even the nearest stars to our
solar system.
Crick sought to remedy this weakness in Arrhenius's theory by proposing
that the transplanted extraterrestrial microorganisms had actually
traveled to Earth within the protective hull of an alien spaceship! As
Crick put it:
"Life started here when these organisms were dropped into the primitive
ocean and began to multiply."3
Why would this obviously serious-minded and gifted scientist put forward
such a seemingly eccentric proposal? Essentially, Crick was attempting
to take seriously the logical implications of what he recognized as "the
very high degree of [the] organized complexity [of living things]
we
find at every level, and especially at the molecular level."4
In order
for even the simplest living creature to metabolize and reproduce, a
vast array of incredibly complicated and interdependent molecular
machinery must function, at a nanoscale level, with a degree of flawless
precision that makes the operations of a Boeing 747 look downright
primitive by comparison. As Crick put it in a candid and colorful remark
that has become a key talking point for the Intelligent Design crowd:
"The origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many
are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it
going."5
But if life originated on an alien world and was later transported here
by a race of intelligent aliens, then the probabilistic resources
available to explain a random origin of life's organized complexity can
be expanded exponentially. The major conceptual weakness of Crick's
directed panspermia scenario is that it merely postpones the ultimate
question: How did life originally get going, either on a distant planet
or in that proverbial warm little pond right here on
Earth?
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I am asserting that wherever and however life and intelligence may exist
elsewhere in the cosmos, it will have originated and evolved from a
universally shared substrate: the chemical elements of the periodic
table and the basic forces and parameters of physics.
As
far as anyone
can tell, these elements, forces, and parameters appear invariant
throughout the visible universe. They can be thought of as a kind of
"deep DNA" — a universal genetic code inscribed far below the level
of
terrestrial genomes. At this fundamental level, everyone and everything
that exists in the universe, whether animate or inanimate, is intimately
related.
And because all of this living and not-yet-living
stuff owes
its ultimate origin to a common genesis event (the Big Bang), we are all
related in a family way. With apologies to Saint Francis of Assisi, we
can confidently state that Earth's satellite truly is Sister Moon, and
that the life-giving star 93 million miles away is genuinely Brother
Sun.
A third implication of the concept is that because the vast
preponderance of the lifetime of the universe lies in the distant future
rather than in the past, the historical achievements of life and mind
are meager foreshadowings of the starring role that intelligent life is
likely to play in shaping the future of the cosmos.
Indeed, this new way
of looking at the intimate linkage of life, mind, and the cosmos
suggests a novel way of thinking about the ultimate destiny of our
universe.
Most scientists believe the universe will end in ice or fire.
Traditionally, scientists have offered two bleak answers to the profound
issue of how the universe will end: fire or ice. The
cosmos
might
end
in
fire — a cataclysmic Big Crunch in which galaxies, planets,
and
any
life
forms that might have endured to the end time are consumed in a raging
inferno as the universe contracts in a kind of Big Bang, but in reverse.
Or the universe might end in ice — a ceaseless expansion of
the
fabric of
spacetime in which the thin soup of matter and energy is eternally
diluted and cooled. Under this scenario, stars wither and
die,
constellations of cold matter recede further and further from one
another, and the vast project of cosmic evolution simply fades into
quiet and endless oblivion.
The Intelligent Universe proposes a third possibility: that
the
universe
might end in intelligent life. Not life as we know it, but life
that
has
acquired the capacity to shape the cosmos as a whole, just as life on
Earth has acquired the ability to shape the land, the sea, and the
atmosphere. As Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson puts it:
"Mind, through the long course of biological evolution, has
established
itself as a moving force in our little corner of the universe. Here on
this small planet, mind has infiltrated matter and has taken control. It
appears to me that the tendency of mind to infiltrate and control matter
is a law of nature."6
My first book,
Biocosm,7 was one long argument
that the cosmos possesses
a utility function (some value or outcome that is being maximized) and
that the specific utility function of our cosmos is propagation of baby
universes exhibiting the same life-friendly physical qualities as their
parent-universe.
Under this scenario, the mission of
sufficiently
evolved intelligent life in the universe is essentially to serve as a
cosmic reproductive organ, spawning an endless succession of
life-friendly offspring that are themselves endowed with the same
reproductive capacities as their predecessors.
The fact
that our
universe seems queerly hospitable to carbon-based intelligent life
— an
astronomically improbable oddity that many leading scientists have
identified as the deepest mystery in all of science — emerges in
the
context of this hypothesis as a predictable outcome (a falsifiable
retrodiction, in the jargon of science).
FALSIFIABLE RETRODICTIONS
Traditionally, scientists insist that new hypotheses generate
falsifiable predictions of experimental results in order to
qualify
as
genuine science.
However, there are some fields of science
— especially
archaeology and cosmology, which involve events that occurred in the
distant past or in physically inaccessible regions — that cannot
generate
predictions susceptible to laboratory testing.
Although a
few purists
regard these fields as intrinsically unscientific, most scientists
concede that it is appropriate for so-called "historical" sciences, such
as geology, evolutionary biology, cosmology, paleontology, and
archaeology to rely on retrodiction as an alternate means of testing a
scientific hypothesis.
A retrodiction essentially compares
previously
gathered observational evidence (for instance, the fossil record, in the
case of evolutionary biology) with the implications of a scientific
hypothesis (such as Darwinian natural selection). If the observational
evidence agrees with the implications of the hypothesis, the hypothesis
is said to retrodict the evidence.
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Though
The Intelligent Universe reprises some of the key themes of
Biocosm, its primary objective is different. Unlike
Biocosm,
the
purpose
of this book is not to lay out a scientific hypothesis but rather to
tell an extraordinary story — the story of the probable future of
the
universe. In telling this story, I am going to introduce you to some
very unusual and interesting people.
You will meet a senior NASA official whose passion is investigating the
probable impact on religion of the discovery of extraterrestrial
intelligence. You will encounter a computer scientist who is coaxing
software to undergo a special kind of Darwinian evolution, thus becoming
more adept and financially valuable over time. And you will meet a
technology prophet who, in my view, is the true contemporary heir to
Darwin's intellectual legacy.
You will also meet a fascinating cast of nonhuman players likely to have
leading roles on tomorrow's cosmic stage. They include: (1) super-smart
machines capable of out-thinking humans without breaking a sweat; (2)
speedy and cost-efficient interstellar probes that will consist of
nothing more substantial than elaborate software algorithms capable of
"living" in the innards of alien computers they may encounter on far-off
planets; and (3) intelligent extraterrestrials, which SETI researchers
have not yet discovered but whose probable existence is strongly
predicted by my
Biocosm hypothesis.
The Intelligent Universe, then, is a kind of projected
travelogue
— an
imagined future history — of the cosmic journey that lies ahead.
The
foundation for that projection is a vision of the deep linkage between
the three ostensibly separate phenomena previously mentioned: the
appearance of life, the emergence of intelligence, and the seemingly
mindless physical evolution of the cosmos.
In discussing
these topics,
the book will not only provide news dispatches from the frontiers of
cosmological science, but also offer musings about the philosophical
implications of emerging scientific insights for our self-image as a
species.
Some skeptics and traditionalists will doubtless protest that such
philosophizing is out of place in a book that seeks to chronicle the
latest scientific thinking about the nature of the universe. In
rebuttal, I offer the timeless words of Galileo:
"Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the
universe — which
stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood
unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the
characters in which it is written."
In the spirit of Galileo, I invite you to gaze into this grand book
— I
mean our cosmos — and begin to learn the language and the
characters in
which it is written.
As we shall see, the grand book is
not only a tale
of the past, but also a story about our tomorrows. Above all, it is a
book that, carefully deciphered, foretells the incredible journey that
intelligent life will make across the vast expanse of the cosmic future
and the projected consummation of that voyage — the emergence of
the
biocosm.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Hoyle, Fred.
The Universe: Past and Present Reflections.
Engineering & Science magazine (November, 1981): 8-12, quoted in Owen
Gingerich, "Foreword" to Simon Mitton, Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred
Hoyle's Life in Science. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2005: xi.
2. Crick, Francis.
Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1981.
3. Ibid., 15-16.
4. Ibid., 49.
5. Ibid., 88.
6. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions. New York: Harper Perennial
Library, 1988; 118.
7. Gardner, James.
Biocosm — The New Scientific Theory of
Evolution:
Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe. Makawao,
Maui,
Hawaii: Inner Ocean Publishing, 2003.
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