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Dear Readers,
You may be too busy to think gratitude for your breath and presence on Earth, so let Staying Awake be a reminder to its author and readers. That any of us are here on Earth is mysterious, and a good reason to indulge some gawking!
In only a few years, the Internet has broadened Earthlings’ awareness to layers upon layers of the webbed mêlée within ruthless monotheistic and political ideologies. Inevitable changes are standing in the peripheries, waiting to hear our applause as they move center stage, letting the spotlight of the sun shine upon them. Imagine our children’s children expecting insights in science, and choosing from infinite opportunities in a world we couldn’t have dreamed is finite.
In his entertaining talk presented at TED dot com, legendary physicist David Deutsch weaves a compelling and complex stance for the study of quantum theory as zenith for survival of the human species. My delight and much fascination inspired this essay, highlighting a few of his revelations in a 20-minute talk videoed in Oxford, UK, July 2005. Refer Our Place in the Cosmos by Deutsch; TED dot com.
Everyone Already Knows
Here are two things everyone already knows. The first has been known for most of recorded history: Planet Earth and our solar system are uniquely suited to sustain our creation, our evolution, our present existence, and our future survival. Spaceship Earth is the dramatic name for that idea, and it can be explained as: Outside the spaceship, our universe is implacably hostile, while everything upon which we depend is inside the spaceship. Humans have only one chance with our spaceship. If we mess it up, we have no where else to go.
Now, the second thing everyone already knows, yet contrary to beliefs recorded in human history, is human beings are not the hub of existence. A physicist, Steven Hawking, famously said humans are chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that’s in orbit around a typical star (our sun) on the outskirts of a typical galaxy.
The first of those two ideas infers humans have become well suited to live on an untypical planet while the second infers a typical planet with unsuitable humans.
If we regard those ideas as foundations out of which life’s meaningful choices are made, then we set ourselves up for conflict. And, that doesn’t prevent either idea from being completely false. But, everyone already knows that.
Universally Typical Place
Is Earth a typical place in our Universe? Well, let’s look around. Do you see the walls of your room, your lamps and computer; do you see yourself, as Hawking would say the chemical scum reading this ezine? Your physical habitat isn’t typical in this universe, because the nearest possible typical place is no where near us or stars or galaxies.
Still inside our universe, we would have to travel one hundred thousand light years from Earth to look back to see our galaxy with its spiral arms and our planet and sun.
After traveling all that distance, we’d still not be any where near a universally typical place until we travel one thousand times again as far, then we’d be in deep space. Once there, we’d discover what is typical: There is utter complete darkness; it’s very cold, less than three degrees above absolute zero; and, it’s empty—the vacuum out there is a million times less dense than the highest vacuum our technology can currently create.
Our planet and solar system are not a universally typical place, because our universe is seemingly an infinite spatial environment entirely alien to that which Earthlings have become suitable.
Or, perhaps, deep space is suitable for humans. How can scientists know so much about an environment that’s so far away?
Open Ended Stream of Knowledge
The human species is creating an open ended stream of knowledge, because we’re becoming aware of and recording happenings—as they happen and have happened billions of years ago—in our physical environment and in the physical universe.Imagine using a telescope to view a further distance than we’ve just been in our travels, and we’ll see quasars. (Quasars are quasi stars; they look like stars but aren’t quite the same thing.)
Billions of years ago and billions of light years away, some matter in a quasar collapsed in just the right moment, in just the right way that tremendous jets of light bolted outward, with lobes as bright as a trillion suns. Here it is billions of years later and billions of light years away on the other side of our universe, some chemical scum can accurately describe, model, predict and above all explain what was happening in physical reality in one of those jets.
Earthlings, right now, are the particular chemical scum that contains universality; our structure, with ever increasing precision, has evolved to contain the same structure as every other thing within the physical universe. Our planet is a hub of existence. One of the most important things about the physical world and an open ended stream of knowledge is the laws of physics mandate our watchfulness.As unlike as they could possibly be, the human brain contains an accurate working model of that quasar, not just a superficial image of it, but an explanatory model embodying the same mathematical relationships and causal structure. That information is called knowledge.
And, if that weren’t amazing enough, the faithfulness with which the brain and the quasar resemble each other is increasing with time, which creates an open ended stream of knowledge. The laws of physics, with the knowledge we are able to glean from them, create and show us that humans are indeed special and vulnerable in our universe.
Inevitable Opportunities
Our special relationship to the laws of physics—our inevitable opportunities and abilities for creating relevant knowledge quicker, interpreting knowledge into new explanations, to be an hospitable hub of existence in the universe—sets apart our species from every other species, and sets apart present civilization from all gone before.
Our species can survive, and can fail to survive. Civilization’s survival doesn’t depend on chance, nor on material resources which are abundant, but on accumulation of knowledge which is scarce.
Our planet (even a polluted Earth) and galaxy are inundated with evidence for discoveries of fundamental truths of all sciences; truths—evidence, energy, and matter, without special dispensation or miracle—have saturated this place in our universe for billions of years.
Challenges are inevitable, and they are soluble; humans need problem fixes, not more problem avoidances. Until we depend on our knowledge to reveal fixes, then there are inevitable possibilities the human species is in line for extinction. That shouldn’t be new news to us. Human extinction almost occurred more than once during the most recent four million years, not to speak of myriad species that won’t survive beyond today.
For a layperson of global warming, the rational consideration is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory. According to that theory, it’s already too late to avoid a disaster. If it’s true our best option is to prevent CO
2emissions, with its treaty protocol of economic constraints and enormous costs, then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. And, the advised actions are not purported to solve problems but to postpone them.*
What do some fixes look like? Here are three examples detained as fringe research:
Setting swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sun’s increased heat; planning
for sustaining life in higher temperatures; and, encouraging classic species that
already eat CO2 to eat more of it.
Facing inevitable problems that we do not yet foresee is our only hope of problem solving and surviving. The inevitable opportunities to put right, not the sheer misfortune of indefinitely avoiding, is our only answer.
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Staying Awake :: an ezine with your awareness in mind