“Is everything ok?” said the young grasshopper.

The lily turned its petals down and said “Can I share something real with you?”

“Yes.” said the young grasshopper.

I believe that words have the power to resonate in a mind, and that when a mind senses that resonance in another, a community is born.  These thoughts are my tuning fork; trio tones of joy, fear, and excitement, jointly holding the baton that conducts the cacophony. All of what follows are my anecdotal impressions, nothing more – I’m sorry that this is the truth (an indictment as I see it).  

The world is full of so much possibility and beauty, and so much ugliness and petty squabbling. It’s sad to think that with our collective resources, intellect, and technology there is so much we might have accomplished – cured most of the major diseases, understood the brain, reinvented ourselves physically and mentally, left our home rock and explored the wild and humbling beauty of the Cosmos.  I suppose that those things might still happen, but it also seems that we are peaking too early, using up too much of our resources, and we have a will to destroy ourselves and irreparably alter our planet long before we grasp our uniqueness, all because we are fundamentally enslaved to our amygdala. I dream of a world where we put aside our very minor differences and realize that not so deep down, we are all very similar. We all feel the pain of living, the emptiness of loss, the longing for love and connection, the joy of friendship, the satisfaction of accomplishment, and the power of Nature. Our evolutionary legacy leaves us beholden to a set of brain chemistries and circuitries that reinforce selfish behavior, that bias our perception toward continual scarcity, amplify apophenia until we see diety and monster in the mist, and intoxicate us with power and greed – we have all those things in common too. We posture, pivot and pontificate to project an image of certitude, because to stare directly at the random and uncertain complexity of it all would crush anyone. Hunter S. Thompson said:  Life is beautiful, and living is pain.  

It amazes me that we are all here on this small planet, burning the most abundant energy source any life form on it has ever known, to go about our daily lives, to build large screen TVs that suck up our precious time and sell us a lie of happiness we don’t need. Consider for a moment that we can now instantly know where we are on Earth and we can instantly communicate with a single person or group. On a whim we have access to nearly the entire sum of all human knowledge. We know the age of the Sun and when it will die. We have seen the edges of the Universe and clocked its growth by the afterglow. We created machines to whisk us from one end of the planet to another, we harness the power of the atom, and we are in labor to give birth to powerful and unmoored digital intelligences, that will, in their own right, soon see us as the tools, rather than vice versa.  All of this in the name of technological, economic, and geopolitical ‘progress.’

“But to what end?” said the young grasshopper.

So that we can surf the world addicted to data and dogma that we believe will finally answer the questions that nothing and no one can – the intangible and ineffable “why’s” of existence. We spend our communal energy – our most valuable asset – believing that other people we call gods have wisdom that we don’t, that paradise is earned by obedience and unlocked by death rather than by expressing gratitude for the only and greatest paradise we will ever inhabit – our home, this world, the Cosmos expressing itself. The nebulous notion that technology, whose mindless implementation and adoption accelerated these trends, will save us is tantamount to thinking that the best way to put out a fire is to make sure that there is nothing left to burn. We have opened Pandora’s box and confused raw technical capabilities with informed stewardship. And the belief that supernatural forces will guide us through these, the most challenging of times, is a fairytale born of justifiable ignorance and confusion, it warps our objectives and dangerously disconnects us from the here, the now, and the other. It attempts to define virtue by what we should not be, and gives lip service to the formative actions of compassion, patience, and thoughtfulness. Both worldviews wrestle to make sense of, and find security within, the master dynamical system whose chaotic trajectory is, fundamentally, unpredictable. Both believe that it can be understood and guided to a place of certain security, rather than accepting and reveling in the undeniable links that chain freedom to security, and suffering to autonomy.

“But to what end?” said the young grasshopper.

So that 100 or 1000 or 1,000,000 years from now we will have selected against the curiosity that leads to real progress and spent the resources that could have enabled the transformation in our species and our quality of life that we imagine lies just outside our reach. This is the greatest and saddest generation of which to be a part, and I can’t help but look at the long arc of history and see that we have been struggling, time and again, with the same problems.  We still have not figured out how to equitably steward our resources with collective action, we still have not figured out how to live in a degree of harmony with the Natural world on which every aspect of our survival depends. We still have not learned to cherish and protect the diversity that defines and stabilizes all living systems. We still have not learned that whatever our circumstance, our forms have needs that require care and balance. We still have not learned that the magic of Life stands on feet of mystery and knowledge – we were not intended to, nor are capable of, dealing with the full sensory and information experience of existence. And yet there are those that vigorously call for us to fight the other, to amplify our differences so that we no longer see other humans as humans, to pass observable truth through a lens of distortion, to disfigure and sharpen our discourse until the barb can pierce dignity, and they rape our world at any expense with no consideration for our own future nor the future of those that come after us.  We place too much value on pleasure to risk progress. And much as I would like to say that I am part of the solution, which I suppose in some areas I am, I know well that I, we are all the problem. In little choices every day we waste and use and think only of our pleasures and progress now – almost no one is playing the long game. We are essentially never willing to sacrifice a momentary and clearly visible personal gain for a potential but uncertain greater good – that is the fundamental issue.

What will be left when we have used all the fossil fuels, and there is no energy source abundant enough to propel us into the next “greener” technological era of our existence? What will happen when we have devalued and destroyed objective physical truth and hard-earned expertise to the point when no one has the knowledge or will to tackle the problems of governance and environment that loom supremely large on the stage of civilization? What will happen when our specters convince us that creativity, non-conformity, and any observable difference are threats?

I don’t know, but I do know that things will look very different, that the world population as such will not be able to continue at its current size and state.  I know that Nature will eventually force us to pay Her heed, when the forests burn, the farm land is depleted, and the medical advancements of the last 200 years are for not because we misused our discoveries and forgot our methods.  It’s tempting to think that we’ll just start over, but that surely cannot be.  We will have spent all the abundant energy, the solar panels will be long cracked and inefficient, the cars will be planters, the nuclear power plants dark forests, and this thing we call civilization will have died back to a scraggly weed of its former self.  It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s a question of ‘when’.

I want to find the silver lining in all of this.  Will our descendants look back and marvel at what we accomplished?  Yes.  Will they ponder incessantly as to why we didn’t or couldn’t take the steps to avoid decline? Yes.  Will they learn from our mistakes and embrace a wider view of humanity and commitment to each other? Maybe.  Will they build a new civilization that respects natural limitations and recognizes that dogma has no place in a free society?  I don’t know.

The system has made us weak and we are knowingly cultivating a culture that values only the most vapid pursuits of momentary validation and material wealth, while discouraging the introspection that asks – If more people behaved as I do, would that move us toward a more tolerant and sustainable world?  I no longer seek to blame any one person, organization, or government – we were all bestowed these brains with systematic faults that we sum to “human nature”.  I think the point might be that we are here together, and like every thinker and leader of thought on the right side of history has tried to tell us – we need to look out for each other, we are all we have in the vast pointless emptiness.  I look around and see unavoidable failures in our system – choice structures like the Tragedy of the Commons – that have no solution because we are incapable of shifting our view from short to long, from me to us. The world is falling apart because we all see it happening, and we all feel like we’re on this sinking ship, most of us can’t figure out where the water is coming from, but there are gushing leaks all around us.  I believe we are living at the peak of civilization on Earth.  The juggernaut of civilization, really, the billions of choices made by the masses and the few pivotal decisions made by the powerful for their own benefit, all sadly make sense.  We have created a system that constantly shows us the material wealth we should strive for, while empowering no one to act beyond their own needs and desires.  Sometimes, I wish there was a God or a galactic super race that would come to save us from ourselves, but I have no faith in either.  

So here we are, the third wet rock from an average star, on the out skirts of a typical galaxy, and no one will hear our laughing or screaming or pleading or self-expressions through music, no will see our art, or take satisfaction in our discoveries, no one will sit on our mountains and in our forests to find peace and wholeness among the spontaneous and awesome self-organization of this world, no one will come to say ‘hey, here’s a better way.’  It’s all on us and if that reality cannot motivate us to be better people and a better civilization, if that does not thrust us into a period of deep self-examination, then nothing will.  So maybe it’s ok, given those realities, that we continue with business as usual, that we recognize that inequity is as natural as gravity, that we chant the mantra of maximization, and everyone suffers in a life punctuated by moments of love and joy and we whiz through space and search for meaning as strange and animate assemblies of the same atoms that are found throughout the Universe.

The only actions to take are to marvel at the continually unfolding beauty and dance when we can to the harmony and natural structure that permeates everything. And our greatest ideal – altruism – manifests as our desire to enable others to take those actions. The same struggle for existence, the master algorithm of Evolution that shaped us from molecules into ephemeral sentient forms will disintegrate us back into molecules. And one day, when time has lost its meaning and space has grown inanimate and cold, there will be peace. I don’t know how many times the Universe has tried or will try this experiment, but I do know that it will keep trying.  And maybe this is the best yet, in the incomprehensible complexity of it all, this is the truest expression of the natural order, this is the Cosmos in all its uncoordinated omniscience and omnipotence learning, flowing, evolving, making mistakes, this is the only way it can be.

I articulate this all in the hope that I can move on and live my life blissfully aware of what almost surely lies ahead, that this too shall pass.

They sat in silence for a time, swaying with the breeze, sunlight moving in dappled patterns over their forms.

“I hope that in other labs of the Cosmos, the experiments are yielding different results.” said the young grasshopper.

“Me too,” said the lily. “Me too.”

There are many key elements that differentiate humans from the rest of the living world.  On a systemic level, our intellect, our memory, and our creativity put us in a different category from all other Life on Earth.  In material and emotional ways our desire and compulsive drive to make sense of the actions and intents of others holds the duplicitous position of (possibly) being our greatest and worst feature.

Our brains have an innate tendency and capacity to assimilate observations, experience, context and memory into a narrative stream that becomes the story-line of our life.  We construct stories about what led up to an experience, what will happen after an experience, and what is going on during an interaction or experience.  This narrative drive penetrates to the core of all people — I would argue it is a fundamental human characteristic, seen across all cultures, professions, orientations, and intelligences.  It spans across arbitrary scales of time, from moment to moment — “Why did he/she say that?”  "This is why X is happening to me.“ — up to the time scales of civilization — "We are the chosen people.”  "Our country has played such-and-such a role in human history.“ "Where is history taking us?”

Frequently, during that process of narrative construction we make two fundamental errors in reasoning that permit us to portray and/or distort that narrative such that we are always the victim and / or hero of our own narrative – or said differently, these distortions seemingly permit us to live in the cognitive duality of believing we acted with our best self while not being intellectually honest in our examination of our actions or alternative potential actions. That we seek to (nearly) always create the narrative as such seems justifiable in a sense … it is difficult to imagine telling ourselves the story of our own life and not feeling like we are doing the right thing most of the time (unless we are sociopathic). Often, if we do look back and question our behavior, we will distort the narrative of ourselves and others to post-dictively justify our behavior — hence why intellectual honesty and integrity are so critical to authenticity, moral character, and emotional intelligence.  At their core, these errors hinder our ability to be honest with ourselves and compassionate with everyone else.

The first fundamental error is that we assume, usually on little more than our immediate observations, that we have enough data to infer the narrative of anyone but ourselves.  For instance, we observe a momentary action of another, perceive it to slight or offend us or go against a value we hold, and then instantaneously create a narrative that vilifies that actor or calls their character or intent into question.  Similarly, we might perceive actions or words of others as complimentary or supportive of our own narrative, when they may in fact be critical, neutral, or irrelevant.  To my mind, the truth is, as is known by those in deep emotional relationships with others, it is extraordinarily rare that we have enough context and understanding of another’s personal history and values to spin and follow their narrative thread, or to have any real insight into the motivations and intentions of others.  Yet we continually assume and impose a narrative of our own construction onto other people’s actions. We believe we know intent of another’s actions or words, and we discount the multitude of alternative reasons that could explain actions of another without vilifying them.  Presumably, this is because acknowledging this lack of understanding of another’s narrative: (a) is unsettling in so much as it leaves us without a narrative context (i.e. narrative ignorance) — in the absence of knowing another’s narrative which weaves with and affects the course of our lives, it becomes difficult to construct and maintain our own narrative, thereby assailing our identity and the context in which we make the choices on which our character is built, (b) calls into question the validity of our own narrative in which we are wronged or superior in some way — this opens up the possibility that we are not the hero or the victim, that our actions or words were not as good or wise or justifiable as we imagined, which might cause us to question if we are as good or smart or consistent as we imagine we are, and © it cripples our ability to infer intent and meaning in other people’s actions which hinders our ability to make our own, well-informed and rational choices that feel good and justified. This error in logic also harkens to a possible axis (of many) along which our personalities traverse – that true balance between the extremes of self-pity (victim) and arrogance (hero) is an unstable equilibrium that requires constant work to maintain, and not everyone has the capacity, insight, or stamina to do that continual work (though I think/hope/have to believe that given a genuine desire, anyone can pull them selves into that state of unstable equilibrium).

The second fundamental error is that we create, bond with, and maintain a single narrative — usually the ego-centric hero/victim narrative.  We do not typically attempt to create alternative narratives that are simultaneously consistent with our observations and our ignorance, and portray the intents and actions of others in a (more) favorable light, unless that narrative also portrays our own actions and intents in a favorable light.  Of course, in any system or situation with imperfect knowledge of context and history — which is every situation and system — there will be multiple possible narratives consistent with current knowledge.  Yet rather than engaging in the intellectually honest work of generating alternative narratives from different view points, we choose the easiest and more self-favorable narrative.  That choice of narrative is often unfair to everyone else, myopic of the complexity of real life and real people, and ultimately, leads us to behave in ways that only reinforce our view of ourselves as victims or heroes, leading to self pity or arrogance, respectively, both of which should be avoided by those seeking balanced, compassionate, and integrious characters – i.e. characters consistent with their best values and evident by their normal actions. As a scientist, I see this as being akin to articulating multiple hypotheses that are consistent with current data, and between which, in the absence of more data, no one hypothesis emerges as necessarily more plausible – often those mutually consistent hypotheses each may lead to drastically different assessments of our own and other’s actions – a sobering thought when considered in light of the fact that we make life altering decisions based on a single, biased narrative hypothesis.  I want to be the kind of person that has the patience, compassion, and capacity to genuinely entertain multiple narratives, and maybe even generate decisions that are based on this more pluralistic vision of what the hell is happening around me.

While I stand behind all of these ideas (and of course, this is, in a sense, its own narrative), I am not really sure what to do about it, except maybe be more easy going, not read into the actions of others, and not tie my sense of self worth and life direction so strongly to the personal identity that requires constant inference and maintenance of my own and others’ narratives.  Pragmatically, in my current mindset that means removing expectations about people and situations – I see expectations as punctuated narratives drawn from a biased view of prior experience and applied to current context for the purpose of making narrative construction easier, and almost surely, more error prone.  Lastly, I want to call into question my own narrative more frequently – thus far I have found that to be the hardest thing I have ever done, but immensely valuable.  It is a strange basal value to have – that is – to hold as a primal value the questioning of one’s own narrative whose dynamic trajectory sets the course of decisions and actions that lead to the adoption of other primal values.  Maybe honesty, uncertainty, flexibility and patience have a stronger link than I once realized.

Here’s to giving one less fuck every day! :)

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
– Arthur C. Clarke

In the context of my professional scientific training and the personal value I place in the Scientific Method this is a heretical post. While I am a strict physicalist, there are limits to what Science can tell us, at least in part because there are things that are, as far as we can tell, unknowable. In fact (so to speak), there are different classes of unknowable things. At the top of the ignorance food-chain one might reference Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, colloquially put: Godel proved that there exist true statements which are impossible for us to know are true using any normal mathematical/logical system; he effectively proved the inherent ignorance of deductive reasoning . In his book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris describes the concept of factual realities that can, for all practical purposes, never be known.  For instance, you can ask: between exactly 12:01 am and 11:59 pm today, how many people on Earth were bitten by mosquitoes (assuming some reasonable definition of “bitten”)?  There is a single number that is the right answer – let’s say 3,223,541 people were bitten. We can estimate this value (we won’t here), but humanity could devote virtually limitless time and effort and never truly know exactly how many people were bitten – there are just too many variables and much of the data required to actually know this value simply does not exist, it was never recorded. Then there’s uncomputable numbers, that is, numbers whose exact enumeration would take an infinite number of operations on a perfect Turing Machine. There are proofs that show that certain physical systems cannot be described analytically by a closed mathematical form (e.g. the states of 3D Ising Model) and the related larger space of problems in computational complexity (i.e. P vs. NP).  And then there’s chaotic systems, the simplest of which is the double pendulum. The dynamic trajectory of such systems is, frustratingly, deterministic, but depends so sensitively on initial conditions that predicting the motion over long time periods is impossible.  These are all concrete physical and/or mathematical examples of unknowable and/or unprovable, but true things; or said differently, physical systems for which precise information about the system exists but is unknowable.

To be clear, this does not mean that we are completely ignorant about these systems. Indeed, we can compute / simulate many measurables about them, but the amount of work (read: actual energy or number of computational operations) to reach those answers depends on the desired level of precision. Whatever the limitations, we can conceptualize ‘the space of all knowable things’, that is, the contiguous information space of all knowledge accessible with our current methods, limited energy for computation, and understanding of what is possible. The point is that from the logocentric perspective of our human-sized, neurologically wired brains, it appears that that knowledge space has limits.  Accordingly, from our point of view that space is all that can be known, even though we know that there is hypothetical knowledge beyond those limits. Many people would assert that this post should stop there, with a kind of ontological circular argument that all that can be known is all that can be known, and thus considering anything past that is folly.  Let the heresy begin – let’s now consider, against the proofs and assertions of people much smarter than me, that there is a body of information (call them ‘facts’, ‘algorithms’, ‘technologies’ etc) that in a grander sense could be known if we had better tools, bigger brains, massively expanded intuition, or a fundamentally different understanding of reality (ignoring the very real possibility that we are simply wrong about what we think can and cannot be known). 

As an attempt to illustrate this concept let’s consider two examples.  I have three wonderful cats:  Zorro, Purry, and Handsome.  Sometimes I imagine that if I could speak ‘Meowish’ I might try to explain new concepts to them and see what they think about them.  “Hey Zorro, did you know that we live on a rocky spherical planet orbiting an average-sized star that we call the Sun in a galaxy about 100,000 light years across?”  I have serious doubts that no matter how fluent I am in Meowish, no matter how masterfully I explained these concepts, no matter how small I broke down the ideas, their brains are incapable of understanding nearly every abstract concept in that question.  Second example:  very soon we might create artificial intelligence whose ability to integrate the sum of human knowledge and rapidly test hypotheses through simulation endows it with an intuitive understanding of reality that dwarfs that of any single human, maybe even humankind.  From the point of view of my cats, the average human is god-like in their understanding of the world and is capable of knowing, understanding, and controlling reality in a way that no cat can.  From the point of view of my (reasonably) speculated AI, we are cat-like in our understanding of reality – its cognitive capabilities place it on another plane of existence, god-like you might say.  

Cats and humans are biologically essentially identical and in terms of our definition of sentience and agency, humans are just barely past the dividing line between Life that can understand its place and move with agency in the Universe and Life that is blissfully unaware of all but the most salient features of its environment and the corresponding influences on its survival. That fact should humbly remind us that we, and our offspring (liberally defined), have a lot to learn.  I wonder if even that understanding, that I / we perceive to be so important – between what we conceive of as sentient living systems and unconscious self-reproducing goo – is actually its own opaque barrier between our current state and a far deeper, more holistic, and penetrating view of physical reality – i.e. to potential god-like lifeforms, we are the unconscious, self-replicating goo.  

In the search for the existence of that deeper truth, understanding, or a chance to touch the unknowable, people turn to all kinds of systems of belief.  Broadly, my personal classification is that those systems are either falsifiable or unjustifiable.  Reasonable examples of the former include believing that the alignment of planets or division of the heavens (the Zodiac) have, through their gravitational effects or other mechanisms-at-a-distance, anything to do with who you are as a person.  Put that in contrast to a back-of-the-envelope calculation showing that who was standing around you at birth is far more gravitationally important than planetary alignments, or simply skipping over the obvious fact that the time of year you were born has many other salient correlates like light levels, temperature, or available foods, all of which affect your development and propensities. Another example is the erroneous notion that water has any kind of molecular memory for, or health relevant qualities from, a now absent molecular species. For the latter classification, I gloss over the largest can of worms and roundly put theistic religions in the ‘unjustifiable’ category without further discussion – you can keep your faith, I’ll employ my evidence and mechanism.  (I like this possibly apocryphal quote from Laplace)  All that said, anything – be it religion or psychedelic drugs – that alters how your neurons fire might well bring with it a noticeable expansion of one’s personal knowledge space. I wager practitioners of either school would attest to such – I certainly do.

The point in all this posturing and discussion is that our knowledge space has bounds, likely imposed by the very structure and capabilities of our brains, yet maybe there is far more that can be known by entities with greater capacities. Consider then that in terms of biological structure and mechanisms, the cat brain and the human brain are essentially the same, and thus if the relatively minor differences in brain size and connectivity produce god-like differences in organismal consciousness, how easy would it be to imagine a life form with god-like capabilities above ours and how much larger and qualitatively distinct might the differences in comprehension and control of physical reality be?  And if sentient Life emerged elsewhere in the cosmos, a billion years ahead of us, it could be incomprehensibly more advanced in its technology and understanding of reality, so much so, that it would not be possible for us to understand, replicate, or even use its technologies, anymore than a cat can consciously surf the internet or a chimpanzee can comprehend regular perturbations of non-linear partial differential equations.  In that context, now consider Arthur C. Clarke’s quote … “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  These beings, their methods and capabilities, and their influence on our reality would be magical, and because it might employ knowledge that we could never attain or comprehend (i.e. on the time scale of human civilizations), it would remain magical and mysterious no matter how much effort we put into understanding it.  The real mind fuck is that it would (or could) still be rooted in physical reality, meaning: a true source of magic, as far as we can ascertain, whose fundamental workings are still and will always remain real and physical.

With all this in mind I begrudgingly admit that these concepts force me to consider the possibility of (physical) beings so advanced that they are effectively gods – relative to us their knowledge gives them omniscience and their technology gives them omnipotence. If we haven’t met them yet, let’s hope they are also omnibenevolent. Though, mostly likely (imo) they simply will not give us much consideration – benevolent or malevolent – in much the same way that we rarely try to have meaningful conversations with an ant colony. We may not even comprehend their presence, in much the same way that I doubt ants are aware of our presence beyond basic notions of threat and large scale environmental influences. To my mind, the other interesting possibility is that, like the plants we tend in our gardens, we are, right now, being tended without awareness of our conscious minds, in the same way that a plant can have so much care put into its cultivation and never have any ‘idea’ that there is a gardener – it just ‘sees’ its version of physical reality:  it’s hot or cold, dry or wet, nourishing or starving, competing or cooperating – the plant lives in the only physical realities it has ever known.  My personal hope is that if such beings exist, they are capable of communicating their presence in a way that we can understand … oh, fuck, may that’s what supernatural is?! :\ 

The ability to test a hypothesis, to measure a difference between an idea and reality is, for the physicalist or anyone else that values objective reality, the definition of knowledge and the defining line between mechanistic and predictive understanding and the realm of the unknowable and the uncontrollable that we call magic. Therefore, I assert that when our ability to perform measurements and gain the knowledge that empowers distinction between science and magic disappears, science and magic cease to be separate – physical reality and magic are one and the same at the edge of what can be known.  

And as for possible implications for an afterlife, in some form, let me get back to you … 

(photo credits: Mr. Wuffles)

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
– Edward Abbey

In 1862 a Scottish physicist named William Thomson posed a conceptually simple question to determine the age of the Earth.  If at some point in the past the Earth was a molten globule of rock and metal, with a given heat capacity and initial temperature, how long would it take to cool to its current, surface-hardened state?  People had suspected, based on geologic features on Earth’s surface and the expected time required for the newly proposed theory of Evolution, that Earth was very old, that is, far older than religious texts suggested.  After some back and forth with other scientists of the time, the Earth’s age was estimated to be 30 million years (though estimates ranged from 15-120 million).  While this may seem extremely young in comparison to the modern, accepted value of 4.54 billion years, this was blasphemously and stupefyingly old in comparison to the Biblical age of only a few thousand years.  Despite that, why did this seemingly reasonable calculation fail so spectacularly at estimating the true age of the Earth?  It would take another 34 years for Henri Becquerel to discover the key:  radioactivity.  While performing experiments where he used uranium salts to develop film in the absence of light, he realized that uranium was spontaneously giving off energy in an unknown form.

The problem with the calculation was that it did not account for the 44 terawatts of heat generated within Earth’s interior (by comparison world electrical consumption is 5-6 terawatts).  The energy released from nuclear decay of Uranium accounts for approximately 20 terawatts, the decay of thorium and potassium account for another 4 terawatts, and the remaining 20 terawatts are thought to be generated by a combination of settling of denser material within the Earth’s interior, tidal forces from the Sun and Moon, and latent heat from crystallization of the molten metal core.  Though the solar energy reaching Earth is far greater than 44 terawatts (by a factor 5,000), Earth’s latent heat is still an enormous and abundant energy source, if only Life could utilize it, but how and where would this happen?

In 2006, scientists were working in a small shaft of the Mponeng gold mine in South Africa, 3.6 kilometers below the surface, where heat from the Earth drives the temperature to a toasty 45 C.  Despite the depth and distance from any large body of water, fissures in the rock were wet.  Analysis of the water revealed DNA belonging to a new species of bacteria, dubbed Desulfotomaculum.  Radioactive dating indicated that the rock had been isolated from the surface for at least 20 million years, without any obvious food source for the bacteria.  In addition to heating the rock and thus keeping water in liquid form, radioactive decay in Earth’s mantle produces high energy alpha particles.  Water molecules are composed of a stable mixture of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, but the impact of a high-velocity alpha particle against a water molecule is capable of splitting water into molecular hydrogen and oxygen.  The basalt rock of the mine contains sulfur-bearing minerals, which react with molecular hydrogen to form hydrogen sulfide gas, which the bacteria use as an energy source, similar to the bacteria of the cold seeps.  Through an indirect mechanism, these bacteria were living off the inherent radioactivity of planet Earth.  This was an astonishing discovery – organisms that could flourish with absolutely no input from the Sun.

Five years later, scientists working in the same mine were examining rocks specimens, and were startled to see something small and black wiggling in the rock.  They had discovered a new species of nematode worm, dubbed Halicephalobus mephisto.   It was about half a millimeter long, could withstand high temperatures, and seemed unperturbed by the extremely low levels of oxygen in the rock, but what was it eating?  Those same bacteria, Desulfotomaculum.  Science had now found the beginnings a simple food chain deep below the surface of Earth that had no dependence on the Sun.  There is nothing to suggest that there is anything special about the environment found inside this gold mine, which begs the question:  might there be a biologically diverse ecosystem within the crust of the Earth itself, whose potential size dwarfs all other known biospheres?  What new biochemical processes might be happening there?

(An electron micrograph of the nematode worm, Halicephalobus mephisto, found deep in a South African gold mine.)

One after another, examples of organisms thriving far from the Sun’s influence started popping up.  Researchers working off the coast of Washington state reported early in 2013 that after nearly 7 years of culturing, they had successfully shown bacteria growing in deep oceanic crust, hundreds of meters below the sea floor, without light or oxygen.  Then in August of 2013, geochemists reported finding bacteria, fungi, and viruses in core samples from deep ocean sediments, except they were older, in two different ways, than anyone had imagined.  Dating of the local rock indicated the sediment was approximately 100 million years old, making it one of the oldest habitats for life found anywhere on earth.  Due to low levels of nutrients and a correspondingly low metabolism, it is estimated that the lifecycle of these microbes is about 10,000 years, which would make them the oldest living creatures to be continually reproducing on Earth (as compared to clonal plants like the Pando Grove, and organisms in various states of stasis).

Even before these discoveries, strange new bacteria had been found living at depths of 2.9 kilometers in oil shale deposits of the Taylorsville Triassic Rift Basin in the US.  Radioactive dating estimated that the rock here had been isolated for an astonishing 130 million years.  There, heat from the Earth keeps temperatures at 76 C, approaching the boiling point of water.  For perspective, the last time the ancestors of these bacteria saw the surface, dinosaurs still had 60 million years left as the ruling animal life form on Earth.  The bacteria survived with no input from the Sun by converting iron oxides in the surrounding rock into a more stable form, called magnetite.  It seems bacteria have evolved multiple biochemical pathways to utilize distinct sources of energy deep within the Earth. 

However, the biochemical processes of deep earth microbes were not limited to how they found energy, but also how they survived with each other.  In 1986, cavers searching near Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico uncovered the entrance to what would become the 6th largest cave in the world, called Lechuguilla Cave.  To date, speologists have mapped nearly 225 kilometers of passages and uncovered one of the most pristine and unique cave environments on Earth.  Huge formations of gypsum were found in perfect condition deep within the cave (see below), and to date 93 new species of bacteria have been found within the cave, using biochemistry to utilize local occurrences of iron, sulfur, and manganese.  Though distantly related to surface species, these bacteria had never seen modern day antibiotics, like penicillin, and yet when scientists grew them in the presence of normally effective dosages of 26 modern antibiotics, more than 70% showed resistance (i.e. the ability to propagate in the presence of the antibiotic).  This made the intriguing suggestion that many of the same biochemical routes of attack used in modern medicine have been in the chemical arsenal of bacteria for eons.   

In May of 2013, free-flowing water samples were collected from the Timmins Mine in Ontario, Canada, whose rock is part of the Canadian Shield – one of the oldest and most expansive rock formations on Earth.  When scientists dated the noble gas composition in the water, they found it had been isolated for not less than 1.2 billion years and as much as 2.6 billion years.  For reference, the last common ancestor of all living animals was a “mere” 600 million years ago.  This water dates from a truly prehistoric time when the atmosphere had a drastically different composition, the continents had not yet separated, and life on Earth was in its microbial infancy.  The water contained constituents necessary for life, and while scientists have not yet reported finding life in this setting, many anticipate they will.  If found, they would be, by far, the oldest and most isolated living organisms known on planet Earth.

(Two billion-year-old water bubbles up from a hole in the base of the Timmins Mine, Ontario Canada.)

As a physicist, there is a small, but haunting possibility that the limitations in our understanding of physical reality are more rooted in a systemic misunderstanding or mis-characterization of reality than in some fundamental difficulty of unraveling the mysteries of the Universe. Illuminating analogies are made to demonstrate this, the oldest and most famous of which is Plato’s Cave, suggesting that our past experiences bias our ability to observe what is plainly in front of us.  More recently Feynman’s chess analogy expounded on this, namely, that as intelligent, curious beings we seek to understand the mechanism behind our observations, and thus, using the scientific method, we build a useful, self-consistent, and utterly “wrong” model of reality (hence the name of this website).

Similarly there is the idea that our perception is limited by our intelligence, and so what seems complex or perplexing (e.g. the economy) to a being of limited intelligence, like an ant (or caterpillar), would be intuitively and immediately obvious to a being of sufficient intelligence (e.g. hyper-intelligent computers or aliens).  We believe we are at the top of the intellectual heap, but that is a biased perspective and many (including me) believe we will either create or encounter an intelligence that dwarfs that of any single human.  Much of this bias stems from our collective arrogance that our own consciousness gives us insight into the consciousness of other beings, when in fact, as argued by Nagel, it likely does not, or at least, not in a way that can be semantically analogized.  I also recently read this blog post which made a similar point in the spiritual realm and this finally spurred me to congeal these thoughts.  Enjoy. 

The other day I read one of the best blog posts I have ever read and felt compelled to share it.  If this doesn’t put things into perspective, I don’t know what will.

The only issue I take with the arguments made in the post is that, much like humans have spent a lot of time studying simpler life forms, I imagine Type III super-intelligences might stop by to see what we’re all about, and it seems extremely unlikely that we would not notice.  But as the blog asserts – maybe we just have it all wrong, and it has either already happened, is happening but we haven’t realized it yet, or we’re simply incapable of noticing :)

It conjures a certain class of frustration to think of all the things that can be quantitatively defined but lie far from intuitive grasp. For instance, every second of every day since the Earth was born some 4.54 billion years ago, the Sun pumps out 10^26 Watts of power in the form of light and broader spectrum electromagnetic radiation. 10^17 watts reach across the 150,000,000 kilometers of empty space to Earth; warming it, keeping water in liquid form, and sustaining life. The engine of this inconceivable power is the nuclear fusion of 620,000,000 metric tons of hydrogen every second. I don’t know about you, but I have no intuitive grasp for those numbers beyond the sense that they make me feel small.

Earth’s unique composition – its water, its relatively balanced pH, and its atmosphere – provides a hospitable place for life, but with such an abundant and persistent source of energy as the Sun, one has to wonder … is there any ecosystem on Earth that could survive (or even flourish) without it? If the Sun were to suddenly poof out of existence, would all life on our planet cease at the impending, eternal dark ice-age? 

In reality a different fate awaits life on Earth; as the Sun ages over next few hundred million years, its luminosity will increase (see figure below) which will slowly evaporate nearly all the water from Earth’s surface, leaving it a hot, lifeless rock … maybe. Being the above-ground, land-loving creatures that we are, it can be hard to imagine where and by what means life could exist without the Sun. However, not only are there whole ecosystems outside the Sun’s influence, but their age, robustness, and potential size are astonishing. 

To thrive without the Sun would require special molecular machinery; life as we are familiar with it here on the surface is based on a food chain that starts with microscopic photosynthetic organisms – mainly plants, algae, and cyanobacteria – that all rely on the Sun. Through a complex web of evolved, metabolic connections, those “lower” life forms are consumed and form the tissues and energy sources for higher organisms (e.g. humans). No matter where you look on Earth it seems that microbes serve vital roles in their local ecosystems, a unifying biological principle that remains true even when solar energy is non-existent. 

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It seems popular to think that we are uniformly more advanced than people hundreds of years ago; that the modern age of electronics and computation puts us in a position of technical prowess second to none in man’s historical lineage.  However, I keep finding examples of technical craftsmanship, in many cases before the advent of modern machining and its attendant reproducible precision, that call this view point into question.

For instance, when was the last time that someone built a device that could, with such fine mechanical control and acoustic fidelity, mimic the complex call of a bird:

Obviously, today we can record and playback a bird call, but creating this sound de novo from metal and hammer blows seems a unique challenge.  Then there was the odd combination of feathered miniaturization, acoustic fidelity, and mechanization of animal movement, again devoted to birds, that created one of the stranger automata of the 19th century, the Singing Bird Pistols.

Though for me, the most amazing such mechanical wonder of yore is the The Writer built by Pierre Jaquet-Droz in the late 18th century.  It truly baffles me to think not only of hand crafting the nearly 6000 parts required to power and guide the The Writer, but also the incredible forethought and intelligence required to design, assemble, and then trouble shoot this amazing feat of mechanical dynamics.  I would challenge any single mechanical engineer alive today to produce a machine of equal or greater complexity and precision (and for bonus points, without the use of a computer!)

Also, I think the machine has better hand writing than I do.  Finally, while it is not the most complex machine ever built by hand, any mention of ancient mechanisms must pay homage to what is surely the oldest and one of the most complex machines of the ancient world:  The Antikythera Mechanism.  Built some 21 centuries ago, it is an enigmatic machine of startling complexity and accuracy; it was used to predict solar and lunar cycles, as well as eclipses using the Saros cycle. Again, the ingenuity of ancient man shocks me into a state of near disbelief – not only did they collect and correctly analyze the astronomical data and then synthesize those data into mathematical models of the heavens, but then they were able to reconstitute those models into a bewildering mechanical form.  

It frustrates me tremendously that we cannot run multiple experiments of history (a longer philosophical topic), but still I wonder, how would the world be different and where would we be today if the technical advancements embodied in this machine had not sunk to the depths off the coast of a small Greek island 1600 years before the invention of the first self-contained and accurate mechanical clock?  

Maybe the answer is that these would have been invented 1600 years earlier. Before we get too high on our technological horse, it behooves us to remember both the genius and devotion of ancient machinists, clock makers, and artisans.  I wonder how long it would (will?) take us to redevelop their techniques if (when?) the lights go out.

People are always so concerned with extensive quantities – How big is it!?  How fast is it!?  How much does it cost!?  Sometimes, it’s interesting to consider the record holders from an intensive point of view.  The distinction between extensive and intensive is oft and aptly made in physics, but it is useful in regular life as well.  Extensive quantities scale with the size of the thing or system being considered, like mass or volume, whereas intensive quantities tell you something that is true about every part of the system on any scale, like density or pressure or temperature – at equilibrium (let’s not get bogged down in technical details) all the intensive properties of a system are equal in all parts of the system.

For example, human beings are generally acknowledged as the smartest lifeforms on the planet (though I think we have a serious judgement bias), but that’s just one way of seeing things … how about asking, what’s the smartest life form for its mass?  Or in other words, what life form has the highest IQ/lbs?  Surely a hard thing to measure, and still harder to adjudicate the winner from all the small, but deft creatures on our lovely planet, but I would like to enter the following little beastie as a contender.

This is the jumping spider Portia labiata:

After reading this story, I could not help but wonder if this tiny arachnid was about as intelligent as something could be for its size.  I mean, there are only so many neurons one can pack into a given volume, and while I am sure ‘intelligence’ is a non-linear function of the number of neurons wired together, this little guy has some pretty amazing powers of analysis and planning.  [edit: later Sir David and his colleagues made this lovely video of Portia during an actual hunt … superb.]

The Peacock Spider.

Then I saw this video by a naturalist in Australia, and, while not the same species of jumping spider (but same genus), I was struck by its behavior and beauty.  Watch the video, and just try not to anthropomorphize this tiny creature – as the mating dance is about to begin, the excitement is palpable.  Additionally, not only am I a sucker for iridescence, which this spider has in spades, but did you see the pattern on his display piece!?  It’s a colorful picture of … a spider! (or at least I think so) So cool!  I love evolution.  But again, one would not expect to find this kind of complex, interactive behavior in an arachnid; heck, it’s surprising to see it in animals ~20,000 times larger. (David Attenborough, if you’re reading this, I love you so much.)

Finally, it is possible that once we learn more about their behavior, I may have to switch my vote on the little guy on the left.  It is baffling to think that on one branch of the tree of life a whole organism with wings, a brain, reproductive organs, legs and eyes is as large as a single celled organism on another branch.

One of many positive aspects of living in downtown San Francisco is that it is a dynamic and breathing street art gallery, as aptly demonstrated by one of my favorite blogs … the picture below is from a nearby alley, whose porticos are covered in fantastic street art.