A Little More on those Aliens

"Sometimes I think we are alone, sometimes I don't. Either way the the thought is staggering"
Buckminster Fuller

The presence of extraterrestrials in the popular imagination is a testament to the plasticity of the human imagination. One could argue that fictional ETs are simply reworking myths of angels and demons. Alternatively one can say they are essentially new myth - one that is elementally modern (similar, perhaps, to narratives of Artificial Intelligence battling their human creators). Either way stories of civilizations in space composed of human looking creatures (with prosthetic foreheads to make them look a tad different) or bags of protoplasm form a staple of our culture's stable of possible futures. All this without a single shred of evidence that they exist.

Stories matter. Stories are how we understand ourselves and set our individual and collective life into context, creating meaning, establishing purpose and building relationship. At the highest level our collective narratives rise to the level Myth. As Joesph Campbell, Mirce Eliade and others have stressed our dependence on Myth have never gone away in our march to modernism. It just went underground reappearing in "that fantasy factory" (as Eliade called it) of movies and novels. In this sense it is important to pay close attention to both the science and fiction of SETI as well as astrobiology. And, in this sense, the introduction of sustainability issues into astrobiological thinking marks a turning point, a maturation perhaps, in our thinking.

Beyond the infinite futures of Star Trek, beyond the dystopia of the Terminator, beyond the easy optimism or quick despair we awaken to what might be universal for technological societies - limits and their consequences. We still don't know what sustainability means. We have no examples of technological societies that are sustainable over long timescales (is it even possible?). All of these questions however will be solved first in the imagination for that is where all creativity begins. Our first steps into thinking about sustainability, SETI and astrobiology represent an opening of the imagination.

Where are all the Aliens?

Thinking about SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is a fascinating exercise in thinking about about civilization. This link is inevitable because any rational search strategy forces you to consider what civilizations do, how they evolve and, most importantly, how long they last. Back when nuclear war was our biggest worry the question of civilizations' endurance always seemed to hing on its bellicosity. Our new found recognition of climate change and the limits to growth changes that perspective. Now we have to ask if there is something fundamental to the very agent which makes civilization seem possible which can, in turn, threaten it - technology.

To that end I want to share with you a paper I have been reading that I found on the astrophysics preprint server. The paper is called THE SUSTAINABILITY SOLUTION TO THE FERMI PARADOX and its authors Haqq-Misra & Baum have been remarkably creative in merging SETI with our new concerns. The Fermi paradox is an old conundrum (which may not have really started with Fermi) that asks, essentially "If ETs exist, why aren't they here already?" The idea is that if one assumes an exponential expansion of a star-faring civilization then unless things just got started everywhere in the galaxy civilization-wise, we should already have been overrun by little green friends.

Haqq-Misra & Baum have an answer for this that comes from our new understanding about limits to growth. Here is their abstract.

No present observations suggest a technologically advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) has spread through the galaxy. However, under commonplace assumptions about galactic civilization formation and expansion, this absence of observation is highly unlikely. This improbability is the heart of the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox leads some to conclude that humans have the only advanced civilization in this galaxy, either because civilization formation is very rare or because intelligent civilizations inevitably destroy themselves. In this paper, we argue that this conclusion is premature by introducing the “Sustainability Solution” to the Fermi Paradox, which questions the Paradox’s assumption of faster (e.g. exponential) civilization growth. Drawing on insights from the sustainability of human civilization on Earth, we propose that faster-growth may not be sustainable on the galactic scale. If this is the case, then there may exist ETI that have not expanded throughout the galaxy or have done so but collapsed. These possibilities have implications for both searches for ETI and for human civilization management

I will let you read the rest for yourself and see what you think.

A Difficult Truth

I have been traveling for the last week or so. Mostly Southern California which also seems like some kind of weird, alien landscape for my Northeastern sensibilities. If you come from industrial New Jersey, having all that beach unoccupied seems post-apocalyptic. Where are the wall-to-wall blankets? Where are the boom-boxes every 5 feet? Even with the miles of highways that double as parking lots its hard not to see what drew so many people to LA and its environs.

Which brings me to a point I have been thinking about as I start working on my next book. Sedentism, Agriculture and City building. The last great sheets of glaciers receded about 12,000 - 10,000 years ago. As the impossibly vast and mile high planes of ice retreated back to their polar warrens our ancestors slowly began a shift in culture that shifted the balance of Earth's biological force.

From archaeological digs in the hills of Israel to the plains of France a portrait of our transition from small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gathers to large dense populations of hierarchical structured city dwellers is emerging. The change in consciousness which came with this transition is also being explored as scientists try to piece together how value became materialized in objects like gold amulets conferring status and power. Finding measures of value, systems of weights for example, constituted both technological and conceptual revolutions. The world went from a matrix we were embedded in to a reservoir of materials that served our purposes.

As the small collections of permanent dwellings that characterized the beginning of agriculture transformed in permanent villages which then became complex cities the framework for our globe spanning culture was laid. Now from space the spiderweb of lights illuminating how city building consciousness has transformed the globe can be seen from orbit. We have come a very long way, in a very short time.

As with all things scientific the purpose, for me at least, in these archaeological investigations is to make the mundane stand out, to make what is right beneath our noses become strange again, become worthy of notice. What we call civilization was not pre-determined, it is not the result of an inevitable progress of evolution. Instead what we inherited is the results of a long series of choices. This is an important point because we have some very hard choices staring us down right now. These are choices about how we want to live, how we want to structure our civilization so that it might become sustainable for the long run. That is what sets this moment apart from all those which preceded it.

Our city building ancestors make their choices deliberately but without a planetary context. And so we ended up with London, LA, Tokyo, Hong Kong and the 100,000 kilometers of industrial supply chains which feed them. Now, in just a few short decades we have woken up to the consequences of our choices for the blue world which supports all this frenetic activity. Those choices for the next civilization will likely not be so unconstrained.

Feeding The Priests: Science, Religion and Society

So the NASA proposal on star formation is finished and has been committed to the great unknown of the review process. Now that's done I am reflecting on how cultures throughout history (and prehistory) have kept those charged with "truth-making" in business.

Modern society spends a lot on its scientists and there are lots of us. Some of us work on very practical applications of science designed to make people healthier, more productive and, perhaps, happier. Some of us work on big questions with no practicle applciation. Either way, in many ways science functions as a priesthood in the big mythological sense of bringing the culture a sense of what is true and real in the world and offering some control over that world.

Did other societies have as large as "priestly class" as we have? Whatever the proportion of that class relative to the society as a whole how where their activities funded? How was the culture's "treasure" apportioned to the people who were responsible for dealing with the culture's unseen truths (Gods, spirits, etc). Throughout time there have been shamans, temple priests, monastics and monasteries. Sometimes these were highly organized with great amounts of wealth committed to their development (think the churches of medieval Europe or the mountain monasteries of Buddhist china). How does our activity compare with theirs? The impulsive in both cases has similar imperatives even if the effect is very different.

We have been at this truth game for a long, long time. How is the nuts and bolts of funding the truth-makers similar? How has it changed?

Science and Money: The Process

While its good to think on the large scales about science, art, spiritual endeavor and the search for the True and the Real, sometimes it's the day to day that matters. There are the scales on which metaphysics and the grand ideals of science exist and then there is the writing of your latest NASA grant. For the last week I have forsaken the former and have been living with the latter.

I have been to the mountain and have seen how laws, sausage and science funding is made. The truth is, it ain't so bad. After years of this I am still quite amazed at how well the system can works.

Science funding moves in a pretty straight forward way. You have an idea, you find out which funding agency the idea relates to best (NASA, the NSF, DOE, NIH, the alphabet soap goes on and and on). Then you figure out which program in that agency is right one to apply to (Astrophysical Data Program, Origins, AstroBiology, Living with a Star etc etc - these are NASA programs). Next you give up a couple of weeks of your life to write up a 15 page proposals with figures and equations. The proposal needs a decent narrative and a good balance of showing what your group has done and showing what you think you could get done in 3 years of funding. Then, if you are lucky, you have a talented administrative staff to help you navigate the pages and pages of government-issue forms and tables. Finally you send it in and light a candle at the alter of St. Euler who watches over grant proposals on astrophysical fluid dynamics. Then you wait and wait and wait.

It takes about a 9 months for the grants agency to get back to you. During that time a review committee gets selected and flown in from all over the country to discuss and rank the giant stack proposals the agency must deal with. The funding rate is usually somewhere between 10% (ugh) and 30% (ugh still but better). These panels are where the rubber meets the road meets the suasage making.

I have satt on a lot of these panels and for the most part I have to say they work. It is a most fascinating exercise to see the very human politics which goes into the search for eternal timeless truths. People have their biases. Some argue their case better than others. Sometimes a strong or well known personality can dominate the process. Still, in spite of all our foibles, it almost always seems that the best science gets recognized and rises to the top. I have always been impressed by this and it gives me faith that we have stumbled on something, some genuine workable means to organize the effort to understand the world.

Of course those proposals at the top don't always get funded. There simply is not enough money to fund the best ones that deserve funding (which I would estimate make up about a third of the proposals). Hopefully that will change with the new administration.

So that is how it works and if you ask me, in general it does work. I have had lots of proposals fail and enough proposals make it and overall I think the system is as fair as it can be.

But there is an important caveat here. I am writing about grants on the scale of an individual scientist or her group. When we talk large projects like the Large Hadron Collider or the International Space Station all this changes. Politics with a capitol P enters the picture in a big way. Projects on that scale, with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on the line operate in a different realm. It is at that level that one can ask how the balance between science and other, less scientific, demands are managed.

The search for truth and spending of a nations treasure - how do they overlap? How do they balance?

Crazy Science

In his insightful book "The Trouble With Physics" Lee Smolin made the case that something has gone wrong with physics, the queen of science, over the last 40 years. In Smolin's view the last generation of effort in theoretical physics (at least those who study "fundamental physics") has stalled.

After centuries in which each generation uncovered some deeper and more elemental character of physical reality than the last (gravity, electromagnetism, statistical physics, relativity, quantum theory) the endeavor has lost its momentum. In the 40 years since the basic elements of the standard model of particle physics was put in place no deeper insight into the roots of the model have been discovered. Quantum Gravity, the holy grail of theoretical physics uniting the twin pillars of Einsteins' General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, remains elusive. Despite its elegance and mathematical insights String Theory has not yet lived up to its promise of a theory of everything. The values of the 20 constants, which the standard model demands be put in by hand, remain unexplained by a deeper law.

For Smolin the requirement of invisible higher dimensions, which form the hallmark of string theory ,is part of this failure. If you need to invent invisible realities to make a theory work then, he argues, you are not explaining, you are explaining away. The same point can be made about the ideas of the multiverse - the universe of unobservable other universes - which are now a standard feature in many cosmological models.

These "crazy" ideas of modern physics (extra dimensions, extra universes) make many physicists nervous. They sound so much like plot devises from a Star Trek movie. Where are the close ties to experiment that form the hallmark of empirical investigation? Shouldn't physics and all of science be about the facts of this world, not the mathematical imaginings of some other possible worlds?

These conundrums are part of the dissatisfaction that have led some scientists to step entirely outside the box and ask what are we missing? What basic cherished principle are we holding onto and, in the process, holding ourselves back. It is from this vantage point that some are asking if the idea of physical law itself must be revised. It is from this vantage point that some are willing to ask what would Law without Law look like?

Law and Time: Who's on First?

So I am in the midst of the annual NASA grant writing binge which is my excuse for not writing more on my new favorite topic: Law without Law.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing a piece for DISCOVER magazine on this strange and, for me, revolutionary topic. As the comments to the last post artfully reveal this is really where the metaphysical rubber meets the empirical road. For today let me just give a little background. The term "Law without Law" originated, as far as I know, with the great American theoretical physicist John Wheeler. Wheeler was so far ahead of the curve in so many ways its hard to tabulate them all. He managed to be both radical, skeptical, hard headed and a dreamer all at the same time.

In his essay of the same name Wheeler asked about the interaction between quantum phenomena and observers and used a thought experiment involving a gravitationally lensed quasar to muse on the notion of "observer-participancy". In this wide ranging essay Wheeler seems to be arguing that reality is ongoing creative interaction between what he calls elementary phenomena (individual quantum processes) and observers (you and me). Only taken together as a whole, he says, does the world take the form we see. It may be essential here to emphasize the "we see" part because Wheeler never doubts there is a world out there but what he is asking about is the form of the world that humans are part of as observer-participants.

One could go on quite a while about this article which I recommend and ask if its crazy or sloppy or insightful. The point for this post is the conclusion that sits above his specific thinking about quantum mechanics: the so-called Laws of Physics, the timeless, eternal constraints which hover above and beyond this world, may be a fiction. Using the evolution as his example Wheeler asks

"Are the laws of physics immutable and eternal or are theses laws, like species, mutable and of a higgledy-pigglety origin"

Wheeler points to the origin of individual species as the result of countless blind accidents and then asks could the laws of this universe have emerged in the same way? Do they still emerge in the same way?

As a number of people have pointed out in the comments this, on face value, would seem impossible and, if it were possible, would challenge some of the most cherished assumptions of the scientific enterprise. Since I spent the last month reading and talking with scientists like Lee Smolin, Stuart Kauffman and Andy Albrecht on just this subject I will try and unpack the idea a bit more in the some of these posts (while still diverging every now then onto different subjects).

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Check out the Wheeler article if you have time. It is long an technical in places and even has a strange shift in font (which comes I believe because it is actually 2 different pieces put together for the particular volume it was published in). I suggest starting on page 20 with the section called Law without Law.