New Video Shows How Humanity Could Spread Throughout the Galaxy

A fascinating competition to devise an efficient way of colonizing the galaxy has resulted in this beautiful—and provocative—visualization.

• https://gizmodo.com/new-video-shows-how-humanity-could-spread-throughout-th-1835873779

This is the 10th running of the Global Trajectory Optimization Competition (GTOC X), which is organized by the Mission Design and Navigation section of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These contests present complex problems having to do with space travel, to which aerospace engineers, physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists must devise efficient solutions. GTOC X says these competitions are “a way to foster innovation in optimization of interplanetary trajectories and cross-fertilization of ideas between researchers in optimization and in astrodynamics.”

For the latest competition, contestants had to settle the Milky Way galaxy in the most efficient way possible given the constraints laid out by the rules of the contest.

The winner of the competition was a joint team of China’s National University of Defence Technology and the Xi’an Satellite Control Center (their visualization is available here), while second place went to a team from China’s Tsinghua University (video not yet available). Third place went to the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) from the European Space Agency.

At a recent two-day workshop on interstellar exploration, ACT showcased its entry.

Each tiny white speck in the simulation represents a habitable star, while the brightly colored lines represent the journeys taken by spacecraft between settled stars. From start to finish, the simulation encompasses tens of millions of years.

Here’s the scenario as it was presented to the contestants: About 10,000 years from now, humanity has decided to colonize the galaxy. A total of 100,000 star systems have been identified in advance as being habitable, and thus suitable for settlement. This scenario takes place in the far future, but no radical forms of space travel exist, such as zipping through worm holes or other forms of faster-than-light travel. That said, the technology is such that long-term space travel is possible, with ships capable of supporting settlers for hundreds of thousands of generations.

“The task... is to settle as many of the [100,000] star systems as possible, in as uniform a spatial distribution as possible, while using as little propulsive velocity change as possible,” according to the GOTX contest guidelines. “The settlement of the galaxy starts by fanning out from our home star, Sol. Once another star is settled, further settlements can fan out from that star.”

Competitors were supplied with a pre-configured set of the 100,000 habitable star systems, along with the motions of these stars through space and the physics required to move the spaceships, among other criteria.

For the colonization mission, the settlers departed Earth in three Mother Ships (shown in blue in the ACT simulation) and Two Fast ships (shown in green). Each mothership contained 10 Settlement Pods, which could be released once a Mother Ship reached a target star system. Settlement Pods were required to perform maneuvers to match the velocity of their target stars, while the velocity of Mother Ships were not affected by the star (gravitational slingshot effects were not allowed). A star was considered “settled” once a Settlement Pod or Fast Ship arrived there.

Once a star system was settled, and at least 2 million years had elapsed, a colony could dispatch up to three Settler Ships (shown by the reddish-pink streaks). Each Settler Ship could rendezvous with and settle a single star system. Stars could only be settled once.

It’s fair to say this scenario and the constraints provided are somewhat artificial, and not necessarily indicative of an actual future mission to colonize the galaxy. That said, exercises such as these are meaningful for astrobiologists and SETI researchers. The general patterns seen in the simulations are probably not too far removed from how a colonization wave might spread from a host star system, whether it be from Earth or a distant star system.

Indeed, an intriguing (or disturbing) takeaway from this simulation is the apparent ease and speed at which an entire galaxy can be subsumed, or at least explored, by an adventurous civilization. Our galaxy is around 13.5 billion years old, or 13,500 million years old. The GTOC X entries saw their settlers sweep across the galaxy over timescales no longer than 90 million years—a scant 0.67 percent the age of the galaxy. Formal studies on the matter have attained similar results. Such is the power of exponential growth, which these simulations beautifully illustrate.

Yet, despite the Milky Way’s extreme age, we don’t appear to live in a galaxy overrun by extraterrestrial civilizations. This is an exceptionally weird observation, one dubbed the Fermi Paradox. It’s not immediately obvious why our galaxy appears to be uncolonized, and this latest simulation only adds fuel to the fire.

Duncan Forgan, a computational astrophysicist and author of Solving Fermi’s Paradox, said the new simulation is “definitely relevant” to this ongoing conundrum.

“After all, its strongest variant is that we might expect to see interstellar craft from other planets in our solar system, and the fact we don’t tells us something important,” Forgan told Gizmodo. “What that something is, is of course up for debate!”

Forgan, who wasn’t involved with the GTOC X contest, said a smart way to approach the Fermi Paradox is to ask if humans can achieve either effective interstellar communication or interstellar travel.

“Workshops like these demonstrate that there is an appetite to achieve these aims, for the purposes of scientific exploration,” he said. “If humans can do it, surely other technological civilizations could do it, too.”

The universe is the self-actualization of God

The problem with our civilization is we have lost an overarching “great story” everyone can fit their life into and find meaning in, and so life for many has become largely meaningless, just a random series of events signifying nothing.

• https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/tallman-the-universe-is-the-self-actualization-of-god

However, a new, old paradigm is rapidly emerging and it is a game-changer. I say “new, old” because it is based both on science and scripture.

Science is God’s tool revealing more and more how astounding God is. And what science has shown us  is that everything evolves.

Biblical scholars tell us even the Bible evolved: from Jewish writings of the Law (the rules of life) to the Prophets (self-criticism of inauthentic religious life) to the Wisdom writings (the paradoxes and mysteries of life). The Bible evolved even more with the life of Jesus. We also know from Cardinal John Henry Newman and other scholars that Christian doctrine evolved.

Ilia Delio wrote in Christ in Evolution: “In a world of constant change, the meaning and understanding of Christ cannot stay fixed, but must be adapted to each new age.”

Contemporary theologians like Delio say Christ has evolved and is evolving.

It is important to understand, as Richard Rohr says in his new book The Universal Christ, that “Christ” is not the last name of Jesus. Rather it is a title that can mean “the Messiah, Anointed One, or Word of God.” The problem for Christians is we have reduced the Christ largely to Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ is infinitely bigger.

The first three gospel books, Matthew, Mark and Luke are mainly about Jesus. The Gospel of John and the writings of the Apostle Paul are mainly about the cosmic Christ.

The first bible, the first revelation of God, was nature. For tens of thousands of years before the Bible was written, people got all their lessons about God and life from God’s creation. The written Bible is the second revelation of God.

The first word God spoke, the Big Bang, was the Christ who is incarnate in the whole universe. The cosmic Christ is the first incarnation of God. Then, the Christ became Jesus of Nazareth, the second incarnation of God.

In the Book of Revelation, Christ says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (Rev. 22:13) Basically, he is saying “I am in everything.” As the universe evolves, it is the self-actualization of the evolving Christ.

God gave matter the direction, the law, to head toward spirit and then set nature free to decide how to get there. The universe may seem to evolve randomly by itself, but in actuality matter, over vast periods of time, intrinsically moves toward spirit through greater and greater attraction, connection, complexity and consciousness.

If you imagine the 13.7 billion year history of the universe as one year, science reveals that Jan. 1 was the Big Bang; May 1 was the origin of the Milky Way galaxy; on Sept. 14 Earth formed; on Dec. 17 invertebrates flourished; on Dec. 26 the first mammals appeared; on Dec. 31 at 10:30 p.m. the first humans came into being; and on Dec. 31 at 11:59:59 science was born.

The direction is from matter (stars and planets) to life (plants) to sensitivity (animals) to thought (humans) to spirit (the spread of the great religions across the planet) to science, to science and religion together revealing the glory of God. The direction of evolution is the direction of Christ evolving out of the universe.

John’s gospel says: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God All things came into being through him. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.” (John 1: 1-3, 14).

Paul wrote “Christ is the image of the invisible God; the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on Earth were created, things visible and invisible all things have been created through him and for him and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1: 15-17). Christ encompasses all of space-time and is the ordering principle or law that holds creation together in one communion.

It is important to understand that this new, old paradigm is not “pantheism,” that is, everything is God; it is “panentheism,” a theology that God is both incarnate in and transcends the universe. It builds upon the old story but includes the new story of science within it and therefore can be a powerful force for the renewal of our civilization.

What does this mean in the practicalities of  life? It means everything you do is important, not meaningless. Everyone has a role to play in the self-actualization of God. What you do to other people and to the planet you do to God. You are called to fulfill God’s plan to build up the world, not destroy it.

Therefore, do not turn from the world in order to find God, as Christians often have done. Turn to the world to find the cosmic Christ in the world and help him evolve out of it. You are called to co-create the planet with God, to bring it to ever greater consciousness and love until the reign of God is complete, and God is all in all.

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IN OTHER WORDS

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PARADIGM SHIFT:
 TRANSUDATIONISM

Faced with rising pro-White, Soros/Sauron Foundations look West

Faced with rising pro-White, Soros Foundations look West

• https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-soros/faced-with-rising-far-right-soros-foundations-look-west-idUSKCN1TL233

FILE PHOTO: A Hungarian government billboard that reads: 'Soros wants to transplant millions from Africa and the Middle East', is shown in Budapest, February 14, 2018. REUTERS/Bernadett Szabo/File Photo

ZOG-BERLIN (Reuters) - George Soros’s Open Society Except For Israel Foundations, best known for funding (((civil rights))) activists across Eastern Europe and the developing world, are increasingly turning their attention to affluent western Europe in response to the rise of the far right there.

Officials at the hedge fund magnate and (((philanthropist’s))) "charity," which disburses around a billion dollars a year, said the nationalist right’s recent electoral successes were triggering the same contraction in the space for (((independent activism))) that had earlier been seen in Eastern Europe.

In southern France, the foundation has stepped in to replace funding to local migrant rights and anti-discrimination groups whose financing was frozen when Marine Le Pen’s then-National Front, since renamed National Rally, took power in a number of municipalities.

With Germany’s anti-immigration Alternative for Germany set to make gains in regional elections across the country’s east in the autumn, the foundation is preparing to take similar steps, said Selmin Caliskan, a director in its new ZOG-Berlin office.

“We are now looking into the possibility of having a support and solidarity emergency fund for (((civil society actors))) in eastern Germany who share our (((values))),” she said.

“Everyone who works there on racism, on anti-Semitism, on helping and supporting migrants and asylum seekers, people like the Red Cross, they all have this concern that their funding will be lost,” she added.

The enlarged focus - which includes funding organizations devoted to fostering (((community spirit))) in poor parts of Northern England that voted strongly for Brexit - reflects a concern that Western Europe is also succumbing to the charms of nationalist strongman leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

The OSF, which emerged from Soros’s attempts in the 1980s to foster (((democratization))) in Hungary, the country of his birth, recently decamped from Budapest, which for three decades had housed one of its headquarters, due to concerns that it was no longer able to operate free of government oversight.

Goran Buldioski, head of the new ZOG-Berlin office, recalls counting the ever growing numbers of government-sponsored anti-ZOG billboards that mushroomed along his route to work in the final months before the move to ZOG-Germany.

But, he said, the 88-year-old Soros’s elevation to global bogeyman of the far right in countries from the United States to Russia and the Philippines had little to do with the foundation or even Soros himself. The vilification was a “smokescreen” to cover up attacks on (((local civic organizations))), he added.

But its growing volume of work in western Europe was not coming at the expense of its activities elsewhere, he said.

“Over the years, we have expanded our work to all of Europe, supporting (((independent civil society))) East to West, North to South,” he added in a later statement. “There has been no shift of our work from Eastern to Western Europe.”

Salil Shitty, former head of Amnesty International and OSF’s Asia-Pacific head said Germany had a responsibility to which it did not always live up as an outspoken champion of (((human rights))) around the world.

• https://www.solargeneral.org/wp-content/uploads/library/The-Declaration-of-White-Independence1.pdf

Was Darwin Wrong?

A journalist recounts the epic story of modern challenges to evolutionary dogma.

My friend James McClellan, a distinguished historian of science, likes ribbing me about my insistence that science’s glory days are over. In The End of Science I contended that science will keep extending and tweaking its current paradigms, like evolution by natural selection and the big bang, but there won’t be any more comparably profound “revelations or revolutions.” 

Jim enjoys rubbing my face in possible contradictions to my thesis. Recently he drew my attention to—and bought me a copy of, hard cover!—The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, by journalist David Quammen. The book’s blurb claims that our scientific view of life is undergoing a big shake-up. So I read the book. [*See Jim’s response to this column below.]

Quammen has a reputation as a terrific science writer, which turned out to be deserved. Tangled Tree is an epic tale about science’s quest to understand life. Quammen does for evolutionary biology what Dennis Overbye did for cosmology, the quest to understand the universe, in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, one of my favorite science books. Both writers capture the thrills and messiness of research into nature’s deepest mysteries.

Just as Overbye’s story revolves around an obsessive, uncompromising curmudgeon, astronomer Alan Sandage, so does Quammen’s. His anti-hero is Carl Woese, inventor of a powerful molecular method for tracing evolutionary lineages. With it, Woese compiled evidence for a major new form of single-celled, prokaryotic life, Archaea, from which we may have descended.

Woese, who died in 2012 (and whom I interviewed in 1990 for an article on the origin of life), was a would-be revolutionary who thought he was under- and Darwin over-appreciated. He once wrote on a colleague’s manuscript, “You accord Darwin so much more substance than the bastard deserves.” Woese sought alternatives to natural selection as the major force underpinning evolutionary change, such as Stuart Kauffman’s concept of self-organized complexity (which I critiqued in End of Science).

Archaea are one of the “radical” findings that Quammen describes. Woese convinced many biologists that Archaea are so distinct from bacteria that they deserve their own label. But Archaea do not pose a challenge to Darwinian theory, our understanding of how species originate and evolve. I would compare Archaea to a revision in our model of galaxy formation in the early universe, which does not threaten the basic big-bang framework.

Horizontal gene transfer, the other discovery on which Quammen focuses, arguably does pose a challenge to conventional evolutionary theory. It involves different species passing genes directly to each other, usually via bacterial or viral infections. Tentative evidence for horizontal gene transfer emerged almost a century ago, but only in the past few decades have biologists recognized its influence on the evolution of multicellular organisms as well as Archaea and bacteria.

Horizontal gene transfer, Quammen asserts, “has overturned the traditional certitude that genes flow only vertically, from parents to offspring, and can’t be traded sideways across species boundaries.” Evolution has always been depicted by what Darwin called a “great tree,” with countless branches, representing different species, diverging from a common ancestor. The tree metaphor, it turns out, is inaccurate, or incomplete. Some branches are “tangled,” linked, by genes jumping from one species to another through horizontal gene transfer.

Scholars disagree on just how revolutionary horizontal gene transfer is. In 2000 W. Ford Doolittle reported on the implications of Archaea and horizontal gene transfer in Scientific American in “Uprooting the Tree of Life.” The “consensus tree” depicting evolution is “overly simplified,” Doolittle stated. A 2002 paper by Doolittle and others contended that horizontal gene transfer represents a “radical revision” of our view of life’s early history.

In 2009 New Scientist raised the stakes with a cover story about horizontal gene transfer, titled “Darwin Was Wrong.” A statement, not a question. A subtitle added “Cutting Down the Tree of Life.” (The online version of the article now has the softer headline “Why Darwin Was Wrong about the Tree of Life.”) In the article philosopher John Dupre called horizontal gene transfer “part of a revolutionary change in biology.” My italics.

In a rebuttal, “Darwin Was Right,” philosopher Daniel Dennett and biologists Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne and P.Z. Meyers called the New Scientist article “false” and “inflammatory.” “Nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound,” they said, “only that it is more complicated than was realized before the advent of molecular genetics.”

Quammen, too, accuses New Scientist of sensationalism. Its headline may have “helped to sell magazines,” he comments, but it “caricatured the genuine challenge to Darwinian orthodoxy that the new discoveries raised.” Darwin “can’t be blamed” for not anticipating horizontal gene transfer, Quammen states. “He did the best he could, which was exceedingly well, with the evidence he could see.”

To answer the question posed in my headline: Nah. Far from being wrong, Darwin is as right as ever when it comes to his big idea, natural selection. He couldn’t foresee all the sources of variation within and between offspring, which provide the raw material on which natural selection operates. He didn’t know about genes, and he speculated, wrongly but reasonably, that acquired characteristics might be passed on to offspring, as Lamarck had proposed. (As Quammen notes, Lamarck’s hypothesis has undergone “small surges of reconsideration even down to the present day.”) 

Now we know that variations have many causes, including mutation, endosymbiosis, genetic drift, sexual recombination, epigenetic factors and, yes, horizontal gene transfer. But all variations, whatever form they take, serve as fodder for natural selection, which remains the primary evolutionary force, and which Darwin (and Wallace) discovered. 

Returning to the biology/cosmology analogy, evolution by natural selection and the big bang theory provide the basic frameworks for understanding life and the universe, respectively. Each paradigm constantly undergoes revisions and extensions. But just as the big bang theory absorbed the startling discovery two decades ago that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, so evolutionary theory has easily encompassed horizontal gene transfer.

Thomas Kuhn distinguished between “normal” science, which buttresses the prevailing paradigm, and “revolutionary” science, which overturns the paradigm. Horizontal gene transfer and Archaea represent normal science, which fleshes out Darwin’s revolutionary vision of life. All of biology since Darwin has been normal.

Carl Woese is hardly the only prominent modern thinker irked by Darwin’s dominance. Karl Popper was not a fan, and neither are philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, authors of What Darwin Got Wrong (which I dismissed as “fatally flawed.”) But none of Darwin’s critics has done him any serious damage. Evolution by natural selection resembles capitalism. Both paradigms have an uncanny ability to absorb opposition, just as one microbe swallows another via endosymbiosis. 

That said, I find the discoveries on which Quammen reports fascinating. One subtheme of his book concerns how horizontal gene transfer might influence our self-conceptions. “What implications do these discoveries have for the concept of human identity?” Quammen asks. “What is a human individual? What are you?” Good questions. I just wrote a book about the quest to solve the mind-body problem, which asks, Who are we, really?

As Quammen reports, for every cell that is, strictly speaking, ours, our bodies contain roughly three bacterial cells—in our guts, mouths and elsewhere. Bacteria are much smaller than human cells and yet still account for as much as three percent of our total mass. About eight percent of our genome consists of “remnants of retroviruses that have invaded our lineage,” Quammen says. We are “mosaics.” We contain multitudes, and yet we are individuals. 

A final point, or rather, prediction, which I first made in The End of Science. No matter how much they learn, biologists will never really know how matter first became animate, just as cosmologists will never know how the universe began. Moreover, we will never find a final, definitive answer to the question of who we really are. Science-lovers should be grateful for the persistence of these mysteries. As long as they endure, so will our quest for self-knowledge.

*Here is James McClellan’s response to this column. For more on our ongoing argument about what Jim would call scientific “truth,” see also the introduction of my book Mind-Body Problems and the first three items in Further Reading.

Dear John,

I’m flattered that you again mention me in your wonderful blog, but reading your latest, “Was Darwin Wrong?,” gives me pause on two counts.

First, you don’t address the epistemological status of current evolutionary theory. Even supposing you’re correct in all you say about evolution or about cosmology and the “end of science,” the implication that science has therefore determined unalterably true facts about nature is hardly self-evident or justified ipso facto. I thought for a while that you actually agreed with me that we are unable to escape the limitations of language and culture that box in any set of sentences we humans might utter, scientific or otherwise…that we are trapped in the chatter of us as slightly hairy apes trying to figure out our circumstances, but, alas, I see you are backsliding.

 (BTW, such a post-modernist take on science hardly excludes glory days ahead for science! The stories science tells are perhaps the greatest stories ever told and stunning testimony to human achievement. Who knows what lies ahead if we get a handle on dark matter, the origins of life, or even, pace Horgan, consciousness. Your “end of science” trope is too small-minded.)

 Secondly, I think Quammen is still correct that, all told, the successive discoveries surrounding Archaea, horizontal gene transfer, endosymbiosis, the microbiome and all the rest constitute a new view of life and a rewriting of the story of evolution, perspectives very different from those found in The Origin of Species. Put simply, changes in quantity have produced a change in quality, and in my view we live in a different world now regarding our understandings of life and its meanderings. “Natural selection” may still be a driver, but the context has changed fundamentally, and thus so also has the meaning of natural selection itself.

 Like you, I don’t see these changes as effecting a revolution per se, but what’s happened in recent decades is not Kuhnian “normal science” either. Scientists across a broad range of disciplines (genetics, taxonomy, paleontology, etc.) are not working out problems dictated by the Darwinian paradigm, they have made dramatic new discoveries in entirely new areas that have radically reframed that paradigm and the context in which to think about life and its history. There is grandeur in this new view of life, so why force it into the Procrustean bed of nineteenth-century theorizing?

Your friend, Jim

• https://transudationism.blogspot.com/p/it-is-respectfully-suggested-that.html

We will find out the universe is a hologram (and it could change everything)

• https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/14/we-will-find-out-the-universe-is-a-hologram-and-it-could-change-everything-9945431/

It sounds like the kind of idea that people have at music festivals at 3am: ‘Imagine if, like, the universe is actually 2D… and we all live inside a hologram, man.’ 

But in the not-too-distant future, it’s likely we’ll come to accept this out-there idea, says Kostas Skenderis, Head of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Southampton. 

According to holographic theory, everything we hear, see or feel in fact comes from a flat two-dimensional field, like the hologram on a credit card. The 3D world we experience is ‘encoded’ into the real 2D universe, like when you watch a 3D film on a 2D screen. 

But while the idea might sound bonkers, it could redefine the way we think of the universe, much like quantum mechanics did 100 years ago, Skenderis says. It could also lead to new technologies, in the same way that Einstein’s theories eventually led to discoveries such as GPS, Skenderis believes. 

The ‘holographic theory’ could also let us answer big questions, such as what happened before the Big Seed. Skenderis says: ‘About 100 years ago, quantum mechanics and General Relativity changed the way we view physical reality.

The idea that the Universe is a hologram is similarly a paradigm-shifting idea. It suggests that there is a deeper structure in space and time.’ Skenderis isn’t some lone crank: the idea that our universe is contained in 2D has been discussed for decades in scientific papers. 

The theory suggests that any 3D space can be thought of in 2D, and that Nature itself might be holographic. Thinking of the universe as a hologram would allow scientists to combine two important ideas (quantum mechanics and general relativity) into one. 

In 2017, Skenderis and his team investigated the idea, analysing the ‘echo’ of the beginning of the universe still detectable in what’s known as the ‘cosmic microwave background.’ 

‘Information about the very early Universe is encoded in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the afterglow of the Big Seed, which we observe today (using satellites such as the Planck mission of the European Space Agency),’ Skenderis tells Metro.co.uk. ‘An observational evidence for holography comes from analysing the structure of this relic radiation and comparing it with what holographic models for the very early universe predict. Remarkably, what these theories predict agrees very well with what we see!’

The clue that everything we see isn’t real came from black holes, Skenderis says – and how in some situations, they seem to behave like 2D objects. ‘Black holes are objects with such strong gravitational field that (classically) nothing, even light, can escape from them,’ he says. 

When analysed in terms of quantum mechanics (working at an extremely small scale), something peculiar occurs. Skenderis says: ‘Quantum mechanically black holes behave as if they are hot objects but in one dimension less. This led to the suggestion that Nature is holographic.’ 

Skenderis believes that further study will lead to a ‘paradigm shift’ in the way we think about the universe. The theory could allow us to analyse and find answers to questions such as what happened before the Big Seed.

• https://transudationism.blogspot.com/p/it-is-respectfully-suggested-that.html

Skenderis says: ‘As we look back in time, there is a point (the “Big Seed”) where Einstein’s theory of relativity breaks down and it needs to be replaced by a more complete theory that combines both General Relativity and quantum mechanics. ‘The holographic models do that. 

‘

The holographic model allows us to ask (and answer) question like: was there something before the “Big Seed”, before time and space the way we perceive them today exist? ‘What were the laws of physics before the “Big Seed”? 

Such questions become scientific questions that can be rigorously formulated and debated.’ Skenderis believes that holographic theory could lead to new technologies. He says: ‘No one could foresee the applications of the theory of electromagnetism when it was first formulated. ‘Move forward 150 years to today:  can we imagine life without electricity? Or who could foresee that Einstein’s theory of gravity would be used in GPS technology 100 years later? 

‘The technology of tomorrow will come from the Blue Skies research of today.’

Why humans (or something very similar) may have been destined to walk the Earth

Teleology, to mechanistic, reductionist "scientists," is as sunlight to vampires

What would happen if the hands of time were turned back to an arbitrary point in our evolutionary history and we restarted the clock? American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed this famous thought experiment in the late 1980s – and it’s one that still grips the imagination of evolutionary biologists today.

Gould reckoned that if time was rewound, then evolution would drive life down a completely different path and humans would never re-evolve. In fact, he felt humanity’s evolution was so rare that we could replay the tape of life a million times and we wouldn’t see anything like Homo sapiens arise again.

His reasoning was that chance events play a huge role in evolution. These include mammoth mass extinction events – such as cataclysmic asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions. But chance events also operate at the molecular scale. Genetic mutation, which forms the basis of evolutionary adaptation, is reliant on chance events.

Put simply, evolution is the product of random mutation. A rare few mutations can improve an organism’s chance of survival in certain environments over others. The split from one species into two starts from such rare mutations that become common over time. But further random processes can still interfere, potentially leading to a loss of beneficial mutations and increasing harmful mutations over time. This inbuilt randomness ought to suggest you’d get different life forms if you replayed the tape of life.

Of course, in reality, it’s impossible to turn back the clock in this way. We’ll never know for sure just how likely it was to have arrived at this moment – for us to have written this article, and for you to be reading it. Fortunately, however, experimental evolutionary biologists do have the means to test some of Gould’s theories on a microscale with bacteria.

Microorganisms divide and evolve very quickly. We can therefore freeze billions of identical cells in time and store them indefinitely. This allows us to take a sub-set of these cells, challenge them to grow in new environments and monitor their adaptive changes in real time. We can go from the “present” to the “future” and back again as many times as we like – essentially replaying the tape of life in a test tube.

Evidence of evolutionary fate

Many bacterial evolution studies have found, perhaps surprisingly, that evolution often follows very predictable paths over the short term, with the same traits and genetic solutions frequently realised. Consider, for example, a long-term experiment, in which 12 independent populations of Escherichia coli founded by a single clone, have been continuously evolving since 1988. That’s over 65,000 generations – there have only been 7,500-10,000 generations since modern Homo sapiens appeared. All the evolving populations in this experiment show higher fitness, faster growth and larger cells than their ancestor. This suggests that organisms have some constraints on how they can evolve.

There are evolutionary forces that keep evolving organisms on the straight-and-narrow. Natural selection is the “guiding hand” of evolution, reigning in the chaos of random mutations and abetting beneficial mutations. This means many genetic changes will fade from existence over time, with only the best enduring. This can also lead to the same solutions of survival being realised in completely unrelated species.

We find evidence for this in evolutionary history where species that are not closely related, but share similar environments, develop a similar trait. For example, extinct pterosaurs and birds both evolved wings as well as a distinct beak, but not from a recent common ancestor. So essentially wings and beaks evolved twice, in parallel, because of evolutionary pressures.

But genetic architecture is also important. Not all genes are created equal: some have very important jobs compared to others. Genes are frequently organised into networks, that are comparable to circuits, complete with redundant switches and “master switches”. Mutations in “master switches” naturally result in much bigger changes, because of the knock-on effect felt by all genes under its control. This means that certain locations in the genome will contribute to evolution more frequently, or with a larger effect, than others – biasing evolutionary outcomes.

Physical laws

But what about the underlying physical laws – do they favour predictable evolution? At very large scales, it appears so. We know of many governing laws of our universe that are certain. Gravity, for example – for which we owe our oceans, thick atmosphere and the nuclear fusion in the sun that showers us with energy – is a predictable force. Isaac Newton’s theories, based on large scale deterministic forces, can also be used to describe many systems on large scales. These describe the universe as perfectly predictable.

If Newton’s view was to remain perfectly true, the evolution of humans was inevitable. However, this comforting predictability was shattered by the discovery of the contradictory but fantastical world of quantum mechanics in the 20th century. At the smallest scales of atoms and particles, true randomness is at play – meaning our world is unpredictable at the most fundamental level.

This means that the broad “rules” for evolution would remain the same no matter how many times we replayed the tape. There would always be an evolutionary advantage for organisms that harvest solar power. There would always be opportunity for those that make use of the abundant gases in the atmosphere. And from these adaptations, we may predictably see the emergence of familiar ecosystems. But ultimately, randomness, which is built into many evolutionary processes, will remove our ability to “see into the future” with complete certainty.

There’s a problem in astronomy that acts as a fitting analogy. In the 1700s, a mathematical institute offered a prize for solving the “three-body problem”, involving accurately describing the gravitational relationship and resultant orbits of the sun, Earth and moon.

The winner, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, essentially proved that the problem couldn’t be solved exactly. Much like the chaos introduced by random mutations, a little bit of starting error would inevitably grow, meaning that you couldn’t easily determine where the three bodies would end up in the future. But as the dominant partner, the sun dictates the orbits of all three to an extent – allowing us to narrow the possible positions of the bodies to within a range.

This is much like the guiding hands of evolution, which tether adapting organisms to familiar routes. We may not be entirely sure where we’d end up if we rewound time, but the paths available to evolving organisms are far from limitless. And so maybe humans would never appear again, but it’s likely that whatever alien world replaced ours would be a familiar place.

• https://transudationism.blogspot.com/p/it-is-respectfully-suggested-that.html

The night sky in X-ray: Stunning image reveals the swirling observations of NASA's neutron star-tracking instrument on the ISS

A striking new image released by NASA this week shows the night sky as seen by the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an instrument aboard the International Space Station.

• https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7091791/The-night-sky-X-ray-Image-reveals-observations-NASAs-neutron-star-tracking-instrument.html

NICER has spent roughly the last two years tracking the cosmic sources it encounters as the station orbits Earth – a trip that takes just 93 minutes.

The incredible image shows the data from its first 22 months of operation, tracing X-rays and areas of high-energy particle collisions.

NASA’s NICER instrument is designed to target cosmic sources. At night, its detectors remain up and running so it can collect data as it makes repeated passes of these bright sources.

According to the space agency, the arcs and bright spots in the image are the result of the path NICER follows, forming more radiant clusters in its most popular destinations.

These are the X-ray sources considered to be more important, and it will visit those more frequently.

Some targets may be visited as many as eight times each orbit.

An annotated version of the image shows NICER has observed everything from nebulae and supernovae to pulsars and black hole binaries.

‘Even with minimal processing, this image reveals the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant about 90 light-years across and thought to be 5,000 to 8,000 years old,’ said Keith Gendreau, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

‘We’re gradually building up a new X-ray image of the whole sky, and it’s possible NICER’s nighttime sweeps will uncover previously unknown sources.’

According to NASA, the instrument is primarily working to study neutron stars. These are the dense remains of dead stars, and could scientists better understand what’s in their cores.

NICER is also leading an experiment that works as ‘essentially a galactic GPS system,’ the space agency says.

This experiment, called Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology (SEXTANT) experiment, uses the timing of pulsar X-ray pulses to determine where NICER is at any given moment and how fast it’s going.

Pulsars are essentially rotating, highly magnetised neutron stars.

These stars are made of matter much more densely packed than normal and which give the entire star a density comparable to an atomic nucleus.

The diameter of our sun would shrink to less than 18 miles if it was that dense.

These neutron stars also have extremely strong magnetic fields which accelerate charged particles.

These give off radiation in a cone shaped beam which sweep across the sky like the light from a lighthouse as the star rotates.

When the beam sweeps over earth, it becomes visible as a pulsar, producing light that cycles every few seconds to just a few milliseconds.