Cosmological Evolution: Spatial

Relativity and the Speed of Life

Robert Sheldon and Richard Hoover

SPIE SanDiego

Aug 14, 2008

Outline

A.Review of Panzooia via comets

B. Bootstrap theory of evolution

C. Review of Darwin’s Metaphysics

D.The Speed of Life

A. Panzooia: Cometary Biosphere

1. Cyanobacterial fossils on comets

2. Sand accretion on short-period comets

3. Liquid water on all trans-Jovian comets

4. Life can hop from comet to comet, colonizing and growing in short summers and long winters.

5. Comets aren’t just a bus between planets (panspermia)--planets are a traffic accident (panzooia).

Cyanobacteria

fossils on extinct comets are:

indisputable, identifiable,

Hoover 2005

1. Fossil cyanobacterial mats

…are not just refugees from the planet Earth, they are complete, photosynthetic ecosystems: manufacturing organics from sunlight, modifying their environment, recycling waste products. This is not a bus with passengers, this is a fully loaded 60-foot RV, with satellite dishes.

Stardust mission to Wild-2

Stardust

Aerogel sample-and-return

Forsterite 1400CStardust

2. Comets accrete

…not just sand grains and dirt, but spores, chunks of dehydrated mats, lyophilized bacteria, whatever is left behind in orbit by previous disintegrating comets.

Temperature on Tempel-1

• Most of comet hovers just above freezing point

Sunshine ice

Geysers

Giotto

DS-1 Stardust

Deep Impact

3. Comet hydrosphere is large

…and dense enough to sustain an ecosystem of extraterrestrial life independent of Earth.

How long can life survive space?

• Antarctic glacier at T<273K, viable > 8 Myrs

• Spores in amber at ambient T; viable > 40Myrs

• Bacteria collected from salt deposits,>250Myrs

“Hard radiation” may be the limiting factor mitigated by being frozen inside a comet. 10m of shielding is virtually infinite. Bacillus permians

Hoover 2000

Vreeland

Cyanobacteria adaptions

1. Lyophilization

2. Mats-- (why didn’t they evolve leaves?)

3. Polysaccharide sheaths--plug the pores of comets, increase tensile strength, blacken to keragen under UV, increase thermal transfer, stick to surfaces… (What is albedo of all comet nuclei observed?)

4. DNA conservation-- (Prochlorococcus marinus smallest genome, yet duplicates nucleotidases)

5. N2 fixing--Only organism that both fixes nitrogen and photosynthesizes, without which comets could not be colonized.

Giotto

4. Comet biosphere is at least 3.5Ga

…and potentially even older.

Can comets seed the galaxy?• The 1 km/s jets on comets give them “non-

gravitational” forces, that can convert a bound, elliptical orbit, to an unbound, hyperbolic orbit

• Marsden’s catalog list 33/307 Oort Cloud comets on hyperbolic trajectories. 23/33 begin trapped and end hyperbolic (ejected), 10 begin hyperbolic.

• Using a 2km/s interstellar speed (after climbing out of the solar system gravity well), the nearest star system is reached in 600,000 yrs.

• Life can survive when frozen in 10m of ice.

5. Panzooia

• Panzooia: habitat for (single cell) life is comets, and Earth-like planets are an insignificant blip in terms of DNA mass.

• Panspermia: habitat for (multicellular) life is an Earth-like planet with liquid water, and comets are the bus.

Horizontal Gene Transfer

• Phages are the most numerous living organism on the planet

• Outnumber bacteria 10:1• Transduction moves

genes between bacteria, eukaryotes

• (2008) From 187 typed genomes, an estimated 81±15% HGT (new cladistics software)

NASA APOD

Life as Information

• Comets don’t just carry cyanobacteria, they carry viruses. Hoover probably sees their fossils but can’t identify them by morphology alone.

• And viruses carry information, not just about themselves, but a large variety of genes they never need.

• Comets are not just a very large biosphere, they are a communication channel specifically for DNA based information. Hoover 2005

Cosmological Evolution If our solar system has a hydrosphere of infected ice

equal to the Earth’s ocean, then the galaxy of 200 billion stars, must have 10 billion or so Oort Clouds, not including the reservoir of interstellar comets.

Life is continually raining down on the Earth.

Evolution isn’t driven by innovation, it is driven by communication

B. Bootstrapping wiki• Computing: the process of a simple system activating a more

complicated system that serves the same purpose.

• Compilers: writing a compiler for a computer language using the language itself.

• Electronics: a form of positive feedback in analog circuit design.

• Law: a rule preventing hearsay in conspiracy cases.

• Linguistics: a theory of language acquisition.

• Statistics, a resampling technique used to obtain estimates of summary statistics.

• Physics: consistency criteria to determine the form of a quantum theory from some assumptions on the spectrum of particles

Bootstrapping

• Information Reservoir

• Limited Communication channel

• Client process• Recursive

transmission (think DSL)

Info

Client

Bootstrap Time Sequence• Examples

– Windows booting– Downloading

Adobe software– Invading Iraq– Starting a car– Feeding a baby

• Properties– Discrete approx

to exponential– Non-diffusive

Complexity

Time

Evolution as Bootstrap

Explains progress

Explains acceleration

Explains the immediacy of life when environment changes

Explains punctuated equilibrium

Matches the complexity history of the Earth

Math Differences from Neo-Darwinian Theory

• Complexity growth is neither Gaussian (smooth diffusion) nor Poisson (small stats), but power-law.

• Early complexity is correlated to later because the system is coherent in both time and space.

• Coherent systems inhabit a larger fractal dimension than incoherent. They possess long-range order.

• They are not random.

• Entropy decreases.

• They demonstrate purpose

C. That Isn’t Science!

• Metaphysics has a bad reputation, with numerous scientists ascribing to it all the ills that Marxists attribute to money. It is true that bad metaphysics will produce bad physics, but like money, there just isn't a better replacement. And a grasp of metaphysics is what made Einstein and not Lorentz famous (&Newton, &Darwin, ...)

• Darwin's success was as much his metaphysics as it was his biology. So closely have the two intertwined, that it has become impossible to critique evolution without also critiquing metaphysics.

Why is this important?

• NASA’s definition of life coming out of a 1992 conference on Astrobiology:

• Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.– No biology in the definition– But lots of metaphysics

• We find what we are looking for• We get proposals from social networking on

common goals

Metaphysics circa 500BC

• Aristotle / Plato– Organic / Biology– Attractive forces– Long-range– Friction (cislunar)– Frictionless (translunar)– Motion = cause– Eternal Matter &

Demi-urge – final & efficient causes

• Democritus / Leucippus– Inorganic / Physical– Repulsive forces– Short-range (contact)– Friction (super-atomic)– Frictionless (atomic)– Motion = chaos– Eternal Matter &

Chance– formal & material causes

Pros and Cons

• Top-Down (TD) is wholistic

• TD gives meaning to everything

• TD answers “Why?”

• Bottom-up (BU) is pragmatic

• BU answers “How?”• BU rewards skill, art

• TD isn’t practical

• TD despises “How”

• TD lets ideology interfere

• BU is individualistic

• BU denies purpose

• BU brings despair

Metaphysics circa 1800

• William Paley– design/tool/function

– The Classification

– Desire / Will / Intent

– Light is a wave

– Biology is irreducible

– Organic Chemistry

– Long-range, large

• Isaac Newton– time / space / matter

– The Calculus

– F = m d²x/dt²

– Light is a particle

– Physics is irreducible

– Inorganic Chemistry

– Short-range, small

Gravity???

Good vs Bad Metaphysics• Good

– Wide Scope (science)– Complete

(few I don’t know)– Self-consistent

(no contradictions)– Includes itself

(m0) – Explains Human Behavior

• Ethics, Aesthetics

– Predictive, Normative– Enables Science

• Bad– Narrow Scope – Incomplete

(doesn’t know)– Inconsistent

(contradictory)– Excludes itself

Ignores Human Behavior• No Ethics, No Aesthetics

– Postdictive, Relative– Disables Science

Grading Metaphysics (Myself)

AristotleDemocritusNewtonPaley DarwinEinstein

Wide Scope Excel Excel Good Good Good Good

Complete Excel Good Poor Good Good Poor

Self-consistentExcel Good Good Good Poor Poor

Recursive Yes No No Yes No No

Human BehaviorExcel Poor Poor Excel Good Poor

Predictive Excel Poor Excel Good Good Excel

Enables ScienceGood Excel Excel Good Excel Excel

Allows for GodYes No Maybe Yes No Maybe

Metaphysics circa 1930• Charles Darwin--NDT

– Time eternal– Matter Indestructible– Space & Time Invariant– Chance Universe– Biology= organic =

inorganic chemistry– Math=Population Genetics

(discrete, spatially fixed, local interactions)

– Species are spatially discrete temporally not

• Albert Einstein--Niels Bohr– Time begins– Matter created/destroyed– Speed of Light Invariant– Contingent Universe– Physics = wavefunctions =

Hilbert Space – Math=Wave Mechanics &

Cosmology (continuous, non-linear, non-local fields)

– Atoms are non-local, temporally discrete

NDT “fixes”• Several truly innovative suggestions have been made

to the classic NDT population genetics approach of JBS Haldane that attempt to “speed up” the process of complexification and/or provide an arrow of “progress”.– Hierarchical evolution– Hierarchical embryology– Punctuated equilibrium– Symbiogenesis– Parasitic arms race

• But they are INCOMPATIBLE with NDT metaphysics.

How is CE different from NDT?

• Think of a specie like an atom, and its level of complexity like its position.

• Democritus would say time is continuous, and motion is random, so strobe photos will show it in different places in time. This is how NDT thinks of evolution.

• Bohr would say the atom is not very defined, but trying to take its picture forces it to find a spot to stand. Space is continuous, and time discontinuous. CE sees all complexity levels possible, but when measured, (with a rocky planet) takes on a fixed value.

Hegel & Negroponte

• We began with a biological model for physics which by the 19th century became an atomist materialism. But biology resisted. Until 1859 Darwin finally converted biology to physics.

• So we entered the 20th century with a physical model for biology. But by the middle of the 20th century, we had a biology model for physics!

• It was Hegel’s dialectic with a twist: a Negroponte flip.

• NDT is losing steam, and many “fixes” have been suggestedKuhn’s paradigm shift.

Conclusions

• The existence of a galactic biosphere, changes the evolution paradigm. Location doesn’t matter. Spatial relativity. Time isn’t continuous, but discrete.

• Comets do more than transport cyanobacteria, they transport viruses full of information. Comets provide a low-bitrate information channel.The speed of life.

• For Earth life to use the galactic data base through a small pipe requires bootstrapping. Temporal and spatial information show math characteristics of bootstrapping – exponential increase. Progress!