GANGS... A DEMORALIZED, ALIENATED SOCIETY

GANGS... A DEMORALIZED, ALIENATED SOCIETY

NASA: New Report of Life from Space

  John Lake

A NASA scientist, Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, claims to have found tiny fossils inside meteorites recovered from the Spanish Ebro Delta waterway.

He found the remains of the micro-organisms during an internal inspection of three of the oldest meteorites to have yet been discovered. Hoover claims that the microbes could not be of earthly origin, because if they were there would be traces or evidence of nitrogen in and around the objects from space. A meteorite is a meteor that has slammed into earth for a final rest.
I concede some skepticism. The theory of “panspermia,”which suggests that life on our Earth originated elsewhere, has never been my cup of tea. Life had to develop somewhere, so, why not here? I see it as the suggestion of a sort of astronomical inferiority complex. But I also concede some interest in the idea that life in all its forms transmits through space; not with a single starting point, but with some unknown evolution, distributing itself through the universe. This idea is within the sphere of interest of astrobiology, and NASA astrobiologists continue to assess the possibility.
Hoover asserts that the fossils are the remains of extraterrestrial life forms that grew on the parent bodies of the meteorites when liquid water was present, long before the meteorites entered the Earth's atmosphere. A finding of bacteria, if indeed from deep space, is a radical notion. Bacteria are not life forms that thrive in isolation. Bacteria as a rule live in the guts of animals and humans, or on the roots of certain plants, and, in our experience, convert nitrogen to something more usable. The bacteria we know are among those sustaining mechanisms that break down waste organic material, dispose of it, and make for a viable environment. Bacteria are extremely flexible, owing perhaps to their millions of years of development, and have a capacity for rapid growth, reproduction, and a very long age span. The oldest known bacteria fossils are about three and a half billion years old.

David McKay, another NASA researcher, claimed Martian life inside a meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984. Scientists tell us that five trillion Martian rocks have over time fallen to Earth. They estimate that tons of Martian material must have come to land on Earth, although only a few Martian meteorites have been found.
Rudy Schild, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and editor of the Journal of Cosmology, which carried Hoover's report, said: "The implications are that life is everywhere, and that life on Earth may have come from other planets." Dr. Hoover says, "I believe these findings indicate that life is not restricted to Earth, but is broadly distributed, even outside our solar system."

Heraclitus: 'The World Bubbles Forth.' An Invitation To Us All.

 

by Stuart Kauffman

We may be at a time when our scientific world view is about to undergo a radical transformation.
Recently, physicist Stephen Hawking wrote an article entitled, "Godel and the End of Physics." His concern is that no finite set of laws may suffice to describe the evolution of the universe, and with it, I add, the biosphere, econosphere, human cultural evolution and history.
I hope in this and forthcoming discussions to explore a new issue in Western born science: Do laws sufficiently describe the becoming of the universe and all in it? If not, as I believe, what does such a failure of sufficiency portend? If the becoming of the universe is partially beyond natural law, the issue is deeply important: The way the world becomes may be ever creative and open. Its implications touch all aspects of our lives and humanity as we move toward a co-evolving ecology of world civilizations, need a sharable sense of the sacred, a global ethic, and a deeper understanding of ourselves, living forward not only not knowing what will happen, but not even knowing what can happen. As we will see, if right, we live forward into Mystery. A partially lawless reality has very large practical consequences for our lives. How could it not?
Perhaps as Heraclitus said about 2700 years ago, the world does bubble forth.
  If we are to discuss this, we must first understand the basic framework welded by physics since Descartes, Galileo and Newton. The first modern summary of this view was put forth by French mathematician, Laplace, in Napoleon's time: Given a vast computing system that knew the positions, velocities and masses of all the particles in the universe, this computer could, using Newton's laws, compute the entire future and past of the universe. This claim is the essence of what is called "reductionism", the framework of science in which we in much of the "first world" live.
Add quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the Standard Model of particle physics, and one has most of contemporary reductionistic physics. Despite its stunning successes, reductionism is now doubted by Nobel Laureate physicists Philip Anderson, in "More is Different", Science, 1972, and Robert Laughlin in A Different Universe: The universe from the bottom down, 2005.
There are at least five major features of Laplace's claim: 1) The universe evolves deterministically, because Newton's laws are deterministic and time reversible. 2) All that exists in the universe are particles in motion. 3) All that happens in the universe is fully describable by natural laws. 4) Those laws capture what Aristotle called "efficient causes", the sculptor chiseling the statue, so all that occurs in the universe is due to efficient causes. 5) There exists at least one language, here Newton's laws, capable of fully describing the universe.
I shall doubt all these claims in our further discussions. The first claim is in serious doubt due to quantum mechanics, which, on the famous Copenhagen interpretation due largely to Niels Bohr, and the Born rule, asserts that at the quantum level particles obey the Schrodinger equation whose amplitudes, when squared, give the probabilities of events, but those events happen fully by chance - acausally. The universe is not deterministic at the quantum level.
A preamble: These discussions will often be exploratory, take side trips, may sometimes be confused and confusing, may sometimes be dead ends, but I do sense, and glimpse enough, to believe that they are important and hope you will join me in thinking through the issues. Perhaps a quite new view of reality can be envisioned.

Below is a video put together by the good folks at the American Museum of Natural History, in collaboration with the Rubin Museum of Art.

Masks Of The Universe

by Adam Frank

Last week one of our astute blog community members recommend the book Masks of the Universe by cosmologist Edward Harrison. I was delighted to see this work come up. This is one of my favorite discussions of Cosmos and Culture and so I wanted to pass along the recommendation with a little extra background.
Harrison's book is an unusual addition to the popular science literature. It is not simply a recounting of Big Bang physics and its triumphs. Instead, Harrison begins with a fundamental, but slippery, question. What is interplay between the raw data the world gives us, and the image of the world we create in response. These responses are what Harrison calls "Universes" and his masks are meant to be the physical science version of Joseph Campbell's Masks of God. As Harrison describes it:

Wherever we find a human society, however primitive, we find a universe and wherever we find a universe, of whatever kind, we find a society; both go together, and one does not exist without the other. Each universe coordinates and unifies a society, enabling its members to communicate their thoughts and share their experiences. Each universe determines what is perceived and what constitutes valid knowledge, and the members of each society believe what is perceived and perceived what is believed.

Harrison has chapters on prehistory, on the first urban societies, on the Greeks etc all the way up to the modern era. Each chapter unpacks the ideas expressed in the quote above - there is more to the story of cosmos and culture than simply being right or wrong about an objective reality. One can not doubt that there is a reality out there that pushed back on us but, in Harrison's view, that reality is always viewed through the prism of culturally constructed paradigms.
In the end Harrison does not answer the most pressing question - to what extend has science finally "gotten it right"? To what extent is the Universe revealed by science THE UNIVERSE and to what extent is it another mask. But that is small criticism given this book's big ambitions. It is a thoughtful and unusual work and well worth more discussion on these pages.