Life On Titan?

by Marcelo Gleiser

 

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

 

The Cassini spacecraft peeks through the murk of Titan's thick atmosphere in a search for clouds.

The headlines were bombastic: “NASA scientists discover evidence ‘that alien life exists on Saturn’s moon’,” at the Daily Telegraph in the UK.

There were many others about a month ago.
The news was based on two papers using data collected by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been flying about Saturn and its magnificent moons. In one of them, published in Icarus, scientists described how hydrogen molecules were seen flowing down Titan’s atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. In another paper, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, a survey of the plethora of hydrocarbons blanketing Titan’s surface found a lack of acetylene. Normally, hydrogen shouldn’t be flowing downward and disappearing, and acetylene should be an ingredient of the organic soup brewing on Titan.
According to NASA scientist Chris McKay, acetylene forms the best energy source for a methane-based life on Titan. So, if acetylene is missing, maybe it’s being consumed as food. Hydrogen is even more important, as it’s a key ingredient in a methane-based metabolism.
An argument for alien life based on the absence of two chemicals is not very strong. But what if there was life on Titan?
  McKay is a very reasonable and extremely serious scientist. He is careful to stress that these are indications of a hypothetical methane-based life form which has never been observed: the absence of hydrogen and acetylene is not yet evidence of life.
The Daily Telegraph’s headline was way out of line.
However, the discoveries are suggestive of some form of extreme chemistry taking place at the moon’s surface, where the temperature is around minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. In this kind of frozen world, methane and ethane flow as liquids, collecting in lakes not so different from those found in our water world. Reality does beat fantasy!
If anything, Titan’s exuberant organic chemistry serves as an indication that alien worlds have many surprises for us. That McKay could predict what kind of effects a methane-based life would have on an alien world is, in itself, quite remarkable. Even if these two signatures prove to be something quite lifeless (that’s my bet), the fact is that we now have machines that can examine alien chemistry in search of exotic life forms, is an amazing achievement.
We are privileged to live in a time when aliens step out of novels and movies and become part of serious scientific inquiry.
It remains to be seen if we are actually going to discover some kind of life form in the next few decades. However, even if we do, odds are this life will be quite simple, possibly unicellular like our bacteria. That’s not a bad thing.
Finding any kind of life would have very deep implications for humankind. After all, if another kind of life exists in a celestial body in our cosmic neighborhood, the probability that life would be widespread in the galaxy would skyrocket. And that would beg the question as to why we haven’t seen any convincing signs of intelligent life.
We would then have to wonder if the reason is that intelligent life is quite rare. That being the case, we would have to wonder why we are so special.

PLAYING WITH DARK MATTER

Also check out this  interactive presentation from McGraw-Hill that will allow you to explore how astronomers conclude that the Universe is full Dark Matter.

P.S. Make sure you read over the Introduction and How To sections to see how it all works.

Death Of The Big Bang, Or The Problem Of Time's Beginning

 

by Adam Frank

NASA

  At an estimated age of 13 billion years, this is the oldest known planet. 
It orbits a peculiar pair of burned-out stars in the crowded core of a cluster of more than 100,000 stars. The measurements were taken by Hubble.

The Big Bang is all but dead and we do not yet know what will replace it.
There are those who will tell you that Cosmology — the study of the Universe entire — has become an exact science.  They will tell you that this grand and all embracing field has, in the last 50 years, moved from the realms of philosophical speculation into the purest domains of science via exacting confrontations between theoretical models and high-resolution data. You should know that they are right.
For the first time in the long march of human thinking we are now, finally, able to construct a detailed and verifiable account of cosmic history.
So when I tell you that Big Bang is dead I do not mean the story that begins with a Universe far hotter and far denser than what we see today. I do not mean the story of a Universe expanding, of matter cooling and congealing over billions of years into stars and galaxies.  That story, the scientific narrative of cosmic evolution over the last 13.7 billion years is doing just fine. That story is, for all intents and purposes, secure.
It’s the beginning that has fallen. It is genesis that stands ready to be replaced.
  The singular and all-important moment of creation at the beginning of the Big Bang — the beginning of time and existence — has become precarious and is poised to be swept aside.  In other words it’s the Bang in the Big Bang that we humans, in our endless quest to understand the world, are ready to abandon.  That single moment of creation with no before is almost exhausted, done in by the very precision of the science which gave it's conception a measure of reality.
Now it appears that science is ready to go beyond, and before, the Big Bang.  Cosmology is waiting at the precipice of its next great revolution.  The only question is where, or better yet “when,” do we go from here? We are ending the beginning and beginning down another path.
There are different reasons for this push backward.  I am in the midst of writing a book on the subject (almost done… almost… done) so I will be blogging on this topic more as time goes on. Today, I will leave you with two terms which sum up the move away from a single moment of creation: Inflationary Cosmology and Quantum Gravity.
Inflationary Cosmology is a major addition to standard Big Bang theory. It emerged in 1980s to solve a number of paradoxes that arose in both particle physics and cosmology.  Inflation imagines a tiny sliver of the Universe undergoing expansion on steroids at the barest instant after the Big Bang.  Inflation makes all we see nothing more than a bubble in a much larger, unknown Universe.  In the Eternal Inflation versions of the model, the process goes on and on with no beginning and no end — bubble universes are always being born and are always “dying”.  No single Big Bang need exist and hence no beginning of cosmic time.
Quantum Gravity is the name physicists give to their holy of holies — a theory uniting Einstein’s description of Space-Time and the Quantum description of the microworld.  String Theory makes a claim to this throne but there are other equally interesting ideas like Loop Quantum Gravity.  What they all share is the desire to climb within that first moment of creation, the singularity at t = 0 when the Universe and time just began.  From these explorations new cosmological ideas like Cyclic Universes emerge: Big Bangs followed by Big Crunches or Big Bangs as collisions between hyperdimensional sheets of reality.  There are many ideas coming from research on Quantum Gravity theories, many ways of avoiding a single moment of “Let There Be Light.”
Most scientists were never happy with a comsic beginning.  It was too strange, like firing up the engine on God’s Porsche.  Now there seem to be many routes to before but only time (and ultimately data) will tell us what to do with problem of time’s beginning.

Understanding Nature On Her Terms, And The Fear That Comes With It

 

by Ursula Goodenough

Robert F. Bukaty/AP

  It is not enough to appreciate nature.
It is also crucial that we understand it.

Aldo Leopold has written a passage in his classic A Sand County Almanac that goes to heart of what I want to write about this morning.

No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions. The proof that environmental conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it. In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial. ...We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

Leopold wrote this passage in 1949, and it can certainly be said that religion and philosophy have since come to hear about conservation, in good part, because of the environmental movement that Leopold helped to catalyze.
But I hear him saying something more.
I hear him saying that it is not enough to appreciate nature.  It is also crucial that we understand it, deep in our bones.
Several years ago I attended a workshop where the speakers described various ways that environmental topics had been effectively woven into college curricula.  Many interesting programs were outlined. In not one presentation, however, was there any mention of science courses. Indeed, the S-word was never used in the entire two hours of discussion. Sustainability, yes, and stewardship and subsidies and self-restraint. But not science.
Let me take a short detour and bring to your minds another key social movement of the past 50 years, one that we can call cultural studies. We have come to realize that in order to have an appreciation of a culture other than one’s own, it is essential to leave one’s own culture-laden perspectives behind. To take in another culture requires a deep understanding of its language, its history, its dynamics, and its mythos from the perspective of those who inhabit that culture, from those who indwell. We now insist on hearing their voices.
In the same way, I would say, to understand a tree is not just to think of it as beautiful, or as a habitat for birds, or as provisioning shade for the ferns or loam for the forest floor.  A tree is all of these things, to be sure. But it is also carrying out photosynthetic electron transport and cyclic and non-cyclic phosphorylation and NADP reduction and DNA replication and lignin biosynthesis. To say that these vital activities of the tree are not interesting, or too difficult to understand, sounds dismissive to me, or even arrogant, like hearing someone say that he wants to observe a Central American culture through his own lenses, on his own terms, wants to pull up in a cruise ship and buy a few postcards and leave. To my mind, it is our obligation to understand how genes work and evolution happens and galaxies collide and water freezes and brains think and stars burn. This is the language and the history of our entire context. Trees speak in electrons and carbon and chemical bonds and DNA.
How could a curriculum on environmentalism leave these things out?
  Well, let’s begin with the perception that “these things” are not very interesting or too difficult to understand. True, our schools in the main do a terrible job of making science interesting, and an excellent job of making it incomprehensible. And true, the perceived linkage between scientific understanding and the technological use of scientific understanding fuels an anti-science bias in persons who are alarmed by the technological juggernaut (although to my mind, as I’ve developed here, this bias arises from a misunderstanding of how the science-technology linkage works).
But I pick up on something deeper: I encounter a resistance to scientific explanation. Resistance doesn't usually come from cognitive sources.  It comes from the gut. Therefore, I would suggest that much of the resistance to scientific explanation comes from what we can call a fear of reductionism. We fear, however inchoately, that to view the Sun in terms of its language of thermonuclear reactions and gravitational pressures will destroy our experience of the Sun’s majesty and the beauty of sunsets. We fear that to view life as the product of genes interacting with environment is to destroy the meaning of both life and environment. We encounter, that is, the ominous specter of “scientific materialism,” which sounds for all the world like soviet-style “dialectical materialism” that can morph into “diabolical materialism.” We shudder, a long existential shudder, and then we scurry back to thinking about nature on our own aesthetic and political terms.
Poor matter. This magical stuff, undergirding everything that we know to exist, including the minds that hold our understandings of existence, is so often given disparaging qualifiers, like “mere” matter or “just” matter or “only” matter. What else, pray tell, would we want to be made of?
So the resistance, I submit, is embedded in our fear that we will somehow lose what we sometimes call our spirituality by encountering our context in material form. And to lose our spirituality, we fear, is to lose our humanness, our soulfulness, our capacity for transcendent experience. We will become automatons.
Here’s what I say to undergraduates when we arrive at this potentially gloomy juncture. I say to them, OK, a good-looking guy walks by and I feel my pulse quicken and my face flush. Do I say to myself, aah, norepinephrine released from my sympathetic neurons has just stimulated my sinoatrial node to generate increased cardiac output? Of course not. I say to myself, Wow, that’s a really good-looking guy!  It’s not like I can’t go there. I can certainly reflect on how interesting it is that the experience I just had was mediated by action potentials and calcium influx. But, I assure them, this doesn’t wreck the experience. It’s just a second way to think about it. The immediate experience, the subjective experience, is uncompromised. Subjectivity, in the end, is immune to anything but its own inherent experiential manifestations.

The Scales of the Universe

  NICE MUSIC... INFINITE ZOOMING

VISIT >>> Scales of the Universe by Carl and Micheal Huang.

ARE WE DRIVEN BY SELF INTEREST?

Cultures 'R' Us: Evolution, Self Interest And Wanting What We Have

 

by Ursula Goodenough

Mahmoud Zayat/Getty Images Birds migrate over the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon.

Continuing this week’s 13.7 focus (here and here and here) on our self-absorbed human predicament, let me offer a few evolutionary perspectives on how we got here and how we might move forward.
All organisms, by definition, are laden with self-interest. Self-maintenance, self-protection, self-reproduction — these are biological imperatives. This mandate is often stated as “surviving to produce fertile offspring,” but organisms that only eke out survival are far less likely to be the ancestors of large lineages than are organisms that flourish in a given ecosystem. Nor is “flourishing” a synonym for that old canard “the fittest.” Rather, it connotes being well adapted to the particular environmental circumstances in which one finds oneself.
Social organisms remain self-interested, but in addition, they also cooperate in such vital activities as food acquisition and predator protection. Hence their mandate is both to flourish as an individual and to flourish in community. Sociality has evolved numerous times: Bacteria secrete signaling molecules to regulate group-related activities (quorum sensing); butterflies migrate; fish swim in schools; birds join together to chase off the circling hawk; wolves hunt in packs.
Social behaviors are in most cases “instinctive,” but in some cases organisms inherit the capacity to learn social behaviors. Primates, in particular, develop minds capable of keeping track of friendships and favors and mastering the nuances of fluctuating social hierarchies, behaviors that enhance the stability and hence the flourishing of their troops. Importantly, natural selection doesn’t “care” whether behavior is hardwired or learned; it only “cares” whether the outcome is adaptive.
Navigating the demands of self-interest versus group cooperation can be fraught with conflicting impulses, and the option to go-it-alone is frequently taken in the context of stress. Under such circumstances, social organisms typically hunker down and engage in self-interested survival patterns, the default behavior of all creatures.
Stress invariably arises when organisms find themselves in environments that fail to mesh with what their genetic scripts anticipated. Unexpected ecosystems fail to provide the necessary context for pulling together the social behaviors that were selected to generate flourishing communities in expected contexts.
Which brings us to human primates.
  We turn out to be “niche constructors” — the familiar prototype being the beaver who dams up a stream and inhabits the resultant lake. We inhabit not only the planetary ecosystem but also the human-made, language-based niche we collectively call culture, allowing us access to information accumulated from generation to generation.
Language-based cultures are continuously evaluated and modified; hence humans are by definition born into unanticipated contexts. The stress engendered by this feature of our niche is minimized when a culture is stabilized by "tradition,” and maximized when cultures are amended in increasingly rapid timeframes, as is currently the case.
From this perspective, the angst expressed in this week’s series of blogs need not be attributed to the new information provisioned by scientific inquiry, nor to the new technologies generated by that knowledge, nor to the challenges modernity poses to traditional religious or political or community or family systems.
The angst arises because it’s all changing so precipitously that we’ve lost our bearings. We had hundreds of thousands of years to absorb fire and spear production; thousands of years to absorb the written word; hundreds of years to absorb heliocentricity.
And now look at us.
Talk about the stress of inhabiting unanticipated environments! Under such circumstances, self-interested survival patterns could be said to be adaptive.
But they aren’t, of course, for the simple reason that the planet lacks the carrying capacity to provide grounding and solace for all in the form of plastic purple penguins by the pool. If there has been an overarching human error, it has been to construct cultural contexts that fail to mesh with planetary realities.
But cultures are us. We invent them and re-invent them. We learn and we teach. Our growing awareness of our error and its consequences will hopefully allow us to access our inherited suite of social emotions – fairmindedness, respect, reverence and empathy – as we generate cultures that balance self-interest and Earth community. Such cultures wouldn’t seek to mask or bemoan our earthly materiality but rather would celebrate it.
We’ll always be self-interested. We’ll always want stuff. That’s part of our animal nature. But as I’ve lift up in a homily on stuff, it’s not getting what you want that’s important, it’s wanting what you’ve got. What we’ve got is a splendid planet; what we need to want is that it flourish.

Re-Imagining Society: Are We Trapped By Old Ideas?

 

by Stuart Kauffman

We always live in a world we partially construct for ourselves by a ring of ideas.
This holds true for the society that shapes us and that we shape.
In this blog I want to sketch familiar ideas that frame us, and will critique them in later blogs.

We can begin 4,900 years ago with Abraham, breaking the idols in his father’s idol shop, and his putative role in inventing monotheism.  With that shift from polytheism, the ancient Jews culled 100,000 years of beliefs in multiple gods to be appeased, with their conflicting egos - think of the Greek gods and their strife - into a single Creator Agent God and that God’s Creativity acting in the ongoing becoming of the universe: “In the Beginning was the Word...”, Genesis, our current religious Abrahamic creation myth among three billion of us on this planet.
The ancient Jews lived stubbornly with Yahweh, debating the interpretations of His Laws, and sought to live righteously with those commandments. They were a people deeply of history, namely, their own as the Chosen People with their God, who would also love their non-Jewish neighbors.
The Greeks were universalists, seeking universal laws. Think of Archimedes running through the streets: Eureka!, as he understood floatation.  The Greek universalist culture was deeply at odds with the particularist Hebraic culture rooted in historicism.
  Skip to glorious Newton.  In three laws of motion and a universal law of gravitation, the invention of the differential and integral calculus, he gives us, in a stunning integration, a Greek-spawned view of the world, classical physics. In this view, still workable in many settings, given the initial and boundary conditions of a system of particles, or billiard balls, the future evolution of those particles is entirely determined and knowable by integration, hence deduction as Aristotle would want, of the differential equations given initial and boundary conditions.
Skip to Laplace and his Demon: Such an intelligence, if knowing the positions and momenta of all particles in the universe, could know from Newton’s laws, the entire future and past of the universe.
So with Newton, we arrive at both reductionism, seen first clearly in Laplace and in our Dreams of a Final Theory, as Steven Weinberg wrote not long ago, and we become frozen with the conflict between the Creator Agent God and that God’s Creativity acting forever in the open becoming of the universe, for that God is a free willed one on the one hand, and classical physics on the other.  If we are to be modern in that 17th Century world of Newton and thereafter, the tension between religion and science is enormous. We are left with either Deism, or a God of the Gaps retreat of religion.
This gives rise to the foundations of both our secular society, our loss of spirituality as we cleave to science as telling us what the world really is, and the rise of capitalism with the invention of banking and the Industrial Revolution unleashed by physics then chemistry.
The birth of secular society is also the child of our beloved Enlightenment, unleashed by about fourteen thinkers whose aims were to shut down the irrational and antiscientific bounds of the clerics, and unleash the power of reason and science to tell us what the world really is, and, via reason, to make forever progress is mastering nature for our benefit, and build a perfect society.  With the Enlightenment, the sacred wanes into the dwindling gaps of the God of the Gaps.
In this vein, Locke was a close friend of Newton and from Locke we get, in the United States, and now around the world, a unique political philosophy: Our Constitution with its three branches of government, Exectutive, Legislative, Judicial, in a hoped for constant tension of counterbalancing forces which - Newton like - would sustain an ongoing equilibrium of power.
But notice something deep: The Hebraic idea of life in living history is not part of our Constitution.  We do not have a “theory of history,” even with Hegel and Marx trying, and Kant, before them, seeking laws of history.  Lacking a theory of history, we do, however, have in our Constitution, derived also from British Common Law, the concept of the gradual, hopefully wise, evolution of our laws as history unfolds.
So here is a new conflict: On the one hand, classical physics says the becoming of the universe is either a becoming that is deterministic, Newton and Laplace, or there is no becoming at all in Einstein’s four dimensional spacetime, only geometric world lines.
On the other hand, we grope with the sense that we do live in a world of open becoming: As I have noted before, the invention and wide sale of the main frame computer enabled the invention and wide sale of the personal compute,r which in turn enabled the invention and wide sale of word processing, which enabled the storing of computer files, whose wide use enabled the storage and sharing of files, which enabled the invention and wide use of the Web, which enabled selling things on the web, which enabled content on the web, which enabled Google.
This is a constant becoming in what I call the Adjacent Possible of the econosphere.  The Adjacent Possible is like a forever expanding house, where passing via a particular door from a room to another room, opens new doors in the Adjacent Possible which we explore in, for example, the explosion of goods and services in our economy in the past 50,000 years, rising from perhaps 1,000 goods to billions. The economists have no theory for this explosion, which has created our technological present beyond stating that research brings new inventions. I will hold that this is a strongly impoverished understanding of the unfolding of economic history, in which the current Actual opens new possible opportunities in the Adjacent Possible, both for human life and for the biosphere's historical evolution.
One deep question is the ontological status of this Adjacent Possible of the economy. Is it a wisp of our imagination?  When the young entrepreneur presents his business case to the venture capitalist, are the possibilities and countervailing risks he presents that may convince the VP to invest, mere “imaginings?” Or, I will very tentatively suggest, perhaps this Adjacent Possible is ontologically real, so reality consists of the Actual and the Possible, as Aristotle suspected and Alfred North Whitehead believed.  This will, I think, lead us to the mysteries of quantum mechanics as part of stepping beyond our familiar framework.
But the first, firmer step beyond the grip of these framing ideas will be to examine whether we can have sufficient natural laws for the evolution of the biosphere, econosphere, and history. I will claim that we cannot have such sufficient natural laws, with, I believe, widespread consequences for our views of ourselves, thus our full humanity and the society we may want to enable that humanity.