In the Dark

Years ago, when people were being urged to drink a lot of milk, it became clear that some were lactose intolerant. As scientists did further research they found more and more adults unable to digest dairy products. The scientists wondered why so many people seemed to have this defect until it was realized in fact that they looking at it all wrong. These scientists were mostly Caucasian and had assumed they were the norm when if fact the majority of adults in the world cannot digest lactose easily. It turns out that only people of European descent, those descended from a few African tribes and a few other groups may be able to digest dairy as adults. What was assumed to be normal was in fact an anomaly.


We may be making the same error when we are looking at the universe...we are assuming we are the norm when in fact the matter and energy we are made of and are familiar with may make up a very small part of the universe! It turns out that roughly 70% of the Universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 25%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the Universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the Universe.


This is turning our view of the universe upside down, that we are in the minority and something that we know so little about, and possibly can know so little about, comprises most of this universe. It's a scary thought...if true.


For decades physicists have been trying to tie everything up into a Grand Unified Theory. The current great best hope has to do with string theory or should I say theories as there is not one but dozens. Unfortunately I don't believe the physicists working with string theory have taken into account the new discoveries of dark matter and energy...heck even the Big Bang and the professed 13.7 billion years of age of our universe may be overturned as astronomers believe they have discovered stars older than that, mature galaxies when the universe was supposedly young and the giant walls of superclusters of galaxies that are believed to have taken more time than that to have developed.


OTOH dark matter and energy may not exist at all. It could be that we are running out of time. Or our theories of gravity are all wrong especially on the large scale.  Or that even the speed of light has changed over the eons. I find it amusing when pundits claim the end of science is near as everything has been learned and it's just a matter of fine-tuning the details. It seems to me our knowledge of the universe is like an onion or a matryoshka doll where we see/know one layer only to find another beneath, having been there all the time, only hidden from us by ignorance. The science established by the Greeks and Romans suited our needs for centuries; then came Sir Isaac Newton who revealed further workings of reality. We found his laws useful for centuries until along came Albert Einstein followed shortly by Werner Heisenberg and others who showed the effects of quantum mechanics underlying the Newtonian world view. Now we are coming to realize that there may be still more to the universe then we have thought. It turns out we may indeed still be in the dark as we take out first steps out of our cradle into the dark.

The Problem with Uncertainty

Atheists have suggested that the drive behind religious belief is a fear of death, the cessation of being; this may very well be true. We will never know the truth of any religion (or lack of belief) until we die when we may find Jesus or Allah or the Light or something humans have never conceived of awaiting us or it will be like the finale of "Terminator 2" where the T-800 descends into the vat of molten steel and its CPU starts to fail, finally fading to black. There can be no absolute certainty this side of the veil between life and death and that, I believe, is the major cause for war between various religious factions. Believer One worships his god his way; nearby another worships the same god but in a different manner and there is still another who worships an entirely different god. They are all happy and prosperous, perhaps more prosperous than Believer One. Doubt creeps in; perhaps the others have the right of it. How can I prove that my worship of my god is correct? asks Believer One. I know. If I fight these others surely my god will side with me and I will be victorious thereby proving that I am worshiping the true god in the correct manner. It seems to me that when you examine history much past bloodshed has been rooted in that sort of uncertainty - why don't others worship my god and do so in the manner I do as it should be so obvious to all that I'm right? In order for all doubt to be eradicated, all non-believers of that god and the "incorrect" manner in which that god is worshiped, must be eradicated. I truly think all fundamentalists consciously or unconsciously feel that way and, if we give them any further leeway, the inevitable result will be disastrous for our planet.

Life is Written into the Laws of Reality

From today's Daily Galaxy:

"To the best of our knowledge, the twenty-one original chemicals chosen by known life do not constitute a unique set; other choices could have been made, and maybe were made if life started elsewhere many times." Paul Davies - leading authority in astrobiology, director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and co-director of the ASU Cosmology Initiative.
A recent mathematical analysis says that life as we know it is written into the laws of reality. DNA is built from a set of twenty amino acids - the first ten of those can create simple prebiotic life, and now it seems that those ten are thermodynamically destined to occur wherever they can.
For those unfamiliar with thermodynamics, it's the Big Brother of all energy equations and science itself.  You can apply quantum mechanics at certain scales, and Newtonian mechanics work at the right speeds, but if Thermodynamics says something then everyone listens.
An energy analysis by Ralph Pudritz, a theoretical astrophysicist and director of the Origins Institute at McMaster University shows that the first ten amino acids are likely to form at relatively low temperatures and pressures, and the calculated odds of formation match the concentrations of these life-chemicals found in meteorite samples.
They also match those in simulations of early Earth, and most critically, those simulations were performed by other people.  The implications are staggering: good news for anyone worried about how we're alone, and bad news for anyone who demands some kind of "Designer" to put life together - it seems that physics can assemble the organic jigsaw all by itself, thank you very much, and has probably done so throughout space since the beginning of everything.
The study indicates that you don't need a miracle to arrive at the chemical cocktail for early life, just a decently large asteroid with the right components.  That's all.  The entire universe could be stuffed with life, from the earliest prebiotic protein-a-likes to fully DNAed descendants. The path from one to the other is long, but we've had thirteen and a half billion years so far and it's happened at least once.
The other ten amino acids aren't as easy to form, but they'll still turn up - and the process of "stepwise evolution" means that once the simpler systems work, they can grab the rarer "epic drops" of more sophisticated chemicals as they occur - kind of a World of Lifecraft except you literally get a life when you play.  And once even the most sophisticated structure is part of a replicating organism, there's plenty to go round.
Early Earth was covered with carbonaceous material from meteorites and comets that provided the raw materials from which first life emerged. In his new book, The Eerie Silence, astrophysicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University suggests that the original cells would have been able to pick and choose from the early Earth's organic cocktail. To the best of our knowledge, he writes, "the twenty-one chosen by known life do not constitute a unique set; other choices could have been made, and maybe were made if life started elsewhere many times."

I'm certain in our universe there are countless planets teeming with life and possibly even intelligent life. There is a drive in us to journey out there and discover the awesome results of billions of years of evolution elsewhere (the billions of years of evolution here on Earth has been pretty awesome too). Ad astra we will go if we don't do something stupid and, unfortunately, that something stupid would probably be instigated by the theomaniacs we are currently plagued with. We have to chose to live up to our name - homo sapiens sapiens (wise wise man) - and put away childish things and finally grow up. 

NYC Atheists

Well I went and joined NYC Atheists. I feel slightly hypocritical as I feel there might be something beyond us; OTOH I'm certainly an atheist in regard to all the man made deities that still plague us and, of the world religions that now exist, I suspect it is only Buddhism that may hold a few truths. 

Teaching The Bible in School

Well bad luck has struck Louisiana again as a repeal of the Louisiana Revised Statutes 17:285.1 failed. These statutes imposed the inappropriately named Louisiana Science Education Act which, as Barbara Forrest recently noted "was promoted only by creationists.

I'm all for teaching Biblical creation in school...in a class on comparative theology. What I dislike most about Biblical literalists is that they want us to believe the only other option to evolution is the Biblical account of creation. Well teach Biblical creationism...as long as the creation myths of the Hindus, the American Indians, the Chinese, the Aboriginal Dreamtime and countless other stories of creation are taught as well. How then can anyone declare that their set of fantastic, unprovable myths are anymore valid than another set of fantastic, unprovable myths? Oh, they'll try but while they keep each other busy, science can get on with its work figuring out how the universe actually works and came into being. 

Spaceship Earth

Though most of us don't realize it we are living on spaceship Earth as it, and the star it orbits, wanders the cosmos. This is one of the best vids I've come across that conveys a sense of movement through the universe: