At first light: Amazing cosmological discoveries

First an announcement or two: 

The Hubble Space Telescope has found the most distant "ordinary" star observed, at 9 billion light-years away, through gravitational lensing. The gravitational lens phenomenon has fast transformed from a cosmic wonder to an almost daily, workman’s tool for deep space astronomers, and no longer are the lenses just giant galactic clusters. "A single star in a foreground lens, if precisely aligned with a background star, can magnify the background star thousands of times." In this case, instead of the usual 50x or so amplification, this event was ballooned 2000+ times.  "There are alignments like this all over the place as background stars or stars in lensing galaxies move around, offering the possibility of studying very distant stars dating from the early universe, just as we have been using gravitational lensing to study distant galaxies."

New estimate: there might be around 10,000 isolated black holes and between 300 and 500 binary black hole systems—two-object star systems in which one of the components is a black hole—within three light-years of the monster-mega BH at the Galactic Center.  It’s starting to look ever more like Gregory Benford’s Galactic Center science fiction universe.

I've been asked to explain the announced discovery of light from among the very earliest stars, and what it implies. Bear with me? As it happens, the light that strikes the Earth (and our telescopes and eyes) comes from a lot of different eras. Only a small amount of it comes from stars. It took light from the nearest stars four years to get here. From the Andromeda Galaxy, it took 2.57 million years. We have photographed galaxies whose light took more than ten billion years to reach us.

But the oldest light isn't even light at all. It has been stretched by the universal expansion, till it is weak stuff... radio waves. And everywhere we point our radio telescopes, we can detect the same thing, a low hum at three degrees above absolute zero... the Cosmic Background Radiation, the oldest remnants of the Big Bang, almost 14 billion years ago.

We cannot see (or hear) the Bang itself because there was an epoch when the still-very-compact universe was too hot for atoms to form out of ions and electrons. No light survived that era. Only then, the electrons and ions joined up -- about 380,000 years after the Bang -- and suddenly light could travel great distances. Much of it is still out there... till it hits our telescopes!

Actually, it's more complicated than that. It seems the universe cooled enough to allow light to travel, then briefly ionized again from the earliest starbursts,-- which blocked much of the light, again -- then cooled again! It is that 2nd cooling event that altered the background light in the sky. That event, about 180 million years after the Bang, is called the Cosmic Dawn. And traces of that event (and perhaps another one, 80 million years later) that Australian scientists are reporting.

This new discovery is about that Transition Era, when stars were just being born for the first time.

"The detection also contained a major surprise. The size of the dip was twice as big as predicted. This suggests the primordial hydrogen gas was absorbing more background radiation than predicted and would suggest the universe was significantly colder than previously thought, at about -270C.... Rennan Barkana, a professor of astrophysics at Tel Aviv University, proposes a potentially groundbreaking explanation: that the hydrogen gas was losing heat to dark matter."

== Seeding solar systems with needs for life? Or disturbing them? ==

Many people first grew aware of our next resource crisis – Phosphorus – on the pages of my novel, EXISTENCE, wherein I posited that Morocco and Iraq (with the biggest deposits) become the OPEC states of a new kind of scarcity. It takes one ton of phosphate-rich rock to make 130 tons of grain, and the U.S. has mostly used-up its once-rich ores in Florida. Of the six most important elements in Life, Phosphorus is by far the least common.

Now astronomers are seeking to discover if this may be an even wider problem. Preliminary indications show that Phosphorus may be scanty in the supernova clouds that seed solar systems.  Might Earth have been exceptionally lucky and rich in the stuff?  Might this help explain the “Fermi Paradox”?  

More to the point of science fiction thrillers, might “P-stealing” propel the next wave of alien invasion plots?

== Extending our vision ==

Europe’s GAIA spacecraft has mapped and done parallax on 1.7 billion stars, giving us  the exact brightness, distances, motions and colors in a huge data set and detailed map of our section of the Milky Way.  The information will yield the best three-dimensional map of our galaxy ever.

Three young protoplanetary suns have been found to have dust rich in nanodiamonds.

Scholz’s Star visited the outer reaches of our Solar System some 70,000 years ago, around the same time our ancestors left Africa. A dim red dwarf star with a brown dwarf companion, it came to within 0.8 light-years of our Sun, possibly perturbing the cometary cloud. It’s now about 20 light-years away. An excellent, detailed article about cosmic sleuthing.

In 2016 a super-flare of Proxima Centauri made the smallest star in the Alpha Centauri system – the nearest visible star to us (that’s not the sun) – brighten many-fold. It likely seared the Earth sized planet that’s been detected there.  The flare was detected by the Evryscope, a nightly sky survey telescope that connects 24 consumer-grade camera lenses to look for transient events and transiting planets.

The Lagoon Nebula is a "colossal object" that's 55 light-years in width and 20 light-years in height. “Even though it is about 4,000 light-years away from Earth, it is three times larger in the sky than the full Moon." Come for an inspiring dive into this marvel, through Hubble imagery. And build a civilization whose descendants will do it for real….

The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft took terrific measurements of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2014 along with the first real life landing on a comet. (In fiction, Mark Twain did it, then me and Greg Benford, in Heart of the Comet.)  Now see this incredible video of snow and stars and eerie terrain a wee bit more complicated than I predicted in my doctoral thesis… but verifying the main ideas!

These German physicists claim that bending light can have effects on gravitation, an inverse to how gravity can bend light. I am very skeptical! And it will take generations for our instruments to be sensitive enough to detect any effect in experiments. Still, for just a few of you, this nifty video abstract, with animations could be entertaining. 

See-it, believe-it proof… plus smart mobs and cool science

We'll start this time with CHASING ICE -- a documentary by and about one of the world's greatest adventurers, who spent years with his brave & hardy team designing, building and setting up some of the world's toughest cameras to endure the planet's harshest environments, all to track by time-lapse whether glaciers are growing or shrinking.  It's spectacular to watch, long before you finally get to see the hard-won footage.

This nature show is a game-changer. Watch it and make everyone you know watch it.  I saw an early version and it left everyone speechless in awe. Check local listings or find it on Amazon).  And yes, your  denialist uncle will find any excuse to avoid watching, because he will know in advance where this goes, where it has to go, where undeniable, bald-faced video footage takes anyone who has the basic curiosity and honesty to watch.

Oh… you have never seen anything till you've watched a chunk of glacier the SIZE OF MANHATTAN break off of Greenland and go belly up in a spectacular roar. Watch it 95% just to know there are still adventurers in the world who can bring home to us tales of wonder, worthy of Amundsen.  

== Tracing back the clock of life… TEN billion years? ==

Has the complexity of life been increasing along a path similar to Moore's Law?  If you trace-back the doublings of integrated circuit complexity, halving the number of transistors per chip every 18 months (Moore's Law) you get to zero around 1970… pretty much when it all started.  A similar back extrapolation was done with Hubble's Law, way back in the 1930s when the expansion of the universe was discovered, giving an early estimate for the Big Bang that was correct within an order of magnitude.  Now scientists have done the same thing with the expansion of the genome. And although this is only one possible measure of life-complexity, this particular trace-back yields shocking results. See: Moore's Law and the Complexity of Life in Technology Review.

If you discount the vast tracts of "redundant" DNA in mammalian chromosomes, then the log curve plots straight back in time, past eukaryotes and prokaryotes, to suggest that life had its origins… almost ten billion years ago.  Since the Earth itself is less than five billion years old, this suggests that either:

(1) life began de novo on Earth (the standard model) and then had a phase of exceptionally rapid genome growth (akin to the inflationary phase of expansion that some say followed the Big Bang), or

(2)  life began elsewhere and was seeded on the early Earth, in accordance with the Panspermia Theory of Arrhenius, and later Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. (As well as Heart of the Comet.)

An altogether fascinating prospect, either way.

== Science and the Spirit of Innovation ==

See 27 sci fi things that are coming true.  Such as a robot that can navigate an obstacle course, spray on skin, invisibility cloaks, 3-D printing of houses, chimera monkeys made from several embryos, artificial leaves, new, cheaper solar cells, and  exoskeletons!

Yet, are any of these advances as epochal as breakthroughs of the past? Has the engine of our innovation broken down? The incredible stodginess of Hollywood, these days, with remakes of remakes, is only matched by the stunning "me-too" notions seen in most net-web startups.  I run into it all the time.

Every decade since 1940 has seen the United states and its economy swayed by two major forces - a vast trade deficit that wound up being the great driver of world development, raising billions out of poverty around the world... and a wave of made-in-america innovative products and services that generated enough wealth to pay for it all.  From jet planes to rockets and satellites; from telecom and pharmaceuticals and fiber optics to xerography, CCDs and the internet, these breakthroughs came in rapid succession and enabled us to buy trillions of dollars worth of crap we never needed, thus uplifting the world.

That is, till the first decade of the 21st Century, when much of this engine stalled.  Is it simplistic to blame it on social matters like the culture war against science, waged especially hard during the Bush Administration? Of course that was a factor, at a time when extremes of both right and left preach cynical disbelief in the possibility of technology serving us in its traditional, problem-solving role.

That attitude is opposed by (among others) President Obama, who mentions sci-tech more often in speeches than any two other presidents, combined.  But there has to be more to it than that. A component that drives deeper than politics.

This article in the Economist, Has the ideas machine broken down? tries for perspective… and at least succeeds in offering background.

One thing you can do: Sign a petition to increase NASA's budget -- and support cutting edge developments in space and technology.  But above all, think about it!  Talk to others about re-igniting the can-do spirit.

==Bio-Science Miscellany==

A thoughtful, brief article  about the prospect of uplifting animal intelligence appeared recently in the Boston Globe, By Emily Anthes.

An absolute must-read about  the importance of the next frontier in biology and medicine, the Micro-Biome  ecosystem of bacteria and microbes who inhabit the human gut, skin, mouth etc.  Aldous Huxley wrote about this in a great novel 80 years ago. Today, both doctors and quacks are touting both real and fantasy cures that might arise from tailoring or re-building these symbiotic networks that are often wiped out or thrown into imbalance by excessive use of antibiotics.  Reinforcing the old saw that one generation's brilliant "solution" winds up creating new problems that the next generation must deal with.  So it goes.  (Get your own personal microbiome analyzed at uBiome.com).

Brain Scan Predicts Whether Convicts Will Re-Offend: Welcome To The Sci-Fi Future.  Activity in one very particular part of the brain shows a high correlation with recidivism. Men in the bottom half of anterior cingulate cortex activity were 2.6 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes and 4.3 times more likely to be arrested for nonviolent crimes. Should this become a factor in parole hearings?  The future is arriving.

Graphic shows how vaccines have changed our world.  And now yet more studies provide overwhelming refutation of the loony notion that vaccines cause autism. An area where the "left" is bona fide easily as cloud cuckoo as the right.

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a way to make genetic parts that can perform logic calculations.

Laser light to the prelimbic region of the prefrontal cortex apparently zaps away cocaine addiction – or conversely turned non-addicted rats into compulsive cocaine seekers. The effects were seen in rats gene-spliced to have light-sensitive neurons that can be turned on-ff by laser, hence, a different approach must be used for human therapies. Still, knowing which neurons are active in inhibition/addiction control could be of great value and there are other (e.g. magnetic) ways to have similar effects.

==Science and Society==

One of the latest TED talk sensations is Allan Savory, who has spent his life combatting desertification, and who now believes we've had it all wrong for two generations.  He claims that deserts are prevented, rather than created, by large herds of grazing animals.  His presentation is worth watching and the re-evaluation that he triggers is delicious to my contrarian mind!  On the other hand, it isn't hard for me to do a second, ornery veer and say "yes… but!"

Oh so many buts.  Like the fact that vast deserts clearly grew as human pastoralists were able to protect their herds from predators. Overgrazing is just as much a threat as undergrazing and Savory's technique requires the transient passage of large/dense herds of grazers, who stomp and fertilize an area without denuding it. A cavil that will require either intense supervision and daily management… or a return to predator-dense situations that keep the herds packed and moving.  Moreover the grasslands that he has restored are anything but "healthy" ecosystems in their own right.  Improved, but still denuded of trees by the very herbivore herds that Savory extolls. For true health you need at least partial coverage by trees, and that takes active management too, in order to protect them from the herbivores, like cattle, elephants and giraffes.

Finally, Savory's method emphasizes vast herds of cattle that are burdensome in their own right.  One of the hopeful prospects on our horizon will be vat grown meat.  If it can satisfy our appetites at three pounds of grain per pound of meat, then there will be more food and hope in the world, at far lower Karmic cost.   I will not let go of that hope… though I appreciate Savory's input of an eye-opening realization.  One that will do good!  Just let's not get carried away.

==Miscellaneous==

Read about one man's lifelong wrestling match with his atheism against religious heritage in the context of a scientific world. Sample an excerpt from The God Problem, by Howard Bloom, in Utne Reader.

Ever read a blog on chemistry that was hilarious? See this one about di-oxygen di-flouride… or FOOF.  Yes, it is as horrible a substance as it sounds!  And the blog is gut-busting… if your funny bone is tickled by something that makes water ice explode at minus two hundred celsius.

io9 offers you one of their great lists:  "Want to get smarter during your commute? There are a lot of fantastic podcasts that will teach you new things in a thoroughly entertaining way. Here are 13 podcasts that will expand your brain with cutting-edge science and cultural analysis."

== Smart Mobs and the Boston Bombings ==

Just one quick comment amid the mid-April terror crisis that has become all-too familiar in recent years. Evidently the FBI gets it and has called out a "smart mob"… or at least asked for public help identifying potential culprits in the Boston bombing from street video footage.  All may change, by the time this blog is posted, so I am putting off making my own appraisal.  But this could be a seminal moment, when all of society came to realize… we'll be better off when all citizens share in the power to see.

Brin Classics: Other Intelligent Designs: alternatives to Darwin that merit "equal time"

Part of a series of re-issues of my most-popular online postings, which first appeared as a featured article in SKEPTIC Magazine.  This one about the deep illogic underlying the claims by the fundamentalist community that they "just want students to be exposed to all sides and make up their own minds."

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THERE IS RICH IRONY in how the present battle over Creationism v. Darwinism has taken shape, and especially how this round differs from previous episodes. A clue to both the recent success — and the inevitable collapse — of “Intelligent Design” can be found in its name, and in the new tactics that are being used to support its incorporation into school curricula. In what must be taken as sincere flattery, these tactics appear to acknowledge just how deeply the inner lessons of science have pervaded modern culture.

Intelligent Design (ID) pays tribute to its rival, by demanding to be recognized as a direct and “scientific” competitor with the Theory of Evolution. Unlike the Creationists of 20 years ago, proponents of ID no longer refer to biblical passages. Instead, they invoke skepticism and cite alleged faulty evidence as reasons to teach students alternatives to evolution.

True, they produce little or no evidence to support their own position. ID promoters barely try to undermine evolution as a vast and sophisticated model of the world, supported by millions of tested and interlocking facts. At the level that they are fighting, none of that matters. Their target is millions of onlookers and voters, for whom the battle is as emotional and symbolic as it ever was.

What has changed is the armory of symbols and ideas being used. Proponents of Intelligent Design now appeal to notions that are far more a part of the lexicon of science than religion, notably openness to criticism, fair play, and respect for the contingent nature of truth.

These concepts proved successful in helping our civilization to thrive, not only in science, but markets, democracy and a myriad other modern processes. Indeed, they have been incorporated into the moral foundations held by average citizens, of all parties and creeds. Hence, the New Creationists have adapted and learned to base their arguments upon these same principles. One might paraphrase the new position, that has been expressed by many, as follows:

What do evolutionists have to fear? Are they so worried about competition and criticism that they must censor what bright students are allowed to hear? Let all sides present their evidence and students will decide for themselves!

One has to appreciate not only irony, but an implied tribute to the scientific enlightenment, when we realize that openness to criticism, fair play, and respect for the contingent nature of truth are now the main justifications set forward by those who still do not fully accept science. Some of those promoting a fundamentalist- religious agenda now appeal to principles they once fiercely resisted. (In fairness, some religions helped to promote these concepts.) Perhaps they find it a tactically useful maneuver.

It’s an impressive one. And it has allowed them to steal a march. While scientists and their supporters try to fight back with judicious reasoning and mountains of evidence, a certain fraction of the population perceives only smug professors, battling only to protect their turf — authority figures trying to squelch brave underdogs before they can compete. Image matters. And this self-portrayal — as champions of open debate, standing up to stodgy authorities — has worked well for the proponents of Intelligent Design (ID). For now.

Yet, I believe they have made a mistake. By basing their offensive on core notions of fair play and completeness, ID promoters have employed a clever short-term tactic, but have incurred a long-term strategic liability. Because, their grand conceptual error is in believing that their incantation of Intelligent Design is the only alternative to Darwinian evolution.

But they have laid themselves open to a jiu jitsu move of startling effectiveness.  Simply by responding "all right, then let's have students ALSO discuss alternatives other than Christian creationism If students deserve to weigh ID against natural selection, then why not also expose them to…

1. Guided Evolution

This is the deist compromise most commonly held by thousands — possibly millions — of very modern people, including many working scientists who want to reconcile science and faith. Yes, the Earth is 4.6 billion years old and our earliest ancestors emerged from a stew of amino acids that also led to crabs, monkeys and slime molds who are all distant relatives. Still, a creative force may have been behind the Big Bang, and especially the selection of some finely tuned physical constants, whose narrow balance appears to make the evolution of life possible, maybe even inevitable. Likewise, such a force may have given frequent or occasional nudges of subtle guidance to evolution, all along, as part of a Divine Plan.

There is one advantage — and drawback — to this notion (depending on your perspective): it is compatible with everything we see around us — all the evidence we’ve accumulated — and it is utterly impossible to prove or disprove. Not only does this let many scientists continue both to pray and do research, but it has allowed the Catholic Church and many other religious organizations to accept (at long last) evolution as fact, with relatively good grace.

To be clear, atheists still have trouble with this alternative.  But if it were included among the "alternatives" offered to young people in school, it would quickly prove far more vexing for those pushing creationism and ID! Biblical literalists would lose far more ground to this competitor than atheism would.

 And let there be no mistake.  If they succeed in dilluting biolgy curricula with "alternatives" to darwinian evolution, this one will be there, whether they like it or not.  We'll make sure it is! Also...

2. Intelligent Design of Intelligent Designers (IDOID)

Most Judeo-Christian sects dislike speculating about possible origins of the Creator. But not all avoid the topic. Mormons, for example, hold that the God of this universe — who created humanity (or else guided our evolution) — was once Himself a mortal being who was created by a previous God in a prior universe or context.

One can imagine someone applying the very same logic that Intelligent Design promoters have used.

There is no way that such a fantastic entity as God could have simply erupted out of nothing. Such order and magnificence could not possibly have self-organized out of chaos. Only intelligence can truly create order, especially order of such a supreme nature.

Oh, certainly there are theological arguments that have been around since Augustine to try and quell such thoughts, arguing in favor of ex nihilio or timeless pre-existence, or threatening punishment for even asking the question. But that’s the point! Any effort to raise these rebuttals will:

1. make this a matter of theology (something the ID people have strenuously avoided).
2. smack as an attempt to quash other ideas, flying against the very same principles of fair play and completeness that ID proponents have used to prop up this whole effort.

IDOID will have to be let in - and Mormons will help push it - or the whole program must collapse under howling derision and accusations of hypocrisy.

3. Evolution of Intelligent Designers

Yes, you read me right. Recent advances in cosmology have led some of the world’s leading cosmologists, such as Syracuse University’s Lee Smolin, to suggest that each time a large black hole forms (and our universe contains many) it serves as an “egg” for the creation of an entirely new “baby universe” that detaches from ours completely, beginning an independent existence in some non-causally connected region of false vacuum. Out of this collapsing black hole arises a new cosmos, perhaps with its own subsequent Big Bang and expansion, including the formation of stars, planets, etc. Smolin further posits that our own universe may have come about that way, and so did its “parent” cosmos, and so on, backward through countless cycles of hyper-time.

Moreover, in a leap of highly original logic, Smolin went on to persuasively argue that each new universe might be slightly better adapted than its ancestor. Adapted for what? Why, to create more black holes — the eggs — needed for reproducing more universes.

Up to this point we have a more sophisticated and vastly larger-scale version of what Richard Dawkins called the evolution of evolvability. But Lee Smolin takes it farther still, contending that, zillions of cycles of increasingly sophisticated universes would lead to some that inherit just the right physical constants and boundary conditions.

Conditions that enable life to form. And then intelligence … and then…

Well, now it’s our turn to take things even farther than Smolin did. Any advocate of completeness would have to extend this evolutionary process beyond achieving mere sapience like ours, all the way to producing intelligence so potent that it can then start performing acts of creation on its own, manipulating and using black holes to fashion universes to specific design.

In other words, there might be an intelligent designer of this world … who nevertheless came into being as a result of evolution.

Sound a little newfangled and contrived? So do all innovative ideas! And yet, no one can deny that it covers a legitimate portion of idea space. And since “weighing the evidence” is to be left to students, well, shouldn’t they be exposed to this idea too? Again, the principles now used by proponents of ID — fair play and completeness — may turn around and bite them.  Indeed, I promise that if they get their alternative to Darwin into schools, this one will also be there.  We'll make sure of it.

Which brings us to some of the classics.

4. Cycles of Creation

Perhaps the whole thing does not have a clear-cut beginning or end, but rolls along like a wheel? That certainly would allow enough macro-time for everything and anything to happen. Interestingly, the cyclical notion opens up infinite time for both evolution and intelligent designers … though not of any kind that will please ID promoters. Shall Hindu gurus and Mayan priest kings step up and demand equal time for their theories of creation cycles? How can you stop them, once the principle is established that every hypothesis deserves equal treatment in the schools, allowing students to hear and weigh any notion that claims to explain the world?  They can be presented in "non-religious terms" a gimmick that ID activists pioneered, showing the way.

Be careful what you wish for.

5. Panspermia

This one is venerable and quite old within the scientific community, which posits that life on Earth may have been seeded from elsewhere in the cosmos. Panspermia was trotted out for the “Scopes II” trial in the 1980s, when Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinge were among the few first-rank scientists to openly disbelieve the standard Origins model — the one that posits life appeared independently out of nonliving chemicals in Earth’s early oceans. Their calculations (since then refuted) suggested that it would take hundreds of oceans and many times the age of the Earth for random chemistry to achieve a workable, living cell.

Alas for the Creationists of that day, Hoyle and Wickramasinge did not turn out to be useful as friendly experts, because their alternative offered no comfort to the biblical Genesis story. They pointed out that our galaxy probably contains a whole lot more than a few hundred Earth oceans. Multiplying the age of the Milky Way times many billions of possible planets — and comets too — they readily conceded that random chance could make successful cells, eventually, on one world or another. (Or, possibly, in the liquid interiors of trillions of newborn comets. See Heart of the Comet!) All it would take then are asteroid impacts ejecting hardy cells into the void for life to then spread gradually throughout the cosmos. Perhaps it might even be done deliberately, once a single lucky source world achieved intelligence through … well … evolution. (Needless to say, Creationists found Hoyle and Wickramasinge big disappointments.)

So far, we have amassed quite a list of legitimate competitors … that is, if Intelligent Design is one. Now a cautionary pause. Some alternative theories that I have left out include satirical pseudo-religions, like one recent internet fad attributing creation to something called the “Flying Spaghetti Monster.” These humorous jibes have a place, but their blows do not land on-target. They miss the twin pillars of completeness and fair play, upon which promoters of Intelligent Design have based their attack against secular-modernist science. By erasing all theological details, ID activists hoped to eliminate any vulnerabilities arising from those details. Indeed, since the Spaghetti Monster is purported to be an Intelligent Designer, they can even chuckle and welcome it into the fold, knowing that it will win no real converts.

Not so for the other items listed here. Each of these concepts — adding to idea-space completeness and deserving fair play — implies a dangerous competitor for Intelligent Design, a competitor that may seduce at least a few students into its sphere of influence. This undermines the implicit goal of ID, which is to proselytize a fundamentalist/literalist interpretation of the Christian Bible.

There are other possibilities, and I am sure readers could continue adding to the list, long after I am done, such as…

• We’re living in a simulation…
• Non-omnipotent others meddled/uplifted us (Chariots of 'gods")
• We’ve been resurrected at the Omega Point…
• It’s all in your imagination … and so on.

I doubt that the promoters of Intelligent Design really want to see a day come when every biology teacher says: “Okay, you’ve heard from Darwin. Now we’ll spend a week on each of the following: intelligent design, guided evolution, intelligent design of intelligent designers, evolution of intelligent designers, the Hindu cycle of karma, the Mayan yuga cycle, panspermia, the Universe as a simulation…” and so on.

Each of these viewpoints can muster advocacy from philosophers and even some modern physicists, and can gather as much supporting evidence as ID. In any case they are all equally defensible as concepts. And only censoring bullies would prevent students from hearing them and exercising their sovereign right to decide for themselves, right?

Or, perhaps, here's an idea. After enduring weeks of this stuff, the brighter students might even start private sessions after school, to study a quaint science called … biology.

A day may come when the promoters of Intelligent Design wish they had left well enough alone.

(Article reprinted from Skeptic Magazine, Volume 12, Issue 2)

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David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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Eschatology & Cosmic Evolution - (bet you can't make THIS political!)

The poilitcal lamp is definitely OUT for this one!

Some physicists have argued that the universe is doomed to be ripped apart by runaway dark energy, while others think it is bouncing through an endless series of big bangs and big crunches. Now these two ideas are being combined to create another option, in which our universe ultimately shatters into billions of pieces, with each shard growing into a whole new universe. The model could solve the mystery of why our early universe was surprisingly well ordered. 

(Um... did any of you read Heaven’s Reach? Does any of this sound familiar? )

In the new model, dark energy becomes very dense and sets the universe expanding at such a rate that it approaches the big rip. The universe tears into small patches that rush away from each other faster than the speed of light. But the destruction is then halted, as the density of dark energy becomes equal to the density of the universe. At this point, each patch crunches in on itself. "All the patches, of which there are a huge number, will separately contract into disparate universes," says Frampton. Each patch will then bounce outwards again, creating a new universe. This has got to be the third or fourth or eighth variation on universal reproduction and/or birth that I have seen from astrophysicists in the last decade or so, an era of profound imagination and speculation! It is starting to look pretty wild out there, in the wonderful realm of eschatology. So, let’s try to put it all in a bit of perspective.

Everyone who is not still in Kindergarten -- either literally or theologically -- knows that overwhelming evidence has proved that a Big Bang started it all - everything we see - about thirteen billion years ago. Some of our neo-cosmologies do poke about earlier, speculating about vast realms of “context” within which the Big Bang took place. See my novella “What Continues and What Fails...”

Where there is even more confusion is about the future. All right, so there was a bang. Where is it all heading?

Take the Big Bounce... under which notion the universal expansion slows down due to gravity, decelerates and stops, then reverses into a Crunch... that thereupon rebounds outward in a fresh Big Bang! This concept was in the 60s brilliantly dramatized by Poul Anderson’s epochal novel TAU ZERO. (Get it, read it!)

The Crunch view was later pursued with fantastic quasi-theological passion by Frank Tipler is his amazing THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, in which he brought forward probably the most flamboyant and unabashed eschatology of all time... that the infrared radiation emitted by your own body, whenever you step outside, will someday all be collected by godlike descendants during the LAST WEEK of the universe and used to learn all about you! (And every other ancestor.) In order to resurrect you in effective (if totally subjective) immortality during the last few (objective) days of the cosmos, when computer-simulation power will supposedly be utterly limitless. Yipes!

Tipler thus vied with Freeman Dyson for the encomium of “greatest theologian of the 20th Century”... an honor that Freeman appeared to have won, when it was shown that HIS eschatology is probably more relevant, because our metagalaxy’s expansion appears to be accelerating rather than slowing, implying the existence of more than sufficient Dark Energy to keep the expansion going forever. Dyson’s quasi-theology describes how life might cope with and eventually resign itself to the final dissipation into absolute-zero nothingness. The big chill.

Only, meanwhile, Stephen Hawking and others had fixated on black holes, those marvelous, one way tunnels that may... possibly... emerge in a completely new cosmic “context” -- possibly even triggering new episodes of creation and universal inflation. And, if so, according to Lee Smolin, there may be vast cycles of “evolution” as mother universes use black holes as the eggs to parent new daughter universes whose genetic code it, in effect, the detailed set of physical parameters and laws and “gosh numbers” that get passed down the line, mutating slightly and experiencing “selection” in favor of maximum reproductive success, in probably the most mind-boggling concept of our age.

Meanwhile, OTHERS have been speculating that all of this is way, way premature. I was shocked, shocked, to learn recently that the SHAPE of the cosmos is still considered debatable, despite signs of endless expansion, and that some astronomers have re-discovered and legitimized the old notion that the “actual universe” is flat and infinite! In other words, the “Universe:” that we see may have come from a bang 13 billion years ago. but that happened in one small patch of a vastly wider expanse of already-existing spacetime that could contain vast numbers of such firecracker creations at the same time, outside of our light-cone of perception.

In other words, some are now saying that the Big Bang was really an explosion!”

An actual, honest-to-God explosion, taking place INSIDE a much vaster context, a truly immense “macro-universe” that is made of real distance, and boggling amounts of real space. Really? But... but... but didn’t you cosmologists yatter at us for generations about how naive that view was? How the bang was a sudden and impressive expansion of “metric” but did not explode “into” anything because it contained everything, period?

This new/old/rediscovered notion, which actually is easier to envision than the standard model of the last 50 years (a Big Bang that consists of expansion without any pre-existing setting to expand into) now seems completely boggling, simply because I thought all the big-domes had already declared it completely excluded. With many a snort of disdain.

Only now guys are talking seriously about a “meta” universe in flat space that is as much bigger than our measly teeny 13 billion light year “universe” as than universe is bigger than the solar system!

Confused yet?

Okay, NOW go back to the top and re-read the news article. That dark energy might drive accelerating expansion until it the metagalaxy breaks apart, then dark energy diffusion allows many long-delayed collapses, which trigger new black holes... new “bounce” creations...

Um, is this in the context-free standard Big Bang? The dimensionally separated “new universe” variation of the standard model preached by Hawking and Smolin? Or in the new/old/restored notion of a vast-flat mega context cosmos? I guess this dissipate-breakup-collapse-bounce idea could happen in any of the three!

Oh, wow, the Big Guy is really laughing now, I betcha. Smartass modernist humans.

Still, we are apprentices. Sniffing. Trying. Gotta make Him proud.

(See also: Is Theology Compatible with Science...Sci Fi and Progress?)