Marvels of the Universe

I just returned from Cape Canaveral for a meeting of NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts group, where I am on the Council of External Advisors.  NIAC is the small team within NASA charged with taking big risks (with little money) on highly speculative and "far-out" potential technologies. Small seed grants are handed over for clever (and a few almost-crackpot) endeavors that might bear fruit some distance down the road.

Past grants have included ventures in quantum entanglement communication, "torpor" suspension of human metabolic activity, haptic-reactive space suits, submarines for Titan and Europa, prodigious space telescopes, extrusion-construction of girders in space, and a supersonic jet that swivels 90 degrees in order to land!  Some prove to be... well... blue sky. Others have won major followup investment from agencies and even industry, such as a way to "print" concrete buildings on Earth, or do the same with sintered regolith on the moon. Be proud to be a member of a civilization that invests (modestly) in notions on the borderline with science fiction!

 Tune in to watch some of this year's presentations -- including glimpses of Buzz Aldrin, Frank Drake, Penny Boston and me (et al) asking questions.

== More excitement from space! ==

Despite major efforts to diss science and to turn us against each other and pump up cynicism (admit it: many of you wallow in that drug), our civilization is actually doing great things! Here's just one of many cures for that vile high of cynicism.

Everybody watch these 90 seconds: Space Suite -- using stunning images from NASA and ESA -- with 3D image processing by visual artist Lucas Green.  A lovely reminder of our ambitions to explore... and seek out strange new worlds...

You get to be a member of a civilization that does stuff like this. I cannot reiterate that too often. Your civilization did this.  Yours. And your neighbors are not sheep. (Well, a lot of em aren't.)

Also, zoom in on the gorgeous super-high-resolution panoramic view of the Andromeda Galaxy: Gigapixels of Andromeda, the largest image ever compiled of our neighboring galaxy. Awe-inspiring!

Cynical despair is just plain dumb.

== Making the universe show herself! ==

Going to the Ends of the Earth to Discover the Beginning of Time: Watch this wonderful TEDx talk by my pal Brian Keating, professor of astrophysics at UCSD, whose membership in both teams that probed the first trillionth  of a trillionth of a second of the universe, already has him under discussion in the preliminary, penumbral zones of Nobel-dom! 

Okay, it's a wild ride and maybe the results were premature.  Certainly, science is doing its proper job -- applying competitive reciprocal criticism to test and double test bold assertions! (Exactly as it has been doing re Climate Change.) So, I guess we'll just find out!  No movie plot could be more exciting.

Still... Brian does a wonderful job explaining new developments in cosmology... culminating in a way-cool/fun stunt at the end!  You will have fun! That's not just a prediction, but a command!

  
== Cosmetology! How about them cosmets! ==

Here's a stunning look at the cliffs of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, imaged by ESA's recent Rosetta mission.  They shock even this comet expert. See the full collection of images on the ESA website. 

And yes, I would have been hip deep in the Rosetta-Philae data analysis right now... had you folks not dragged me (kicking and screaming) away from being a cometologist into doing storytelling and speechifying and industrial consulting and all that other blather, instead.  Ah, parallel worlds and might have beens. Sigh

== And plasmets! ==

After five years of searching, researchers using data from NASA's exoplanet-hunting Kepler spacecraft have discovered what look to be two of the most Earth-like worlds yet. Dubbed Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b, both planets appear to be rocky, and orbit in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold habitable zones of their stars, where liquid water can exist in abundance. Orbiting smaller-dimmer suns... Kepler-438b is only about 12 percent larger than the Earth, and basks in 40 percent more starlight. Kepler-442b is 30 percent larger than Earth and receives about 30 percent less starlight. (Note such suns sometimes have cycles of intense flare activity.)

A monster ring system just discovered around exoplanet J1407 is 200 times larger than the rings of Saturn!

Ultrascope is an automated robotic observatory (ARO) that you can laser-cut and 3D print at home. Future versions will be able to contribute to the Asteroid Grand Challenge.  See this and other cool NASA-related STEM projects at the Space Gambit Site!  Some of the projects are way, way cool!

Now to get them interested in the best of all — the EXORARIUM!

== Looking out into the cosmos == 

Here’s an interesting rumination on whether the galaxy may fill with advanced artificial intelligences - which can occupy deep space and use its resources - rather than the bio-entities that spawned them, after evolving on muddy worlds. The notion of self-replicating machines filling the stars goes back to Jones and Finney's classic paper around 1983, about how Von Neumann probes may replicate and fill the galaxy in just 30 million years.

In fact this concept has long been grist of scientific science fictional speculation.  Gregory Benford's Galactic Center series, for example, posits that that realm - lethal to bio life - might be the natural abode of advanced machine civilizations.  

My novel Existence explores this notion in detail, including whether such machines might be "lurking" in the asteroid belt.  And the Brightness Reef trilogy explores possible relationships between bio and machine civilizations on a galactic scale.

== ... and more space, more! ==

Kewl.  We proposed this in the 1980s.  Now President Obama wants it… using a railgun to launch scramjets to near orbit. 

Support the Sentinel Mission. Join a citizen-funded deep space mission to detect Near-Earth Asteroids! (I will be speaking to donors for this mission and the B612 Foundation, in San Jose, in February.)

Stay Tuned for a Group Message from Humanity: With NASA's New Horizons space probe arriving at Pluto, space artist Jon Lomberg is heading One Earth -- an effort to upload messages from Planet Earth. Sign here to add your voice.

Do manatees need spacesuits? The lead image in this article about the  may remind some of you of the first chapter of SUNDIVER.  But these fellows have more than enough delightful craziness of their own. The "Nonhuman Autonomous Space Agency" is a whimsical futurist speculation built on top of a serious thought experiment.

== SETI and the question of God ==

There's a truly stunning piece of drivel in the fast-sinking shipwreck that Rupert Murdoch has made of the former Wall Street Journal. One Eric Metaxas argues that the Fermi Paradox – the absence of any evidence (so far) of extraterrestrial civilizations – means there “must be a God.”  Quoth he: “As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, then 200, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.”

Given that Metaxas offers no citations, it is hard to trace what he means by “parameters” for life to develop. But as someone  who has been immersed in this field for 35 years, I have to say that he must have pulled such a number out of thin air… or somewhere else.  

In fact, every year the conditions for life in the universe seem more prevalent. Today scientists no longer believe you even need an Earth-like world in a “Goldilocks Zone” (and those zones are now much wider than we previously thought). Indeed, there may be a hundred “roofed worlds” or icy moons with sub-surface oceans, like Europa, for every Earth with its waters exposed to the sky.

But I’m not making the mistake of fact-debating silly people who lie about science in order to sway the gullible. We've seen that trick used to devastating effect, in ways that endanger all our children. Yes, even (especially) the children of carbon moguls.

 No, what puzzles me is a matter of basic logic. Like why Mr. Metaxas clearly wants Earth to be alone in the cosmos. Somehow, he has convinced himself that a vast universe of quadrillions of stars and planets is somehow better and more reflective of a great and creative deity if… if it is entirely sterile, except for one teensy dust ball, floating in one obscure corner, that somehow was chosen to receive a spark granted to no other place in all of that immensity.

Let’s leave out that it took the light from some of those stars billions of years to get here… I won’t cram into Mr. Metaxas’s mouth any claim that the Earth, nevertheless, is just six thousand years old. Though we know that is the formal dogma of his brand of fanaticism.

In the end, what depresses me is how immensely insulting to God their proposal is – that we should act all impressed with such a measly, small-minded, un-ambitious and teensy-parochial “creation!” When in fact the heavens are replete with glories suggesting that – well – if He is out there (and I ain't sayin'), then He/She/It is surely a whole lot bigger, more curious and more ambitious than the philosophy clung to by claustrophilic, narrow-minded Kindergarteners, terrified of the vastness of actual Creation.

== And from the celestrially ridiculous to the terrestrially... ==

Ah… Texas Sen. Ted Cruz now heads the Senate committee overseeing NASA. He is making a show of supporting "exploration" but he is part of the cult that all-too recently ordered NASA to drop the word "Earth" from all mission statements and to many Earth-sensing, environment and resource programs.  His "emphasis on exploration" has one goal, to renew that Bush era scheme, diverting all NASA eyes toward the Moon's useless desert and away from the only oasis of life that we know.

Finally, though... swerving to a magnificent "failure" that advanced us all tremendously... catch this amazing video footage of the "almost!" attempt of Elon's SpaceX first stage to land on a barge.  Clearly there are faults, but correctable ones, which makes this a case of "Hell yes, you get a cigar!"

Could Our Universe Be a Fake?

Does the emperor exist, when he dreams that he is a butterfly? Does the butterfly dream of being an emperor?

Since long before Chuang Tzu posed this ancient Chinese conundrum, some version of it has bedeviled bright youths in every generation—especially college sophomores. It seems the same specialized organs in our brains that allow us to make pragmatic plans and perform thought experiments, or gedankenexperiments, also unleash a human imagination so eager and creative that we can—briefly or permanently—lose track of what is real.

For example, although it might be called a form of lying, most societies have highly valued storytelling. In my role as a novelist, I join this tradition by stringing together lengthy chains of coded squiggles—in the Roman alphabet—that highly skilled readers later deconvolute and transform into stirring mental images, rollicking action, empathy with imagined characters, and even (possibly) an insight or two. Motion pictures shortcut and amplify this process with a firehose stream of visual images, cues and crutches that cater to the same human genius—a knack for picturing things, people and events that never (objectively) existed.

If “magic” is the creation of subjective realities in the minds of other peoples, then we moderns have learned how to perform magical incantations on a vast, industrial scale.

And now comes an era when we live immersed in computer-generated “virtual” realities, rendered through lavish games where ersatz selves get to do countless things that our mundane, fleshy selves cannot. Is it any wonder that some people have been talking about a near future when this process may reach its ultimate conclusion? When the denizens of Reality will not be able to verify, by any clear-cut means, that they aren’t living in—or even existing because of—a simulation?

Picture some future time when thinking beings may occupy simulated software realms within some vast cybernetic space—either in “holodeck” style physical manifestations or in purely cybernetic downloads. Realms that emulate the palpable “pinch-me test” of reality, with fine attention to every detail. We don’t yet know how far simulation can be extended, or whether there are inherent limits. Some very smart people believe there aren’t any, in which case there’s no guarantee that you, reading this paragraph right now, aren’t already living in such a simulation.

In such a software-emulated world, Rene Descartes’ brain-body dualism might easily be true! And if it ain’t true now, it could plausibly become true, tomorrow. And if it could come true tomorrow, again how do you know that you aren’t right now living as a character of a simulation of the early 21st century that is being implemented in some machine or demigod imagination, hundreds or thousands of years farther ahead along the river of time? In much the same way that you might implement a version of Captain Ahab, by thinking for a while about Moby Dick?

To illustrate, let me offer a scene from one of my own short stories, Stones of Significance, a somewhat intense and difficult tale, because it is set in a future far in advance of ours. A tomorrow wherein the main character—a designer of simulated worlds—has been asked about his relationship with the artificial beings that live in them:

In every grand simulation there is a gradient of detail. Despite having access to vast computing power, it is mathematically impossible to re-create the entire world, in all its texture, within the confines of any calculating engine. That will not happen until we all reach the Omega Point.

Fortunately, there are shortcuts. Even today, most true humans go through life as if they were background characters in some film, with predictable ambitions and reaction sets. The vast majority of my characters can therefore be simplified, while a few are modelled in great detail.

Most complex of all is the point-of-view character—or “pov”—the individual simulacrum through whose eyes and thoughts the feigned world will be subjectively observed. This persona must be rich in fine-grained memory and high fidelity sensation. It must perceive and feel itself to be a real player in the labyrinthine tides of causality, as if part of a very real world. Even as simple an act as reading or writing a sentence must be surrounded by perceptory nap and weave … an itch, a stray memory from childhood, the distant sound of a barking dog, or something leftover from lunch that is found caught between the teeth. One must include all the little things, even a touch of normal human paranoia—such as the feeling we all sometimes get (even in this post-singularity age) that “someone is watching.”

I’m proud of my povs, especially the historical recreations that have proved so popular—Joan on her pyre, Akiba in his last torment, Galileo contemplating the pendulum. I won awards for Ghenghiz and Napoleon, leading armies, and for Haldeman savagely indicting the habit of war. Millions in Heaven have paid well to lurk as silent observers, experiencing the passion of little Ananda Gupta as she crawled, half-blind and with agonized lungs, out of the maelstrom of poisoned Bhopal.

Is it any wonder why I oppose reification? Their very richness makes my povs prime candidates for “liberation.”

Once they are free, what could I possibly say to them?

This notion of simulated realities is getting a lot of attention lately, both in philosophical scientific literature and in serious science fiction. There are endless ramifications, more than we could go into here. But to me, one implied conundrum stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Here is the prime theological question. The one whose answer affects all others. And yet, one that is almost never asked:

Is there moral or logical justification for a creator to wield capricious power of life and death over his creations … and is there any fundamental moral reason why those creations should have to obey?

Humanity long ago replied with a resounding “no!”… at least when talking about parents and their offspring. (There have been a few exceptions, such as the principle of pater familias in Roman law, which permitted a father to kill even adult offspring, if they offended him.) In most cultures, the created—our kids—eventually get full authority and a right to make their own way. In some societies, they are even welcome to argue with their creators along the way.

And yet, without noticing any irony, we have implicitly answered the same question “yes” when it came to God! The Creator, it seemed, was owed unquestioning servitude, just because this creator made us.

It is the ghost at the banquet, the underlying assumption of all religions, taken for granted for far too long. Is it puzzling that—after more than four millennia of theological wrangling, and the investment of millions of hours of thought to religious matters—this question only comes up now? Now that we are picking up creation’s tools, like bright apprentices? Tools of physics and biology, and also tools that let us simulate the creation of whole worlds.

It provokes some odd thoughts. For example, heaven and hell may not be such bizarre notions, after all! Consider our demigodlike descendants, with power at their fingertips to compute and emulate any reality. They will be able to “call up“ simulated versions of people from times past, especially 20th century folk, what with all the data available about us, including skin cells in all our old letters and scrap books. What will they do with that power?

Perhaps, those who helped build the utopia of tomorrow will be remembered, immortalized, in software simulations by our descendants. Those who hindered progress, who obstructed or simply did nothing, will at best not be invited back. At worst, they might be assigned unpleasant roles in software scenarios. Might the old notion of “purgatory” have some resurrected relevance, after all? I leave possible extrapolations of this idea to the reader.

As I said, this topic has a million permutations. Here’s another:

Can we see any evidence that we live in a simulation already?

I see a few clues. For example, quantum mechanics. Specifically, the division of reality into “quanta” that are fundamentally indivisible, like the submicroscopic Planck length, below which no questions may be asked. Isn’t this exactly the sort of truncation that a computer model would use, in order to prevent being taxed with infinite demands on processing power—which would happen if the model could look into ever-smaller domains like the fractal Mandelbrot set? Likewise, at the high end, both the speed-of-light speed limit and the intrinsically contained dimensions of a big-bang universe may be artifacts introduced in order not to have to deal with the software loads of modeling a cosmos that is infinitely observable.

Still, some of the “clues” are far more visceral and impulsive. Take the coincidence of names that keeps cropping up, almost as if the “author” of our cosmic simulation were having a little joke. Like the almost unlimited amount of fun you can have with Barack Obama’s name. Or the fact that World War II featured a battle in which Adolf the Wolf attacked the Church on the Hill*, who begged help from the Field of Roses, which asked its Marshall to send an Iron-hewer to fight in the Old World and a Man of Arthur to fight across the greatest lake (the Pacific) … does the Designer really think we don’t notice stuff like this?

Or maybe this designer just doesn’t care.

(Reprinted from a posting on Closer to Truth)

*That unlikely World War II scenario came from a science fiction story, "Letter from a Higher Critic" by Stewart Robb, in the November 1966 issue of Analog.

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?)