THE ROLE OF LIFE IN THE COSMOLOGICAL
REPLICATION CYCLE
B. A. Balazs
Department of Astronomy, L.
Eötvös University
Budapest, Hungary
Abstract:
“The
general theory of relativity established that it is the structure of
four-dimensional spacetime which manifests itself as gravitation. With similar
logic, a spacetime theory of all interactions would establish decisively that
there exists nothing in the world but structured spacetime. Certain structures
would manifest themselves as galaxies, others as quarks or black holes, flowers
or bacteria, yet others would be you or me. If this is really so, then it would
surely have been an event of cosmic significance when spacetime became
conscious of itself.”*
Life
has existed on Earth for a full third of the lifetime of our universe. It is
the most expressive and complete manifestation known of the universes
cosmological capacity for complexity. Even so living beings are not
traditionally conceived of as cosmologically relevant structures. Indeed:
· Life
is considered as a frail insignificance as compared with the mighty forces of
the gigantic cosmic objects.
· The
whole biological evolution of the genetically coded living structures is looked
upon as a stochastic process of random mutation and selective advantage, many
of whose outputs are incidental and idiosyncratic.
In
the present paper we put these conventional views in issue and venture upon to
show that
· life is not a blind chance
but an integral part of the universe, strongly favored by the physical laws and
constants of inanimate nature;
· the emergence of increasingly intelligent life is a
robust phenomenon, plays an important role in the cosmological replication
cycle, and its manifestations should make up an important part of our world
picture.
The advent of a new (bio)cosmological era will
strongly stimulate and influence our thoughts on ourselves and on the world
then will presumably result in a radical change of our view on the role of
life in the cosmos. One has to adopt a strictly super-Copernican**
standpoint: We got very far away from any anthropocentric vision of the
universe, yet at the dawn of the third millennium we begin to realize, that
life – as the most important manifestation of the natural phenomenon of
emergence – is an essential component of the cosmos. Life seems to be
capable of attaining the capacity to engage in cosmological engineering and
to improve the ability of the universe to reproduce. As the
chances are that our universe (a large, casually fairly but not entirely
separated spacetime region) is only a minor part of the totality of physical
entity (multiverse), life and intelligence (conscious spacetime?)
may play an important role in the cosmological replication cycle, and they may
be predestined to pervade and dominate a whole ‘family’ of universes.
_______________
*
Quotation from G. Szamosi (The
Twin Dimensions, McGraw-Hill, New York, N.Y., 1986)
**J.A. Wheeler’s
phrasing in his famous book At Home in the Universe, AIP Press,
New York, N.Y., 1994
* * * * *
Life
has existed on Earth for a full third of the lifetime of our universe (e.g. Arrhenius at al., 1996). It is the
most expressive and complete manifestation known of the universes cosmological
capacity for complexity and can be considered as a long-term stable trait
of cosmic evolution.
Even
so living beings are not traditionally conceived of as cosmologically
relevant structures. Life is rather looked upon as a frail insignificance
as compared with the mighty forces of the gigantic cosmic objects. According to
the majority of the evolutionary theorists the probability of the emergence of
human-like intelligence through the natural process of biological evolution is
vanishingly small (e.g. Gould, 1990) and therefore our appearance is generally
considered as an extremely improbable event. The whole biological evolution of
the genetically coded living structures is looked upon as a stochastic
process of random mutation and selective advantage, many of whose outputs
are incidental and idiosyncratic.
Some
renowned contrarians (e.g. Wilson, 1998; Wright, 2000) take an opposing
position, arguing on the basis of the omnipresent trend of convergent
evolution and other indications, that the emergence of human-level
intelligence was absolutely probable, almost ineluctable. Although we can
rightly conclude, that living beings are too complicated – statistically too
improbable – to have come into existence simply by chance, this conclusion is
valid only for a single, sole act of chance.
But the phylogenesis consists of a long series of minute chance steps
– genetic mutations –, each one small enough to be a real product of its
predecessor. Only a tiny minority of them turns out to be slight improvements
regarding survival and reproduction, but by the process of natural selection
the beneficial changes will gradually spread through the species and grow to be
the norm. Our body – far too complex to have come into being in a single act of
chance – is actually a result of a very long selective chain of tiny steps, the
timescale of which is almost 2 million times longer than the whole history of
Christianity (e.g. Balazs, 2001).
It is quite possible that a new point of view will set
the relevant trend line for the near future. More than twenty years ago Chris
C. King (King, 1978) proposed the biocosmological thesis that the form
of life's origin and evolution is a cosmological interactive process ultimately
defined in the cosmic symmetry-breaking at the origin of the universe.
Prebiotic chemists have been slow to comprehend the central role of non-linear
quantum science in prebiotic and biological evolution because of a Newtonian
misconception that all chemical structures are simply building blocks and life
is an arbitrary consequence of a series of historical accidents, rather than an
expression of fundamental bifurcations. However, with the passage of time, the
pendulum has shifted from the puzzling improbability of life as a random
molecular accident to the awareness that central biomolecules leading to the
RNA-era may be cosmologically abundant products of the clouds forming young
stars. This approach unveils the non-linear quantum foundations of
biocosmology as the founding science of life and provides the basis for a
bifurcation theory which could give biogenesis the same generality that
nucleogenesis has for quite a time (King, 2001).
One basic phenomenon associated with the behavior of
complex adaptive systems – and therefore with any kind of phylogenesis – is emergence,
which has superbly been described by John Holland (Holland, 1998): “We
are everywhere confronted with emergence in complex adaptive systems – ant colonies, networks of neurons, the
immune system, the Internet and the global economy to name a few – where the
behavior of the whole is much more complex than the behavior of the parts.” The
following characteristics of the phenomenon of emergence are notable in the
context of development of life and natural or artificial intelligence:
· The possibilities for emergence improve
“when the elements of the system include some capacity, however elementary, for
adaptation or learning.”
· The “component mechanisms (in an emergent
system) interact without central control.”
· “Persistent patterns at one level of
observation can become building blocks at still more complex levels”, leading
to a “hierarchical organization (configurations of generators become
generators at a higher level of organization).”
The last feature is particularly important, because it
entails, that the number of hierarchical levels belonging to a particular
emergent phenomenon can be infinitely large, and that satisfactorily
advanced hierarchies of rudimentary components as simple as primordial
subatomic particles are capable of eventually producing such sophisticated
phenomena as human civilization and artificial intelligence.
It
may turn out that the spacetime itself is the relevant emergent system.
According to Geza Szamosi (Szamosi, 1986) “a spacetime theory of all interactions would establish
decisively that there exists nothing in the world but structured spacetime.
Certain structures would manifest themselves as galaxies, others as quarks or
black holes, flowers or bacteria, yet others would be you or me. If this is
really so, then it would surely have been an event of cosmic significance when
spacetime became conscious of itself.”
It appears, that the physical laws and
constants of our universe are very finely tuned to support life, and quite a
number of competent authorities take fine-tuning to be an explanandum
that doesn’t speaks for itself. Our current best physical theories and the Big
Bang scenario in cosmology have a number (thirty or so) free parameters, and
man could never come into being in a universe in which one or the another of
the basic constants or parameters is altered by merely a few percent one way or
the other. We have selected five of them as follows:
· Number of spatial dimensions. Two space dimensions are purely
geometrically not enough to allow for the development of sophisticated beings
like us. In four space dimensions (e.g.) the orbits of planets would be
unstable: the least disturbance would result in the earth spiraling away from
or away into the sun.
· The initial rate of expansion. If the rate of expansion one second after
the Big Bang had been less merely by one part in 1010, the universe
would have collapsed after a few million years, and if it had been greater by
the sane amount, the universe would have been practically empty after the same
period. Therefore it wouldn’t have lasted long enough for life to develop.
· Neutrinos, the weak interaction. Carbon and some heavier elements are
absolutely necessary for our life. These elements are manufactured in stars and
spread across the Galaxy when a minority of them explodes as supernovae.
Computer calculations had shown that a burst of neutrinos (originated in the
core region) is indispensable in helping the shock wave of the blast to blow
the star apart. If the weak
interaction, the force that determines how neutrinos interact with baryons,
were a little too weak, then even the dense shock wave would be transparent for
neutrinos; if, on the other hand, the interaction were a little too strong, the
neutrinos would never get out of the core.
· Electron/proton charge equality. Any charge imbalance would force every
object in the universe – our bodies, rocks, planets, stars etc. – to explode
immediately. The balance must be extremely precise. We would fly apart if the
two charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion!
· Neutron/proton mass differential. In our world the unstable neutron
outweighs the proton, which is a stable particle. The mass difference is only a
tenth of a percent (roughly the mass of an electron). In the opposite case the
neutrons would be stable and all protons would decay into neutrons. Therefore,
if the difference were reversed, hydrogen, water and most of the stars would
not exist. Solid bodies would collapse rapidly into neutron objects or black
holes, and we would certainly not be here to discuss the case.
It seems reasonable to doubt that there is a proper
physical theory on the basis of which our universe is not fine-tuned. Renowned
physicists – like John Wheeler – explicitly deride all efforts to derive
the values of physical constants and the laws of nature from time-invariant
principles (Wheeler, 1994): “…the laws of physics cannot have existed from
everlasting to everlasting. They must have come into being at the one gate in
time, and fade away at the other.”
At the present time two possible
explanations are contemplated commonly: the design hypothesis (which
involves superior beings, principles or mechanisms external to our physical
world and accountable for selecting its properties) and the ensemble
hypothesis. In the present paper we intend to deal with the second one, the
meaningfulness of which is not so much in question. It states that our universe
(a large, casually fairly but not entirely separated space-time region) is only
a minor part of the totality of physical entity (multiverse0).
With the words of Nick Bostrom (Bostrom, 2000): “This totality itself
needs not be fine-tuned; if it is sufficiently big and variegated, so that it
was likely to contain as a proper part the sort of fine-tuned universe we
observe, than an observational selection effect can be invoked to explain why
we see a fine-tuned universe.”
The member universes of the multiverse can simply
coexist or be genetically connected. The two most established proposals, which
can account for the spreading of the ‘family tree’ of the universes are the
concept of eternal chaotic inflation1 (Linde, 1998) and the
process of cosmological replication and natural selection (Harrison,
1995; Smolin, 1997; Gardner, 2000), but only the second one offers a
reasonable explanation for the problem of fine-tuning.
According
to Smolin the
anthropic qualities2 of
the cosmos are simply consequences of a process of cosmological
replication and natural selection, the utility function3 of which is black hole maximization.
(Smolin imagines, that during the collapse of a black hole a rebound occurs
that spawns one or more universes. He suggests that although the laws and basic
constants of nature are mutable, the crucial parameters in the new ‘baby universes’ only slightly differ from
those of the ‘mother universe’.) A universe where black holes (potential
offspring) are abundant must have a large number of stars (to turn into black
holes) and a suitable amount of carbon (to help
condense stars from interstellar
matter), consequently must have anthropic qualities.
Smolin’s new cosmological
paradigm, a classification of the universe as a self-organizing
replicator that contests for reproductive success within a multiverse of
rival replicators, is really fascinating, but has some obvious flaws (e.g.
Vaas, 200). The two most conspicuous of them are the following ones:
· The Darwinian analogy of cosmological
natural selection is somewhat misleading, because the members of the
multiverse have no significant interaction with an environment, and the process
of their reproduction is not constrained by external factors.
· Any Darwinian theory “depends on the prior
existence of the strong phenomenon of heredity. There have to be
self-replicating entities (in a population of such entities) that spawn
daughter entities more like themselves than the general population” (Dawkins,
1997). With this in view perhaps the most
serious shortcoming of
Smolin’s hypothesis is the lack of memory. (There is no genetic
transmission of traits without a certain kind of recollection.) Indeed, if a
black hole evaporates its mass away via Hawking radiation, which is a pure
blackbody emission, it carries none of the information about the matter that
originally collapsed. Then why should parameters change slightly and not
arbitrarily during the replication?
As it was pointed out by John von Neumann in his classic lecture
“On the General and Logical Theory of Automata” (first published by Jeffress,
1951) any self-reproducing object must contain four indispensable components:
· a blueprint, providing the plan for
construction of offspring;
· a factory, to carry out the
construction;
· a controller, to ensure that the factory follows the plan; and
· a duplicating machine, to transmit a
copy of the blueprint to the offspring.
The first two
components could imaginably be supplied respectively by the set of physical
laws and constants of our universe and by our world itself (Pagels, 1984,
1986), but for the time being it is far beyond anything that we can comprehend,
that any mechanism of the inanimate nature might be capable to imprint
the fundamental laws and parameters of our world in a ‘baby universe’.
Some six years ago
R. Harrison (Harrison, 1995) has proposed a thought-provoking solution,
which might be able to supply the last two von Neumann components: the
controller and the duplicator. He suggests, that our universe was made by
super-intelligent forms of life living in another universe4. Since
their universe must be compatible with their existence, it must be basically
similar to our own. Let us assume, that — as a consequence of the primordial
chaotic inflation — there were an initial ensemble of universes, in which the
fundamental constants have random variations, containing at least one universe,
where intelligent life develops. In accordance with the phenomenon of emergence
mentioned above, life is capable of attaining the capacity to engage in
cosmological engineering and to improve the ability of the universe
to reproduce. With the words of Freeman Dyson (Dyson, 1988):
“there are good scientific reasons for taking seriously the possibility, that
life and intelligence can succeed in molding the universe … to their own
purposes…It appears to me, that the tendency of mind to infiltrate and control
matter is a law of nature.”
To sum it up: life and intelligence (conscious spacetime?) may play an important role in the cosmological replication cycle, and they may be predestined to pervade and dominate a whole ‘family’ of universes.
For us the final goal is still very very
distant, but already perceptible. As it was shown by E. Farhi and A. H. Guth
(Farhi & Guth, 1987), it may be really possible to create a universe under
controlled laboratory conditions, by forming a black hole of about 10 kg mass
from particles at energy ~ 1015 GeV. The physical constants of the
offspring universe would then probably be pretty similar to the values in the
parent universe.
#######
Notes
0 The existence of many universes is consistent with
all we know about physics and cosmology. In fact, it takes an added hypothesis
to rule them out – a super exclusion law of nature that says only one universe
can exist. Actually, we would violate Occam’s razor to insist on only one
universe (e.g. Stenger, 1999).
1 Most versions of inflation predict the
existence of other universes (actually an infinity of random universes). They
assert that the cosmos is a huge, growing fractal with many inflating balls
(universes) that produce new balls ad infinitum.
2 In the context of the multiverse hypotheses the
anthropic principle (Carter, 1974) acts to select those universes that are
“interesting” for us, i. e. capable of supporting self-aware consciousness. In
this picture, the distinction between the weak and strong forms of the
anthropic principle is meaningless.
3 A utility function transforms an outcome
into a numerical value and measures the worth of an outcome.
4 The super-intelligent beings assumed by Harrison are
part and “natural product” of the parent universe, so his proposal cannot be
considered as a variation of the design hypothesis. The assertion, that our
universe is the first in the reproduction cycle of fine-tuned universes would
violate the Copernican principle (our case would be exceptional).
http://www.anthropic-principle.com/preprints.html
http://www.edge.org/discourse/smolin_natselection.html
http://www.vijlen.com/confs/mima/Vaas/VAAS.html
(This
paper was supported in part by the OTKA grant T034998.)