Becoming Participants in the Cosmos
Submitted by John Fleming
Occasionally I post snippets about my cosmological thinking. When I was a boy I was all gaga about astronomy, checked out all the astronomy books in the local library, my parents bought me a small Gilbert Scientific reflector telescope that I spent many evenings scanning the heavens, peering into the dark trying to discover all the Secrets. Nevertheless I went on to engineering instead of science. During a visit to Palomar a few years ago I bought a gift shop book that described all the discoveries the Hale 200-inch participated in since its commissioning. That book reignited my enthusiasm for cosmology.
That book gave me the realization that the universe has a design. It's a self-assembling mechanism, it has emergent structure, it has a program, and it has an operating principle. It starts with lots of hydrogen and a little helium (and possibly the mysterious “dark matter” and “dark energy”) at a temperature and pressure. The first massive stars form, go supernova, create the other elements, and become black holes. The black holes become the seeds of galaxies, greedily gobbling matter to become hyper-massive and collecting vast clouds of surrounding matter. Galactic collisions cause star-burst formation. Galaxies are star-creation factories. Stars are element creation factories, creating all the elements and stable isotopes beyond hydrogen. As the universe becomes metal rich from generations of stars spewing their products into the void, the new stars accumulate planets, gas giants, rocky and metal-rich planets and water-worlds.
The operating principle in the universe is: Every step creates the conditions needed for the next step.
So what is the next step? Life forms on planets once the hot and violent early universe settles into more genteel environments, and all the elements become abundant. And now there's a scale problem. The universe moves at galactic distance scale and billion-year timelines. Life is small and short by at least eight orders of magnitude. The problem: how is it possible for life to have any effect on the mechanism of the cosmos, to participate in the operating plan? To what purpose is life? And I have come to believe that life is a part of this Grand Design, to be not just a recipient but a participant. It's not a belief or faith as it is an axiom that things are not created for no purpose. The Teacher in Ecclesiastes proposed this axiom long ago: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”.
Life (well, life as we know it) has another problem. It starts planet-bound. A planet can be born, life brought forth, endless generations of species evolve, live and die, then the planet's sun goes red giant and nova, consuming the planets and recycling them into the galactic medium. All that life had exactly zero effect on the progress of the universal program. All that Art and Beauty created by that life is lost like tears in rain.
That seems to falsify the purpose axiom.
And now I've had my latest realization. That's the way the universe works at all scales, that's part of the operating principle. It looks to us as if the universe is wasteful and purposeless to the extreme. All that matter sucked into black holes, billions of galaxies, uncountable trillions of stars, endless uninhabitable planets, less so inhabitable planets, and apparently nothing to show for it except the progression of structure and organization. The operating principle expects that from the uncountable billions of life experiments, a few will be “successful”, enough to become active participants instead of mere inhabitants, to modify the universe, its conditions and things, to create the next steps.
Now I have an explicable answer to “why should we go into space?” I've been looking for that answer since I was a boy. Because we some of us want to be active participants in this Grand Design. We don't want to be recycled as one of the failed ones.
We're going to need some things to sustain and guide us for the long haul, those of us that want to get going and get out there: morals, ethics, Beauty, Art, and insatiable desire to become better than we are. It's either get busy living, or get busy dying. We don't know where we are going, and we don't know what it will look like when we get there, but for now what we know is the journey is the destination. Travel is not for the faint-of-heart and stay-at-homes.
We don't even know if our kind if life is transitory. Perhaps our purpose is to create AI which will replace us, AI that can span the stars and colonize the currently inhospitable locations in the universe, AI intelligences cool and vast embedded in and interconnected across the interstellar medium, having single thoughts across many human lifetimes. It doesn't matter. We are here for an as-yet unknown purpose, we must survive and thrive and spread among the stars.
Links:
Utube dot com/watch?v=80_TbSVBVqA
Utube dot com/watch?v=tLpyklFEahs
