Author Archives: John Fleming

Becoming Participants in the Cosmos

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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

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I Only Have One American Bison Story To Tell

The New American Digest Posted on by

We Homo sapiens learn by telling each other stories. Abstract theories and calculations are one thing, but those only come alive and change our lives when we hear it in a story.

I was camping on Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles. Back in the 1920 and 1930s buffalo were introduced to Catalina by a silent movie company and by the Wrigleys. They have been there ever since, and the herd size and health is managed by the Catalina Island Conservancy. A bit of a contradiction that, buffalo on Catalina are exotic, and prior to white men running things, there were no large grazers on Catalina. The Conservancy wants to keep the Island in its pure and natural state. Yeah, and they also need tourist money, and the romantic pastoral sight of buffalo herds is one of the things that bring the folks from the mainland.

Since their introduction the buffalo have evolved. The forage on Catalina is poor, the fresh water is scarce, and like many island-bound species, the Catalina buffaloes are runts compared to the majestic creatures of the plains.

I was camping on the west end of the island. There is a fence at the Two Harbors isthmus to keep the buffalo out of the west end. During the day I had duties, so my only real time to get out of camp and explore was very early in the morning, walking and running the hills and trails by myself. That year a couple of buffalo had hopped the fence, or somebody left a gate open, and were wandering around the west end. One had made it into the area where I was, because there is a small trickle of a stream in the canyon coming down from Silver Peak that mostly runs year-round.

If you know what to look for, and know what to smell for, there are plenty of signs buffalo are about. It’s sort of a sweet livestock smell, not unpleasant. And they make dust wallows along the trails and dirt roads, large and shallow craters of fine dust where they roll around on their backs and sides.

One morning I got up particularly early and headed up one of the steep truck trails towards the island crest, hoping to make a long loop and come down by another route. Ahh, such good times solo trail-running in the early morning twilight, the first glimmers of the coming day lighting the sky in the east, the west sky still dark, the early-rising birds beginning to chirp in the trees and brush, the world waking up.

In the canyon it was still dark. I had been on this trail before, I knew the way. No flashlight was needed. And suddenly, right in front of me as I turned a curve in the trail, there loomed a deep-black shadow that cut off views of the trail and the landscape ahead. The shadow was motionless. No one knew where I was, I had told no one about my plans and route for that morning.

Well, I stopped. Stared for a bit into the bottomless black, and then began to silently, as best I could, backtrack down the trail always keeping my eyes on the shadow. Backing down until the shadow was out of sight. Then turned and began trotting down the trail, still silently, and looking back often. I said to myself, “I think I’ll go another way today.” They may be runts, but when you are by yourself in the wide world, that was still an awfully big shadow.

And in all the times I’ve been to Catalina since, I have never gone out on the trails while it was still dark.

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