The Smog of Tomorrow Visualized

Chinese cities have an extremely bad problem with smog, which is getting worse in cities such as Shanghai. I wish I could present a graph showing the decline of air quality in Shanghai. There used to be an excellent site that allowed you to type in a start date and an end date, and then see the air quality for previous days in Shanghai. Unfortunately that site no longer has any recent data (the link is here, but when you press the Ok button you no longer get any data for any time after January 1, 2013). 

Here is some data I have accumulated from recording the air quality in Shanghai on random recent dates this year. An air quality number above 100 is considered unhealthy:

1/18 197
1/19 177
1/20 152
1/21 107
1/22 95
1/23 87
1/24 64
1/25 279
1/28 153
2/3 64
2/13 96
2/14 75
2/17 147
2/22 177
2/25 165
2/28 107
3//5 135
3/7 107

This is a total of 12 unhealthy days out of 18. The air pollution in China is so bad that scientists think it is starting to drift to the United States, and is helping to decrease the air quality in cities in California. It is estimated that air pollution in China is causing the premature death of up to 500,000 people every year.

The decline of air quality in Shanghai is a tragic tale of the price of runaway growth. When I first visited the city about twenty years ago, the air was relatively clean, the streets were packed with bicycles, and there were relatively few skyscrapers. Now more and more Shanghai residents drive cars and Shanghai has many skyscrapers, but the air quality is very poor. One of the main reasons for building a skyscraper is to give people a nice view from the tall building. But that doesn't work if you look out the window of a skyscraper and cannot see very far.

Let us extrapolate a few years into the future and imagine what the view will look like from a skyscraper in an average large city of China.

You might see a view that looks like this:

Or looking out of the window of your expensive apartment, you may see a view that looks like this:

Or on a day of better-than-average air quality you might look out the window of your high-rise office building and see a view that looks like this:

These visuals are art pieces I created using the Bryce computer program. Do you think this is just alarmist art? Do a Google image search for “Beijing smog” and “Shanghai smog” and you will see many photographs that show smog as bad as shown in these visuals.

What can you do to help reduce this terrible problem of air pollution in China? Buy less. Much of China's smog is produced by factories producing manufactured goods to support the wasteful lifestyles of US consumers.

What or Who Broke Up Asteroid P/2013 R3?

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected an unusual asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. What is strange about this asteroid is that it seems to be disintegrating. Pictures of the changes in the asteroid are shown below.

NASA/ESA -- click to expand

It can be seen that the top light changes into two lights, and the bottom light changes into three lights. What could cause this?

Scientists say that this disintegration was not caused by a collision. If a collision had been a cause, the pieces would have rapidly separated. But the series of images shows a very slow separation lasting several months.

One scientist named David Jewitt has advanced a theory postulating that the asteroid was a very loosely connected mass, and that it is regular sunlight that is pushing the pieces apart. Anyone familiar with the concept of “solar sail” space vehicles knows that sunlight can produce a very small amount of pressure. The large very thin sails of a solar sail spacecraft are designed to trap that pressure, causing a spacecraft to accelerate. 

A solar sail

But this “sunlight broke up the asteroid” theory seems a bit farfetched. While sunlight might produce an appreciable pressure on a very large thin sail the size of a football field, enough to accelerate a very small spacecraft, it is rather doubtful that it would provide pressure to cause asteroids to disintegrate.

Jewitt speculates here that the asteroid may be breaking up due to a sunlight-related process that has taken between 100,000 and a million years. But there's a little “chronological coincidence” problem with that, which is: why would we be lucky enough to be observing the climax (over a few months) of a process that took so incredibly long? Wouldn't such a process have been 99.9999% more likely to have occurred outside of the lifespan of the Hubble Space Telescope? This is not a decisive objection, but it is one that makes the “sunlight disruption” idea seem rather doubtful.

Let me suggest an alternate hypothesis, one that is unlikely but just barely imaginable. The hypothesis is that the disintegration of this asteroid is somehow related to extraterrestrial visitors.

Imagine if extraterrestrials were to visit our solar system, and begin a discreet period of observation of our planet. Their ship or ships might be orbiting somewhere away from Earth. They might send occasional probes to observe our planet more closely.

After a while, they might decide they need more raw materials, possibly to build additional spacecraft, or to build more places for their kind to live. Getting such raw materials from our planet would be likely to attract attention, and would not be cost effective because of the difficulty of lifting into orbit any raw materials they acquired from our planet. It would be much easier for extraterrestrial visitors to get the raw materials from the asteroid belt.

As far as we know, it is fantastically difficult and expensive to travel between stars. The cost of sending every kilogram to another star would be incredibly high. So it has long been pointed out that a wise approach might be to send a minimal mission with a small payload, and then to use that mission to leverage resources available in another solar system. So, for example, if we wanted to colonize a planet revolving around Alpha Centauri B, we might send a small craft, and then have that craft (or robots from that craft) create more and more structures (or robots) in that distant solar system, using the resources available in that solar system.

An expedition from another solar system to our solar system might be taking the same approach. Breaking up a few asteroids and using their resources might be part of such a plan. Scientists think asteroids are rich in metals.

Another possibility is that the “one light breaking up into multiple lights” phenomenon observed in the photos above is somehow related to similar type of observations reported during UFO sightings. People who report UFO sightings sometimes say that they saw a single bright light in the sky, which broke up into two different lights or three different lights. You can see details of such sightings here, here, here, and here.

This page below shows a video clip of a light in the sky breaking up into two lights and then three lights.

Strange indeed that the Hubble Space Telescope should have witnessed something similar to what people have seen in our skies – a phenomenon of one light in the sky seeming to break up to become several lights. Is this just coincidence, or could they be the same mysterious phenomenon?  

A Critique of Seth Lloyd's Theory of the Universe as Quantum Computer

Seth Lloyd is an MIT professor of mechanical engineering who wrote a book called Programming the Cosmos. Some of the ideas in this book have been stated in a recent scientific paper he wrote entitled The Universe as Quantum Computer. In this paper Lloyd deals with some fascinating ideas, and flirts with some promising lines of thought. But does he come up with a workable conclusion?

I will skip over the first seven sections of this paper, which mainly deal with a discussion of exotic issues in computer science such as universal Turing machines and cellular automata. In section 8 “The Universe as Quantum Computer,” Lloyd leaps to the conclusion that the universe is “observationally indistinguishable from a giant quantum computer,” but does not justify this assertion. For one thing, no one has built a giant quantum computer. For another thing, if we were to build a giant quantum computer, there is no reason to think that it would look anything like our universe of galaxies, stars, and planets. 

Lloyd then asserts, “The ordinary laws of physics tell us nothing about why the universe is so complex.” This is a very serious misstatement which is easy to disprove. In fact, the ordinary laws of physics tell us a great deal about why the universe is so complex. We have large complex objects such as galaxies, stars, and planets largely because of the law of gravitation. We have 100 different types of atoms (and many complex molecules) largely because of the laws of electromagnetism, and the laws of nuclear physics involving the strong nuclear force. We have a stable planet partially because of conservation laws that maintain various types of balances such as the balance between positive charges and negative charges. We have complex life partially because of various complicated laws that allow stable sun-like stars to produce thermonuclear fusion at a slow, steady pace. I could list numerous other examples of laws of physics that help to assure that we have a universe as complicated as ours rather than merely an unordered lifeless soup of particles.

Lloyd then asserts that the known laws of physics can be written on the back of a tee shirt, something that will come as quite the surprise to anyone studying physics in graduate school, who has to lug around 600-page books filled with the complex mathematics and equations of general relatively, nuclear physics, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics. This page lists or gives links to more than a hundred laws of physics, a much larger list than can be written on the back of a tee shirt.

Lloyd then wonders how the universe got so complicated after the simplicity of the Big Bang, when everything was presumably packed into a simple incredibly hot and incredibly tiny superdense ball. To explain the rise of complexity in the universe (things such as galaxies, planets, and life), Lloyd offers his “quantum computational model of the universe,” which he attempts to explain in terms of typing monkeys.

The story of the typing monkeys is well-known to anyone who has read books on the origin of order in the universe. The idea is that if you have a sufficient number of monkeys typing for a sufficient length of time, they will eventually produce any imaginable literary work. Lloyd imagines monkeys typing text that will be fed into a computer. Purely by chance, Lloyd infers, some of this output would produce a working computer program. Lloyd suggests such a randomly produced program might somehow be responsible for order in our universe.

But where is this computer, and where are the monkeys? Lloyd gives this answer: “In addition, quantum fluctuations – e.g., primordial fluctuations in energy density – automatically provide the random bits that are necessary to seed the quantum computer with a random program. That is, quantum fluctuations are the 14 monkeys that program the quantum computer that is the universe. Such a quantum computing universe necessarily generates complex, ordered structures with high probability.”

Taken literally, this thesis is quite nonsensical.

First, let's look at the primordial quantum density fluctuations mentioned by Lloyd – not his speculations about them, but the basic concept of primordial quantum density fluctuations. Scientists imagine these as incredibly tiny random variations in density that occurred in the early universe. Cosmologists say that such fluctuations would have occurred in the early universe because of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. But that law of nature (and its associated physical constant, Planck's constant) set a very specific limit on these fluctuations. According to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, a quantum fluctuation cannot be greater than about a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a joule during any second. A joule is about the energy needed to slide a brick a distance of one meter. So the maximum allowed quantum fluctuation in a second is an amount of energy billions of times smaller than the energy used in a single one-second flash of a firefly.

Given that limit, it is quite nonsensical to imagine quantum fluctuations literally being the source of some randomly produced program that might help to produce order in the universe. Even with random fluctuations occurring all over the universe, nowhere in the universe would we have for even one second some program that might be used later in producing order in the universe. If such a program were to somehow permanently pop into existence (contrary to the limitations of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle), there is no reason to think that it would then somehow be applied generally as the universe's computer program. Since quantum fluctuations would be occurring all over the universe, any random process producing one computer program would also produce trillions of other computer programs. If those programs were then somehow used by the universe, what we would see is not the universe we see (one in which there are physical laws the same everywhere), but some totally different hodgepodge smorgasboard patchwork-quilt universe in which every little patch of space had its own laws of nature. Our universe is totally different, and scientists have done observations tending to confirm that laws of nature behave the same at opposite ends of the universe, indicating a great uniformity of law throughout the observable universe.

I may also note that there is absolutely no reason for thinking that a particular part of space would start to use a random program that happened to pop into existence due to a quantum fluctuation. Just because a computer program pops into existence doesn't mean that a nearby computer will start using that program as its operating system. Also, if we are to explain the order needed for life by postulating something like a computer program, we need not a random computer program created by quantum fluctuations, but a highly optimized, fine-tuned program (given the huge number of anthropic requirements for observers like us, discussed here).

But perhaps Lloyd is just speaking in metaphorical terms (despite making such statements in a scientific paper). Given his completely incorrect statement that “the ordinary laws of physics tell us nothing about why the universe is so complex,” perhaps Lloyd thinks that most of the universe's order is because of some lucky quantum density fluctuations in the early universe, and perhaps he is poetically or metaphorically referring to these as a computer program. In reality, only a small fraction of the universe's order (less than 10%) is due to such quantum density fluctuations, with most of it (much more than 50%) being due to the universe's seemingly optimized laws of nature and physical constants.

To his credit, Lloyd seems to have some general idea or suspicion that programming and computation play an important part in the universe. But he's taken this promising idea, and failed to create a workable thesis from it. The truth is that the universe's order is mainly caused by a series of highly favorable laws and fine-tuned physical constants that seem to have existed from the very beginning, a seemingly goal-oriented set of laws and constants that can only be described as programmatic and conceptual. Our universe seems to have been programmed for success from the very beginning, as I discuss here and here. We understand only a small part of this programming (that part which we call the known laws of nature), Far from being some simple thing that can be written on the back of a tee shirt, there is every reason to suspect that the programming that allows a life-containing universe to evolve from the super-dense state of the Big Bang is some programming vastly more complicated and proficient than any software man has ever created. We cannot plausibly explain that cosmic programming either through a theory of typing monkeys or through a theory of quantum fluctuations occurring after the origin of the universe.
 

Astonishing Anomalies That May Support an Alternate Theory of Consciousness

In a previous blog post The Receptacle Hypothesis: Could Your Mind Have Come From an External Source? I suggested the hypothesis that human consciousness might come not from the brain, but from some unknown external source. It could be, I speculated, that our brains are mainly a kind of receptacle for our consciousness, rather than the sole producer of that consciousness. This may at first sound like some wild idea that cannot be supported, but in a later blog post 9 Strange Mental Phenomena That May Support an Alternate Theory of Consciousness I listed quite a few phenomena (real or alleged) that may tend to support this hypothesis. Since writing that post I have learned about other anomalies that may lend credence to this hypothesis: additional strange phenomena that lead one to question the conventional thinking that your brain is the sole source of your consciousness. I will discuss these anomalies now.

One such anomaly is the amazing fact that when a certain type of rare brain surgery is done, half of a child's brain is removed. Under the theory that your brain is the sole source of your mind, we would expect that removing half of a child's brain would either cause the death of a child, or cause the child to be doomed to a vegetative state. Instead, amazingly, children who have this surgery done suffer relatively little mental impairment.

The type of surgery in question is called a hemispherectomy, and is sometimes performed on children experiencing severe seizures. The operation is described in a Scientific American article entitled Strange but True: When Half a Brain Is Better than a Whole One. The article states: “Unbelievably, the surgery has no apparent effect on personality or memory.”

According to this link, 70% of the children who had half of their brains removed were able to speak well, and 42% older than 6 were able to read well. Given that only about 60% of the American population can read well, this 42% figure is amazingly high.

These facts seem to stand in stark opposition to the theory that your consciousness is being produced entirely by your brain. Under that theory, we should expect that removing half of the brain would have a crippling effect on someone's mental abilities. That is not at all what we observe. We observe a relatively small effect, at least in children. I may point out that when half of a child's brain is removed in a hemispherectomy, the other half does not grow back.

Now for another similar anomaly that is even more amazing. This is a case in which a human managed to function well in society as a French civil servant, even though he had almost no functional brain.
 

The case is discussed here. Inside a normal brain are tiny structures called lateral ventricles that hold brain fluid. In this man's case, the ventricles had swollen up like balloons, until they filled almost all of the man's brain. When the 44-year-old man was a child, doctor's had noticed the swelling, and had tried to treat it. Apparently the swelling had progressed since childhood. The man was left with what the Reuters story calls “little more than a sheet of actual brain tissue.”

But this same man, with almost no functioning brain, had been working as a French civil servant, and had his IQ tested to be 75, higher than that of a mentally retarded person. The Reuters story says: “A man with an unusually tiny brain managed to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, caused by a fluid buildup in his skull.” The case was written up in the British medical journal The Lancet (link).

In 1980 John Lorber, a British neurologist, recounted a similar case of a brain filled with fluid. “There's a young student at this university,” said Lorber, “who has an IQ of 126, has obtained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain.” According to Lorber, “We saw that instead of the normal 4-5 centimeter thickness of brain tissue...there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid.” Lorber found other similar cases. Here is a link discussing his work.

These accounts seem to stand in stark opposition to the conventional theory that your consciousness is entirely produced by your brain. Under that theory, someone with the conditions described here should have been dead, in a vegetative state, or at best persisting with the intelligence of a squirrel – not working successfully as a French civil servant, or being an honors student with an IQ of 126. But these cases are perfectly compatible with the receptacle theory of consciousness I have suggested. If the brain is mainly just a receptacle for consciousness (consciousness which comes from some unknown external source), then it might not matter all that much if the receptacle is much smaller.

I am not saying that these cases show the likelihood of the receptacle hypothesis I have suggested, but they do make you wonder about whether such a hypothesis may be true, along with the other items I have listed in this post. 

 Montage of mysteries

Loeb's Theory of Early Life Evolution Is Implausible and Sterile

On yesterday's www.slate.com website we have an article about the “early habitability epoch” theory of Harvard professor Abraham Loeb. We normally think of life as something that can only appear on planets revolving around stars, and only planets that have an orbit not too close and not too far from a star. Planets that have such an orbit are said to exist in the habitable zone, also called the Goldilocks zone (because planets in such a zone are neither too hot nor too cold). Loeb's theory is that a few million years after the Big Bang, there was a warm background temperature of space which may have allowed life to appear fairly soon in the early universe, only about 10 to 17 million years after the universe began. For a relatively brief slice of cosmic history (less than a thousandth of the universe's history), this warmth would have existed throughout the universe, in theory allowing life to arise on suitable planets, even planets beyond the normal habitable zone. The visual below is a highly schematic diagram illustrating the idea:

But this brief period of pleasant warmth did not exist for long. The universe rapidly cooled after the Big Bang, and there was only a relatively short period during which the background temperature would have been suitable to support life's evolution on a planet far away from a star. Loeb's scientific paper estimates that this period of warmth (which he calls an epoch of habitability) lasted only six million years. Any life that evolved (outside of the habitable zone) because of this brief period of warmth would have been killed as soon as this relatively short period ended, when the background temperature of space would have plummeted.

Six million years is, in reality, far too short a time to allow for the evolution of a visible organism. Loeb admits this. When asked when whether intelligent life could have evolved in this period, Loeb says, “No. I'm talking about very simple organisms like algae.”

However, it is most improbable that even one-celled organisms like algae or diatoms could have evolved within a six million time frame. Our planet is 4.6 billion years old, but the oldest traces of life are 3.5 billion years old. So we have about one billion years of something going on before there was even evidence of life. Life seems to require hundreds of millions of years of evolution before you get to something like algae or one-celled organisms.

This is one reason why Loeb's theory is not credible. Six million years is too short a time frame for any visible life to appear. We must also consider that the early universe was a place of high radiation, when any young planet would be bombarded by intense radiation causing the sterilization of any freshly evolved life. It is actually very unlikely that any planets would have formed by the beginning of the supposed habitability epoch Loeb imagines (between 10 and 17 million years after the Big Bang). Loeb's paper says that the possibility of such planets is “not ruled out” by the existing data, but he uses some special pleading to get to such a conclusion. We must also consider the fact that between 10 and 17 million years after the Big Bang, any newly formed small planet would be a kind of lava world still cooling from its initial formation, and would also be constantly bombarded by asteroids hanging around from the early formation of its solar system. A negative trifecta of high background radiation, the hellish inferno of a recent planet formation, and constant asteroid bombardment should have been sufficient to prevent life from appearing anywhere during the time frame imagined by Loeb. 

The hellish environment of a newly formed planet

We need a proper theory for explaining how life (and the semantically rich genetic code) could have got started on Earth even given billions of years, something which is actually quite difficult to do, given reasons discussed here. In this light a new theory trying to squeeze an origin of life into a six million year time frame (less than one percent of the time it took on Earth) is rather laughable. But I understand the appeal to certain minds, the attraction of trying to minimize the difficulty of explaining the origin of life by suddenly imagining it occurring 200 times faster. It's kind of like a man saying to his skeptical girlfriend: “You don't think I'll become a millionaire in 30 years? I'll become a millionaire in 3 months!”

I don't particularly object to Loeb advancing a very farfetched theory. When it comes to theories, I say: let a hundred flowers bloom; the more, the merrier. I am bemused, however, by Loeb's grandiose pretensions in which he suggests that his theory is some big intellectual breakthrough. “It’s almost like a Copernican  revolution in our thinking about life,” Loeb says. Fancy that: Abraham Loeb, the new Copernicus!

But far from being some great intellectual breakthrough, Loeb's theory is of little significance. One reason is that it is neither falsifiable nor verifiable. We could never possibly falsify the idea that life arose somewhere in the billions of galaxies between 10 and 17 million years after the Big Bang. We could also never verify such a theory.

For such a theory to be verified, we would need to find fossil traces that life had arisen shortly after the Big Bang. We couldn't find that in our solar system, since our solar system is less than 5 billion years old. We also could not find such fossil traces if we visited any other solar system. As there is absolutely no fossil evidence of life during the first billion years of earthly history, we can conclude that any life that appeared a few million years after the Big Bang (and disappeared a few million years later, when the background temperature became colder) would not have left behind any traces that someone could detect billions of years later. Any such life would at best be pre-cellular life such as self-reproducing molecules, something too primitive to leave behind fossil remains.

Loeb's theory doesn't explain anything, doesn't predict anything, and it also has no important implications. Since his theory imagines a relatively short “epoch of habitability” lasting only six million years near the beginning of the universe (which is merely a “one-night stand” from the standpoint of a 13-billion year cosmic history), the theory does not have any implications for the overall likelihood of life's current existence in the universe.

Loeb's theory is therefore a kind of insignificant curiosity, an idea without any deeper meaning, a sterile idea that we will never be able to confirm or disprove. Far from being the start of a new Copernican revolution, his theory seems to be a dead end.