Dissipation Drivel of the “Easy Life” Guys

The online science magazine Nautilus sometimes gives its readers impressions that are completely at odds with reality. Based on many articles Nautilus has had on the multiverse, you might think that this is a well-confirmed scientific concept. But to the contrary, there is not a speck of evidence for any multiverse or any universe beyond or own. There are also very good reasons for thinking that no such evidence could possibly appear, given that any observations that we could possibly make would always be observations of our own universe, not an observation of some other universe.

Another area in which Nautilus creates an impression completely at odds with reality is the origin of life. An article by astrobiologist Nathaniel Comfort in the current edition of Nautilus has a subtitle telling us that “Hydrothermal vent models transform the origins of life from unlikely to near-inevitable.” The text of the article goes even further, stating this:

Vent models posit that given the initial conditions, the emergence of life was not a near-miracle. It was inevitable.

This statement gives the reader a very wrong idea. Any realistic appraisal of the origin of life must regard it as the most improbable type of event, basically a miracle. To calculate the odds of such a thing, we must consider all of the insanely improbable things that seemed to be required for life to originate from non-life. It seems that to have even the most primitive life originate, you need to have an “information explosion.” Even the most primitive microorganism known to us seems to need a minimum of more than 200,000 base pairs in its DNA (as discussed here). Protein molecules have to be just-right to be functional. It has been calculated that something like 10⁷⁰ random trials would be needed for a functional protein molecule to appear, and many such protein molecules are needed for life to get started. And so much more is also needed: cells, self-replicating molecules, a genetic code that is an elaborate system of symbolic representations, and also some fantastically improbable luck in regard to homochirality.

Postulating hydrothermal vents as the spot where life originated does nothing to help with these problems. A hydrothermal vent could supply some heat. But a lack of heat was never the issue. The issue was the appearance of life requires a very high degree of organization and functional coherence that should have been fantastically improbable to have occurred by chance.

By claiming that life appeared at hydrothermal vents, it seems that you are sharply decreasing the odds of life appearing, not increasing them.  As the map below shows, hydrothermal vents are found on only a tiny fraction of the ocean's surface, at the bottom of the ocean.  A person assuming that life might have originated anywhere in the ocean would be assuming perhaps 100,000 times more volume of space for chemical reactions to occur. 

Credit: NOAA

To support his “easy life” insinuations, Comfort cites a scientific paper using the word “dissipation” or “dissipative” 18 times. Comfort also gives us a little thermodynamic mumbo-jumbo centered around the idea of dissipation. He states the following:

What most goes against our intuition is that complex structures can be better dissipaters of energy than simpler ones. Catalysts help you up an energy hill so that you can drop even further down on the other side. Casting our gaze across the entirety of biological evolution, each organism is such an energy hill. It forms only if it is thermodynamically favored—if by pumping energy uphill to create it, even more energy is released. ...A world that also includes warm-blooded cows, munching grass and emitting heat, methane, and fertilizer, is an even better entropy engine; one with tigers is better still. It is the ecosystem that is energetically favored: A lush green Earth teeming with life pulls more heat out of the hot center of the planet and out of the sun, releasing it into cold, dark space, than does, say, Mars. Our biosphere is but a sophisticated icepack for the sun. A giant dissipation engine came on the scene with Homo sapiens. The history of technology is ultimately one of developing ever more powerful methods of extracting energy from the earth and sun: fire, cooking, agriculture, mining, smelting, logging, steam engines. Like a trickle of water flowing downhill, the exact path of neither evolution nor culture is predetermined—only the overall trend. Thus, neither art, nor war, nor NASCAR, nor smart phones were inevitable, but all can be seen as work done by the human entropy engine. In this light, our dissipative tendencies are not an aberration, but thermodynamically required.

As some type of attempt to explain the origin of life and increasingly complex biology, this thermodynamic twaddle is a complete bust, and we can laugh at the loopy statement, “Our biosphere is but a sophisticated icepack for the sun.” The term dissipation is defined as “squandering of money, energy, and resources.” Such a concept does nothing to explain biological organization. If some chemicals become organized into a life form, that is the opposite of dissipation. Far from helping us out in regard to the origin of life, the second law of thermodynamics just gives a reason for thinking that such a thing is all the more unlikely. The second law of thermodynamics says entropy or disorder always increases as times goes on. If we have life appearing and becoming ever more organized, that is a trend that is disfavored (but not prohibited) by the second law of thermodynamics, rather than something favored by it. Far from being thermodynamically favored, each increase in biological order is thermodynamically disfavored.  Similarly, each step you take up a stairs is disfavored (but not prohibited) by the law of gravity.

You can summarize the second law of thermodynamics like this: it likes anything that involves a dissipation or dispersion of heat, but doesn't like anything that involves a concentration of heat.  Because life forms are a concentration of heat, they are thermodynamically disfavored.  Things that are thermodynamically favored are things like a fire burning out, a hot object cooling down, and the sun eventually burning out. 

The idea that hydrothermal vents would have made the origin of life likely is busted in this statement by origin-of-life scientist Nick Lane:

Deep ocean hydrothermal vents are the systems most likely to have given rise to life. These far from equilibrium systems do at least favour the production of organic molecules, the biomass that makes up cells, but the level of self-organisation and dynamism required to get from cell matter to living cells is so great that we're in no position to specify the probability of life arising even in the most favourable environment.

Comfort seems to favor the “easy life” hypothesis, which claims that the origin of life was for some reason inevitable or all-but-inevitable. There are many reasons for thinking that such an idea is not correct. The main reasons are all of the difficulties in explaining the giant leap in complexity, information and organization involved in moving from non-life to even the simplest living thing.

Another reason for rejecting the “easy life” hypothesis is that despite more than 65 years of laboratory research, no one has been able to artificially create life in a laboratory. If it were true that the origin of life was thermodynamically favored, then it wouldn't be too hard to create an origin-of-life experiment which produced life from non-life.

Still another reason for rejecting the “easy life” hypothesis is the failure of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Life). If the origin of life was somehow thermodynamically favored or all-but-inevitable, then the whole galaxy would be teeming with life, and odds might have favored searching for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. But after decades of effort checking many thousands of sun-like stars, no such signals have been found.

Still another reason for rejecting the “easy life” hypothesis is that such an idea implies that life would have originated on Earth many times. If it was “all but inevitable” that life would originate, there should have been many separate origins of life. But the total number of times in which life has naturally originated on our planet seems to be no greater than 1. All earthly life uses the same genetic code. We see no organisms using a different genetic code. But imagine if life had independently originated multiple times on Earth. Then we would see various types of life that each used a different genetic code.

People sometimes argue that if there had been a second origin-of-life on Earth, then life based on that second origin would have been gobbled up by whichever life appeared first. But that's not a good argument. Imagine if these two things happened:

3,700,000,000 years ago: life originates using one genetic code, resulting in Biosphere 1

3,600,000,000 years ago: life has a separate origin using a different genetic code, resulting in Biosphere 2

In this case would the organisms of Biosphere 1 just destroy the organisms of Biosphere 2 through predation? No, since they both would use a separate genetic code, they would be incompatible.  The organisms of Biosphere 1 would not be able to consume the organisms of Biosphere 2 – or, if an organism of Biosphere 1 ate an organism of Biosphere 2, it would not find it nutritious, because it would be using an alternate chemistry. So rather than Biosphere 2 disappearing because Biosphere 1 had a head start, the two biospheres would both exist. 

There is no evidence of a second biosphere, and life seems to have not naturally originated on our planet more than once. Such a thing argues strongly against the "easy life" claim that the origin of life was inevitable or almost inevitable. 

Postscript: It is inaccurate for Comfort to be claiming that certain models posit that the origin of life was inevitable. While some of the authors of the papers that he references may have made optimistic statements about the origin of life, neither a mathematical model nor any set of equations could ever show the origin of life was likely.  There is no way to put "life" or "a living cell" on the right side of an equation. You could in theory have an experiment or a computer simulation that might show a likely origin of life, but none of the papers that he references involves such a thing. 

If a person tries to appeal to human beings or some other life form as a superior agent of heat dissipation, and then tries to suggest that such things are likely on the grounds of the second law of thermodynamics, such a person is committing a kind of fallacy like the fallacy in the reasoning below:

"The law of the wind is a kind of law of dispersion.  Wind likes to scatter things far apart. So the wind would bring various things together to make bombs. Because those bombs would be really good at dispersion, at scattering things far apart."

This reasoning is fallacious. The "law of dispersion" followed by the wind is not precognitive or intelligent. Such a law is too dumb and short-sighted to first bring things together because this will later eventually serve some goal of causing a high degree of blowing things apart.  Similarly, the second law of thermodynamics will act in a way that is completely short-sighted and lacking in any foresight, intelligence or precognition. It makes no sense to postulate that such a law will create things of concentrated heat and low entropy (living things) because such things might eventually engage in dissipation effects that result in heat dissipation and higher entropy.  Life forms are a concentration of heat, and there is no concentration of heat that is favored by the second law of thermodynamics.  

"Easy life" theorists sometimes cite the work of Jeremy England, an MIT Professor. A Harvard professor says, "Jeremy’s work represents potentially interesting exercises in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of simple abstract systems," but says that any claims it is has to do with biology or the origin of life is "pure and shameless speculation." 

After quite a few absurdly immodest articles have appeared about his work, England seems to have got more modest. "I would not say I have done anything to investigate the 'origin of life' per se," he now says. He says, "If, when you say 'life,' you mean stuff that is as stunningly impressive as a bacterium or anything else with polymerases and DNA, my work doesn't yet tell us anything about how easy or difficult it is to make something that complex, so I shouldn't speculate about what we'd be likely to find elsewhere than Earth." 

Is Our Universe More Improbable Than a “Boltzmann Modern Earth” ?

Cosmologists sometimes discuss a possibility called a Boltzmann brain. A Boltzmann brain is the hypothetical possibility of a brain forming somewhere in space from an incredibly unlikely random combination of particles. Some have tried to explain the very unlikely existence of our universe by using reasoning along these lines: don't be surprised to be an observer in a universe like ours, because observers can only exist in universes like ours. But the possibility of a Boltzmann brain is sometimes presented to rebut such reasoning.

Let's consider two possibilities. In the first case, you live in a universe that is 99.9999% disorderly and chaotic, but there is just a tiny little area of space that is highly orderly, just orderly enough for your brain to exist. In the second case, you live in a universe that is orderly for vast regions stretching billions of light-years, with enough order to allow the possibility of trillions of life-bearing planets. Our reality is the second of these cases. But some cosmologists have argued that from a thermodynamic standpoint and an entropy standpoint, a "blind chance" standpoint, it is inconceivably more probable that you should find yourself as an observer under the first of these two cases.

Another possibility to consider (rather similar to a Boltzmann brain) is what we may call a “Boltzmann modern Earth.” This is the incredibly unlikely possibility that a planet the size of Earth, with all of the complexity and biology of our planet, could arise fairly suddenly from a random combination of particles.

This possibility of a "Boltzmann modern Earth" is discussed by ace cosmologist Roger Penrose in his recent scientific book Fashion Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. On page 316 of his book, he says, “One can make a very rough estimate of the probability that life, as it now exists on Earth, with all its detailed molecular and atomic locations and motions, came about simply by chance encounters from particles coming in from space in, let us say, six days!” Penrose then estimates that such a thing would have a probability of about 1 in 10 to the ten to the sixtieth power. That is a probability not anything like the microscopic probability of 1 in 10⁶⁰ but instead an almost infinitely smaller probability. It's the probability you would have if you started out with one tenth and then kept multiplying by one tenth a total number of times equal to a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times.

But then Penrose tells us that this fantastically unlikely event (a life-filled Earth like ours suddenly forming from random collisions of particles) would be far more probable than the existence of a universe as orderly as ours, saying it “would be a far 'cheaper' way of producing intelligent beings than the way in which it was actually done!” He's indicating  that the incredibly improbable sudden formation of a “Boltzmann modern Earth” would actually be much more likely than the chance of you getting a universe such as ours accidentally.

Speaking of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Penrose states this on page 317:

The lower-entropy earlier states of the universe that initially gave rise to humanity in its earliest stages (being of lower entropy simply by virtue of the 2^nd law) must have been far more improbable (in this sense) than is the situation now. This is just the 2^nd law in action. So it must be “cheaper” (in terms of improbabilities) for the state to have come about as it is now purely by chance, than for it to have arisen from an earlier much lower entropy state – if that had come about purely by chance!

And on page 313 Penrose states that “the improbability of the universe conditions that we actually seem to find ourselves in” is roughly 1 in 10 to the 10 to the 124^th power, which is a probability almost infinitely smaller than the 1 in 10 to the 10 to the 60^th power estimate he made for the chance of a planet with all of Earth's biology appearing suddenly from random particle collisions (a “Boltzmann modern Earth” occurring). This 1 in 10 to the 10 to the 124^th power probability is the probability you would have if you started out with one tenth and then kept multiplying by one tenth a total number of times equal to ten thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times.

Why such a low probability? The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that entropy must steadily increase. But right now the entropy of the universe is fairly low. Situations such as solar systems surrounded by vast amounts of empty space are very low entropy situations (as opposed to a universe that is a uniform sea of particles, which is high in entropy). It seems that if the universe has the low entropy it now has after 14 billion years of existence, the entropy of the universe must have been staggeringly low at the time of the Big Bang. And from a thermodynamic standpoint, such a thing seems insanely unlikely.

Penrose is one of the most well-known cosmologists around. If his statements on this topic are correct, then we have perhaps a tremendous irony. Centuries ago, people argued that our planet and its life could only have appeared if there were some higher power in the universe, on the grounds that it was too improbable that so much order could arise by chance. Now after all our advanced science, much of it done by people wishing to overturn such a conclusion, we may have discovered that the chance of this type of order existing randomly by chance (considering the history of the universe, the Big Bang, entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics) is not greater than was imagined long ago, but actually very much smaller.

Why a Bouncing Universe Theory Doesn't Work

In the science news this week there has been coverage of a paper by Neil Turok and Steffen Gielen, a paper purporting to show that the Big Bang might have been a “Big Bounce,” occurring after a contraction of the universe. The idea of a “Big Bounce” is part of a cyclical model of the universe.

A cyclical universe theory is one that says that the universe passes through a series of phases or cycles, with each cycle being repeated over and over again. Depending on the theory, each cycle may last billions or trillions of years.

The main theory of a cyclical universe has been the theory of an oscillating universe. To understand this theory, you must understand the concept of critical density. Scientists have long said that if the density of the universe in mass-energy is less than a particular density called the critical density, the universe will keep expanding. But if the density of the universe is greater than this critical density, the universe's expansion will one day slow down and then reverse. If that were to happen, the expansion of the universe (in which the distance between galaxies increases) would turn into a contraction of the universe (in which the distance between galaxies decreases). At the end of the period of contraction would be a Big Crunch in which all of the universe ends up crunched together in a very dense state.

According to the theory of an oscillating universe, this Big Crunch would turn into a Big Bounce – another Big Bang that would start the universe expanding again. The oscillating universe theory is the idea that such cosmic phases of expansion and contraction have continued indefinitely – perhaps forever.

The paper by Turok and Gielen deals purely with whether or not a Big Bounce would occur after a Big Crunch. The paper claims that such a Big Crunch might actually lead to a Big Bounce in which the universe starts expanding again. Such a thing actually seems incredibly improbable. Previously cosmologists have said it is overwhelming more likely that a contracting, collapsing universe would eventually collapse into one or more black holes, without resulting in another phase of cosmic expansion.

The authors claimed to have reached their conclusion based on simple assumptions. In an article in the magazine New Scientist, Turok is quoted as follows:

“The spirit of our work is to focus on simplicity,” Turok says. “We’re not adding bells and whistles to the physics we already know.”

In the abstract of their paper, the authors refer to their theory as “natural,” and in this article Turok is quoted as saying the theory involves only “minimal assumptions.”

Turok's claims about being minimal, natural and simple are quite misleading. The assumptions he is making are unnatural, absurdly complicated and highly speculative. He is indeed adding a whole bunch of speculative bells and whistles to the physics we already know.

The press release for Turok's study makes clear that it based on the idea of conformal symmetry. But conformal symmetry is a highly speculative and unproven idea. The speculative nature of Turok's paper is also shown on page 2 of the paper, where he starts speculating about anti-gravity. He might as well have been speculating about unicorns and fairies. Gravity is a known feature of nature. There has never been the slightest evidence for any such thing as anti-gravity. Discussion of anti-gravity belongs in science fiction novels.

The following passage from page 2 of the paper shows that Turok's claims of simplicity are bogus:

Once anisotropies and inhomogeneities are included, generically there are

no regular, real “bounce" solutions; but there are regular, complex solutions which are deformations of the classical bounces. We claim these are legitimate saddle points of the path integral and provide a consistent semiclassical description of a quantum bounce.

Here Turok seems to be basically admitting that the straightforward answer he gets (as to whether a collapsing universe would bounce) is “no bounce,” and that he can only get a bouncing universe by resorting to “complex solutions” – in other words, weird, ornate speculations which he introduces through absurdly complicated speculative mathematics. This is the opposite of simplicity.

You won't be able to follow Turok's speculative mathematics, but it is easy to explain a reason why the notion of a cyclical universe (with periodic “Big Bounces” at the end of contraction phases) does not work. The reason is simple: scientists have determined that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, which means there will be no Big Crunch in our future.  The expansion of the universe will continue forever, and the universe will never begin to contract. 

The diagram below shows (in black) the cyclical, bouncing universe theory, the idea of an oscillating universe. But the red arrow shows what scientists actually observe. The acceleration of the universe's expansion means there will be no Big Crunch in the future. If there isn't one in the future, it's not plausible to maintain that there was a previous cycle of the universe in which a Big Crunch turned into a Big Bang.

Anyone trying to come up with a theory of a cyclical universe has the deck stacked against him. You have the Big Bang, the unexplained one-of-a-kind event beginning the universe. You have the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us entropy always increases over long time periods. You have the fact that the current entropy level in the universe is vastly lower than it would be if the universe were many times older than 13 billion years. You have the acceleration of the universe's expansion, which tells us that there will be no further opportunities for an event like the Big Bang, when everything was densely packed. These are not facts that lend credence to any cyclical theory of a universe. Nature seems to be screaming at us that the universe is not eternal and has not existed forever.

Scientists say that at the time of the Big Bang, the entropy level of our universe must have been incredibly low. Since the Second Law of Thermodynamics says entropy always increases, for you to have a universe such as ours after 13 billions years means the entropy of our universe must have incredibly low at the the time of the Big Bang. Anti-gravity speculations such as Turok's are futile, as they provide no explanation as to how we could have ended up with a universe with very, very low entropy at the time of the Big Bang, if the Big Bang had been a Big Bounce from a previous phase of the universe lasting several times longer than 13 billion years. Turok's paper completely ignores this crucial issue, and doesn't even mention entropy.