2 Scientists Say You Are Descended From Distant Alien Life

In their scientific paper Life Before Earth, scientists Alexei A. Sharov and Richard Gordon present an argument that life on Earth has a development time that stretches back 9.7 billion years. Therein lies a paradox, because our planet is only about 4.6 billion years ago. To account for this discrepancy, Sharov and Gordon suggest that all life on our planet is descended from life that first appeared in some other solar system billions of years before our planet formed.

Sharov and Gordon reach this conclusion about the origin time of earthly life by doing a backwards extrapolation. They suggest that the growth of life's complexity follows a law of exponential growth similar to Moore's Law, the law that the number of components in a state-of-the-art computer doubles every 18 months. The scientists created a graph that plots on a logarithmic scale the growth of genome complexity in earthly organisms. They find that on this graph the growth of complexity pretty much follows a straight line. When one traces that straight line back to its beginning, you come to a point about 9.7 billion years ago.

A graph from the scientific paper (click to expand)

This conclusion is startling. The standard story is that life first appeared on our planet a few billion years ago, because of some lucky accident. When they started to put together this graph, the scientists must have expected the trend line to begin at a point about 4 billion years ago. Instead, following the trend line back to its beginning, they end up with a starting point 9.7 billion years ago.

Could it be, however, that the rate of evolution has not been constant? Some evolutionary scientists support a theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” in which species exhibit little change over very long periods, and then suddenly branch off into several new species. But Sharov and Gordon anticipate this objection. They argue that while one species may split into several in a fairly short time (geologically speaking), the overall growth in functional complexity does not have sudden spurts:

The reason why living organisms cannot increase their functional complexity instantly may be that it takes a long time to develop each new function via trial and error. Thus, simultaneous and fast emergence of numerous new functions is very unlikely. In particular, the origin of life was then not a single lucky event but a gradual increase of functional complexity in evolving primordial systems. Similarly, the emergence from prokaryotes to eukaryotes was not the result of one successful symbiosis, but may have involved as many as 100 discrete innovative steps.

But how do these scientists reconcile this starting point of 9.7 billion years for earthly life with the fact that scientists say Earth is only 4.6 billion years old? Do they suggest that Earth is twice as old as we thought? No. Instead Sharov and Gordon suggest that earthly life is descended from life that originated elsewhere.

But how could earthly life be descended from life that arose elsewhere in the universe? Not wishing to use the deus ex machina of extraterrestrial spaceships, Sharov and Gordon suggest a simpler idea: spores. The scientists put it this way:

Bacterial spores have unusually high survival rates even in very harsh conditions, and therefore, they are most likely candidates for interstellar transfer. Contaminated material can be ejected into space from a planet via collision with comets or asteroids. Then bacterial spores may remain alive in a deep frozen state for a long time that may be sufficient for interstellar transfer. Bacterial spores were reported revived after 25-35 million years of dormancy.

The basic idea can be summarized like this:

Phase 1: Billions of years of extraterrestrial evolution in some other solar system

Phase 2: Spore migration from other solar system to our solar system

Phase 3: Billions of years of earthly evolution

The idea of life naturally spreading across the stars may seem farfetched, but it seems more reasonable when we consider that according to astronomers many of the elements on our planet originated in other solar systems. Scientists say that all of the elements heavier than iron originated in supernovae explosions that occurred before our solar system formed. Those explosions of stars are believed to have created the elements heavier than iron, and spread those elements around into interstellar space. Scientists think that such explosions enriched with heavy elements the cloud of gas and dust from which the solar system formed.

With its emphasis on the long time needed for life to evolve, Sharov and Gordon's theory may help to supply an answer to Fermi's Paradox, the issue of why extraterrestrials have not appeared here or taken over our planet. If it takes something like 10 billion years for intelligent life to evolve from the most primitive state of life, that can help to explain why “they” are not here already. It could be that we are one of the first intelligent species to evolve. 

The theory of Sharov and Gordon may have merit, but I don't think they have done enough to promote their “life before Earth” theory. Perhaps they need a more catchy marketing approach. To help them sell their theory, I have created the promotional poster shown below, which I give them permission to use. In this visual I combine elements of their theory with motifs from two of the most beloved science fiction series. 

 

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.