astro picture for the day/ Isaac Asimov's "Rare Earth Hypothesis"

Image Credit - MeerKat radio telescope - the Event Horizon Telescope guys want to keep people from getting excited; they think the image "may disappoint."  I think we can rest any fears of disappointment.  Right now, they're keeping the images to themselves till they get the scientific papers out(publish or perish)

- Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee published "Rare Earth" in 2000.  At the time, the idea that despite the billions of stars in a galaxy, Earth's and technological civilizations could be rare was new.  But, I actually grew up having read Isaac Asimov's "Extraterrestrial Civilizations." Ward and Brownlee don't reference Isaac's book. I wanted to re-read Isaac's book and "Rare Earth" in the light of a recent finding furthering the "Rare Earth Hypothesis."

Appears that Supernova don't all produce the same amount of Phosphorus. Phosphorus is an essential element for life as we know it. I'll link one artilce here --> Phosphorus shortage may make alien life very rare

This finding is just the latest property of our solar system and Earth that Astronomers have found which would indicate that Earth's and Extraterrestrial Civilizations might be rare. As indicated above, Isaac Asimov, and not Ward/Brownlee was the first to think of this Rare Earth hypothesis.  Curiously, he doesn't mention Fermi's Paradox. So, I'll start this review of the Rare Earth hypothesis with Fermi's Paradox.

In the 1950's, Fermi was sitting down with a few physicist friends, talking about the recent Big Bang theory of the universe(note, this was over a decade before even cosmologists took the Big Bang seriously), and asked "Where are they?"

What he was getting at is if there was a Big Bang 10 to 20 billion years ago(The Big Bang is well dated in todays' Hubble Space Telescope era - 13.7 billion years), and the Earth is dated to 4.5 billion years old, then shouldn't there be E.T's swarming the galaxy?  Shouldn't the galaxy be settled by now?

A further technicality of the Fermi Paradox is that for there to be rocky planets, you need a generation or two of supernova.  The Big Bang only produces hydrogen and helium.  Elements essential to making stars, but not rocky planets. Supernova go off in about a hundred million years.  Factor in the recombination event after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled down enough for light to disentangle from electrons and allow atoms to appear, and you still have billions of years since the Big Bang for E.T's to swarm the universe.

UFO and E.T. enthusiasts have of course had a field day with this one.  They've hypothesized everything from they're among us(Einstein was an Alien hypothesis) to making the Egyptian pyramids to there's just getting ready to wipe us out. Getting to Isaac Asimov's "Rare Earth" hypothesis.

Isaac Asimov gets to his Rare Earth hypothesis by means of rational philosophy.  He points out the remarkable similarity between the UFO craze and Religions who want there to be a God to save them.  Whereas the God believers want a savior god Jesus(or Osirus, or Dionysius, or Mithras . . . see my Gospel of Truth), the UFO guys want E.T.'s to come down to Earth and reveal all their science and technology so we don't have to go through the painful stages of life to acquire all this knowledge. One could further note the analogy with the third world economies being able to go straight to the information age instead of the industrial age - as pointed out by Alvin Toffler.

This proves some interesting ideas of Carnap and other Vienna school of logicians of the 1900s.  That often a problem can be proven meaningless.  Or, other times a problem is meaningless at one time, and not at another time. This understanding appears to have been lost to humanity since E.T. Bell's "Development of Mathematics" which appears to me heavily influenced by this Vienna logicians scientific humanist philosophy.

The idea of Extraterrestrial Civilizations has no meaning before Astronomers proved the Heliocentric model of the solar system(they'll often say "of the universe" - or Helio cosmology).  In a geocentric model of the universe, where the white dots are not suns, there's no way to conceive of Extraterrestrials.

Also, this relates to the nature of all mathematical discovery. A mathematical problem is hard because the viewpoint one is using is not appropriate for the it's solution. Only be re-expression does a hard mathematical problem get solved.  In Symbolic logic, one learns that to prove a proposition from the conclusion, one needs to make a re-expression.  See perhaps Velleman's "How to Prove It."

Isaac points out that the effort to find Extraterrestrial Intelligence by hypothesizing a god(s) is using unobservables, and since we can't (dis)prove unobservables, we move on to looking for Extraterrestrials like us.

He points out animals as intelligences, but since they don't create technologies, they don't count.  And, this shows that when we're looking for Extraterrestrial Intelligences, we're looking for Extraterrestrial Civilizations.

Curiously, to me perhaps, he missed pointing out Neanderthals as intelligences other than ourselves.  And there were lots of other primates other than Australopithacines and Homo Erectus that we competed with in our evolution. But, getting to the Rare Earth hypothesis . . .

Despite Isaac considering the Moon not that important to the possibility of Extraterrestrial Civilizations(E.C's for short), he starts there.

Isaac points out Torricelli's experiment which found the vacuum for the first time. Astronomers quickly realized that the atmosphere of the Earth does not extend throughout space, and maybe the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere - No atmosphere, no water, not life.

Isaac then goes through all the physics discoveries and history showing there's no life on Venus or Mars(probably not; certainly, we know there's no multi-cellular life on Mars), the Gas giants and their moons.

Just because only one planet in our solar system is covered with life, doesn't mean other star systems are not brimming with life.  But, Isaac finds many Astronomy finding's suggesting that Earth's may be rare.

Isaac's first number for habitable stars sytems = 300,000,000,000

Isaac goes through the some rather little known history of the Nebular hypothesis.  He shows that Laplaces nebula hypothesis for the origin of a star and planets went through a bit of a scientific process. Laplaces nebula hypothesis had an angular momentum problem.  The sun doesn't rotate fast.  But, the planets do. It took over a hundred years before Astronomers realized magnetic fields could have transferred the momentum from the Sun to the Planets.  I've considerably shortened all the history presented in Isaac's book.

Isaac tries to use this to exclude certain star systems from having planets.  Fast rotators must not have planets.  He does point out there could be other reasons; but, for the most part, this condition reduces the amount of habitable planets for Isaacs second number - 280,000,000,000

I'm just going to list out for the most part Asimov's numbers for habitable solar systems,

3rd figure = 75, 000,000,000 - this is due to stars being to large(they go supernova), and small stars doing tidal locking, flare stars.  These midget stars make up the majority of stars.  Sunlike stars are only 25 % of the stars in a galaxy. What happens when binary stars are taken into account?

4th figure = 52,000,000,000 - this figure is arrived at by considerations of binary star systems.  The explanation gets a bit complex as he considers every possibility of giant and small stars in a binary system.

5th figure = 5,200,000,000 - the possibility of Extraterrestrial Civilizations takes a big hit with considerations of Population I and II stars.  These labelings are a bit backwards for most people(including me).  The Galactic core stars are called Population II stars, and the disk stars are Population I stars. The Population II stars are 1) light element stars and probably don't have any heavy element planets.  They're also radiated by the central black hole.  There's also the consideration of generation 2 stars of the Population I stars.  In all, the number of stars with the possibilities of an Earthlike planet takes a big hit.

6th figure  = 2,600,000,000 - Isaac's 6th figure is probably the most speculative at the time of his writing.  I'm thinking that one article I read about Jupiters spiraling in close to their star and ejecting any inner rocky planets also holds here.  I need to re-read that; those close in Jupiters would drastically reduce the number of stars with Earthlike planets.?

7th figure = 1,300,000,000 Isaac arrives at this figure by considering that not all planets in a suitable star system's ecosphere is of the right size.

8th figure = 650,000,000 This figure is come about with the same considerations as the 7th figure. So, these two figures are not precise. I'm thinking this is where "Rare Earth" book comes in to define these parameters more precisely.

figure 9 = 600,000,000 - this figure is a guestimate on the lifetimes that life develops from bacteria to multicellular.  It's saying if a star is stable enough and has been around for enough time for life to go from single cell to multicellular.  This use the Cambrian explosion as a minimum time when life went multi-cellular.  And the 10th figure is related to the this consideration - 433,000,000 . . .also figure 11, which is considering land life - 416,000,000 . . . and the 12th figure is about how many star systems planets could be around with intelligent civilizations = 390,000,000

Isaac's last figure 13  = 530,000

What does Ward/Brownlee show that's new beyond Isaac Asimov's 1980s book?  They talk about plate tectonics, and Snowball Earth.  The Snowball Earth maybe related to the Moon stabilizing the Earth's tilt.  This would be when the Moon wasn't in position to stabilize the Earth's tilt as much.   Also, they mention the Moon and Jupiter.

Astronomer's have found that many solar systems Jovian planets have spiraled close in where the inner rocky planets would be.  Because of a resonance between the Star and it's Jovian planets, as the Jovian Planet spiraled in, the resonance would have thrown out any inner rocky planets.

Between the Moon, which Isaac disregards, and the Jovian planets being in close, and the recent Supernova's not making phosphorus equally, that last 13th number is probably considerably lower. Probably less than a hundred thousand. Factor in Nuclear war, and/or Industrial destruction of the environment before they establish themselves out in space, the number of E.T's could be quite low.

But, even if the number is fifty or even less, when we consider billions of years, and what technologies we know are around the corner  - A.I, Nanotechnologies, and Quantum Computers, even if one Extraterrestrial Civilization had got as far as the exotic technologies noted above and established themselves out in space, they should have been able to populate the Galaxy.

- I've been refraining talking about the latest Nanotech and Quantum Computing news.  Sorry if my readership is innocent; but I've been wondering who my readership is lately. Assuming my readership has been using me for insider news on nanotech and quantum computers, I can only tell you that I am not an insider. I get my news when everyone else. Sure, I peruse the net and I am a longtime watcher of the scene. Other than that,  I don't give any kind of secret info.  Whether you want to believe this qualification of whether I'm giving secret info or not, I do feel forced to talk about A.I./Nanotech/and Quantum Computers a bit here.

A.I and Nanotech kind of arose together.  Once could say chemistry is nanotech.  But, what say Richard Feynman and Eric Drexler, the two main founders of nanotech mean is nano-manufacturing.  The last term is my own as far as I know. I have, curiously, seen it used from time to time.  Anyways, what's meant by nano-manufacturing is making everything from nanoscale to macroscale objects to molecular precision.  Molecular is the better term here because to say atomic precision is to suggest subatomic quantum scale.  We're talking about getting every atom in a molecule or a macroscopic object in the right place - molecular precision.

NanoManufacturing would be like a computer.  Only, instead of juggling bits and getting a picture on a screen, or a printout, we're juggling atoms and getting a product.  Two affect could allow this.  One, a molecular scale robot.  The small size allows rapid movements.  The other affect would be massive parallelism.

When/if they get NanoManufacturing to happen, they could recycle the industrial world.  We would be in a revolution comparable to the iron age to the Bronze age. We could make things to their scientific limits dictated by natural law.  Things could be made anywhere from ten to a thousand times greater in quality. But, it's A.I. that can really drive the NanoWorld.

A.I powered NanoManufacturing could explore those limits of natural law.  They can also make the amount of technological development so high, as to be beyond human comprehension. The amount of engineering accomplished in a single day could dwarf all that came for the last so many hundreds of years, much less the thousands and even Millions of years if you count the Austalopithacines stone tools.  But, that's nothing or even further augmented by Quantum Computers.

Quantum Computers use quantum entanglement, a state so delicate, you need to work at zero degree temperatures, and get rid of all vibrations to keep the quantum state from withering away. Quantum Computers could make today's supercomputers look like Pascal's adding machine of the 1600s.  The Quantum Computers can solve quantum chemistry and differential equations that are unsolvable today.

Quantum entanglement can lead to quantum technologies beyond even computing.  They can come up with artificial atoms - and alternative chemistries. Insted of just relying on the periodic table properties, we can come up with alternative periodic tables.

Already, we have cloaking technology. We already have the ability to make refraction free lenses.  This allows our Electron Microscopes to see atoms.  Where before, the laws of physics prohibited Electron Microscopes from seeing atoms.

I'd like to point out a favorite science/technology that doesn't get mentioned much - chaotic dynamics.  Researchers have figured out how to 1) use strange attractors, and/or 2) go from one of the systems strange attractor states to another.  They can stabilize one of the possibly infinite behaviors of a chaotic system. They can do this for any medium - mechanical, electromagnetic, chemical.

Point is if an Extraterrestrial Intelligence established itself out in space and/or established even one of the above technologies(establish one, and you could easily establish the others), they should have no problem with interstellar space travel.

So, where are they?

Well, one answer is they've cloaked themselves. Even if this were true.  Why do we have supernova?  Wouldn't they want to prevent that, and prevent more black holes from forming?

I think the answer lies elsewhere - Religion. Religion doesn't like to be questioned.  In such an extremely science future, where science has conquered all; there's no where for Religion to hide. Eventually, they say no.