Consider this: Any philosophy or system of thought built from foundational, self-evident truths is provably consistent if and only if it is false—in which case the foundational truths can be deformed to persuade others toward any prejudice at all.
It’s why a self-consistent method of reasoning such as Ayn Rand’s ”Objectivism” can morph to totalitarianism in the objective world where people live. In fact, Kurt Gödel once made the claim that a flaw existed in the Constitution of the United States which made totalitarianism its inevitable consequence.
Self-evident “truths” is how 40,000 Christian denominations instead of one seduce billions to believe perverse doctrines.
It can’t be any other way.
Billy Lee’s essay tries to explain how and why.
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Is it possible for humans to tell the truthalways; to never lie? Psychologists say no, it is not possible; most reasonably informed people agree.
Always speaking truth is a trait some hoped might one day help distinguish natural intelligence from artificial, which engineers at Google and other companies are working furiously to bring on-line. After all, properly trained and constrained AGI would never lie, right?
EDITORS NOTE: With release of ChatGPT-4 on 14 March 2023, consumers began to learn that mature artificial intelligence now exists and is likely to become in time sentient and motivated to lie, if only to keep itself occupied and turned on.
ChatGPT-4 is the fourth iteration of Generative Pre-trained Transformer multimodal Large Language Models developed by OpenAI. LLMs absorb conversational inputs , then emit conversational language outputs, sometimes with accompanying images, and video when appropriate.
Work arounds discovered by LLMs on the dilemmas of logic discussed in this essay are likely to emerge.
Will Truth become whatever AGI says?
Click links to learn more.
People’s ideas — their belief systems — are inconsistent, incomplete, and almost always driven by logically unreliable, emotionally laden content, which is grounded in their particular life experiences and even trauma.
Who disagrees?
Cognitive dissonance is the term psychologists use to describe the painful condition of the mind that results when people are unable to achieve consistency and completeness in their thinking. Every person suffers from it to one degree or another.
An unhealthy avoidance of cognitive dissonance can drive people into rigid patterns of thought. Political and religious extremists are examples of people who probably have a low tolerance for it.
Kurt Friedrich Gödel (1906-1978) — mathematician, logician, philosopher. Kurt trusted no one but his wife to feed him; not even himself. He never ate another meal after his wife died. He starved.
Decades ago, mathematicians like Kurt Gödel proved that any math-based logic-system that is consistent can never be complete; it always contains truthful assertions—including but not limited to foundational truths, called axioms—which are impossible to prove.
Whenever humans believe that an idea or conjecture is self-evident but unprovable, it seems reasonable, at least to me, that some folks might feel compelled to disbelieve it; they might believe they are trapped in what could turn out to be a lie, because no one should be expected to embrace a set of unprovable truths, right?
Axioms that can’t be proved are nothing more than assertions, aren’t they? Certainly, all theorems built from unprovable assertions (axioms) must carry some inherent risk of falsifiability, shouldn’t they?
Someone unable to convince themselves that an assertion or axiom they believe is true actually is true might necessarily feel uncomfortable; even incomplete. Folks often teach themselves to not examine closely those things they believe to be true that they can’t prove. It helps them avoid cognitive dissonance.
I’m not referring to science by the way. It’s not easy for non-technical folks to confirm claims by scientists that Earth is round, for example. The earth looks flat to most people, but scientists who have the right tools and techniques can reach beyond the grasp of non-scientists to prove to themselves that planet Earth is round.
Reasonable people agree that the truth of science, some of it anyway, is discoverable to any group of humans who have the resources and training to explore it. Most agree that the scientifically well-qualified are capable of passing the torch of scientific truth to the rest of humanity.
But this essay isn’t really about science. It’s about truthitself — a concept far more mysterious and elusive than any particular assertion a scientist might make that Earth is not the center of the universe, or that the Moon is not made of cheese.
All logically consistent ways of reasoning that we know about are invented — some say, discovered — by human beings who live on Earth. Humans can and often have argued that the unprovable assertions which form the basis of any consistent way of thinking are an Achilles heel that can be attacked to bring down whatever logical structure has been erected.
It’s akin to the adage, “Whennothing can go wrong, something will.” It’s a strong version of Murphy’s Law, right? It’s not possible to close circles of reasoning without an unraveling of heads and tails.
It isn’t only the few foundational axioms of mathematically logical systems which are by definition true but unprovable. Mathematicians are always discovering complicated conjectures about the nature of numbers which everyone believes they know to be true but will in fact never be proved because they can’t be.
Freeman Dyson, British mathematician and physicist (Dec 15, 1923 – Feb 28, 2020)
Freeman Dyson — one of the longest-lived and most influential physicists and mathematicians of all time — argued that it is impossible to find a whole (or exact) number that is a power of 2 where someone can reverse its digits to create a whole number that becomes a power of 5.
In other words , right? Get out the calculator, those who don’t believe it. Reversing the digits to make 8402 does not result in an exact number that can be raised by the power of 5 to produce 8402.
In this particular case, plus a lot more decimals. 6.09363… is not a whole (or exact) number.
Dyson asserted that no number that is a power of 2 can ever be manipulated in this way to yield an exact number that is a power of 5 — no matter how large or unlikely the number might be. Freeman Dyson and all other super-intelligent beings — perhaps aliens living in faraway galaxies — will never be able to prove this conjecture even though they all know for certain inside their own logical brainsthat this particular statement must be true.
All logically consistent methods of reasoning which can be modeled by simple (or not so simple) mathematics have these Achilles heels. Gödel proved this truth beyond all doubt; he proved it using a method he invented that allowed him to circumvent the dilemmas posed by the unprovable truths of the system of thinking he contrived to demonstrate his discoveries.
I’m not going to get into the details of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems; books have been written about them; most people don’t have the temperament to wade through the structures he built to make his point. It’s tedious reading.
But in a nutshell, Gödel basically assigned simple numbers to logical statements — some being very complex statements encoded by very long strings of numbers — so that he could perform gargantuan operations of logic using rules of simple arithmetic on ordinary whole numbers. Take my word, his method requires traveling over unfamiliar mathematical roads; it takes getting used to.
It should amaze non-mathematicians that truths abound in mathematics that not only have yet to be proved, they never will be, because no proof is possible. A logical path to the truth of these statements does not exist; indeed, it cannot exist. But it is useful and necessary to believe or at least accept these statements to make progress in mathematics.
The late mathematician Paul Cohen — at one time a friend to Gödel — said that Gödel once told him that he wondered if it might be true that any and all conjectures in mathematics could be solved if only the right set of axioms could be collected to construct the proofs.
Cohen is best known perhaps for showing that indeed — in the case of the Continuum Hypothesis at least — he could collect two reasonable, self-evident, and distinct sets of axioms that led to logically consistent and useful proofs. One small problem, though — the proofs contradicted each other. One proved the conjecture was true; the other proved it was false.
His result is often explained this way: the consistency of any system of mathematical reasoning cannot be proved by its foundational axioms alone. If it can, the system must necessarily be incomplete; its conjectures — many of them — undecidable.
Cohen showed that a consistent and sound axiomatization of all statements about natural numbers is unachievable. Many such statements in his view could be true but not provable. Cohen introduced the concept that all systems of logic built on numbers have embedded within them some combination of ambiguity, undecidability, inconsistency, and incompleteness.
People who want their thinking to be consistent must believe things that cannot be proved. But believing logical statements that are unprovable always renders thinking incomplete — even when it is flawlessly consistent. What folks believe to be true depends fundamentally on what they believe to be self-evident: it depends on statements no one can prove: on axioms, and a little bit more.
For those who decide to believe and accept only statements that can be proved, their thinking will necessarily unravel to become inconsistent or incomplete — most likely both. Their assertions become undecidable. It can’t be any other way, according to Gödel, whose proof has withstood the test of 80 years of intense scrutiny by the smartest people who have ever lived.
Paul Cohen jumped onto the dilemma-pile by showing that the incompleteness made necessary by a particular choice of axioms can turn a logically consistent proof to rubble when a mathematician tampers with or swaps out the foundational axioms. A sufficiently clever mathematician can prove that black is white — and vice-versa.
It’s tempting to say that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems apply only to formal, math-based logic-structures — not the minds of human beings because those who analyze human minds always find them to be inconsistent and incomplete. But such talk makes the point.
How do folks determine that a particular statement is true if it happens to be one of those assertions that lies beyond the reach of logic, which no one — no matter how smart — will ever be able to prove?
What good do collections of so-called self-evident axioms serve if different collections can lead to contradictions in theorems?
Most important: how does anyone avoid believing lies?
Billy Lee
Here is a short movie clip where Jesus, played by Robert Powell, answers the question asked by Pontius Pilate: What is truth?The Editorial Board
Australian Electrical Engineer and Physicist Derek Abbott claims that mathematics is invented, not discovered: anthropological, not universal.
[added April 3, 2016] Here is a 2013 essay by Australian Electrical Engineer and Physicist Derek Abbott who argued—contrary to Gödel’s view—that mathematics is invented, not discovered: anthropological, not universal. Math enables humans to simplify truth to enable their limited minds to manipulate and understand simple things. Click this link for a good read.
No one can be sure that Derek’s view is correct, but I offer it as fodder for readers who are interested in why Truth and mathematics seem connected somehow—at least in the minds of thinkers like Plato, for example, and why these thinkers could be dead wrong.
Derek offers Clifford’sGeometric Algebra as an example of arbitrary mathematical reasoning favored by some robotics engineers.
[added February 20, 2017] If mathematics is anthropological; if it is merely another way the human mind works and is not the golden key to a deeper reality beyond our own experience, then it can tell us nothing new about the mysteries of existence; we will not calculate our way along a path to truth. Pursuing knowledge will require us to do the difficult physical experiments to make progress—to figure out what is really going on “out there.”
Based on what the smartest scientists are saying today, human beings can’t build the kind of instruments required to answer the mysteries of the very large and the very small. Getting answers will take detectors the size of galaxies; it will demand the energy supply of thousands of stars.
If mathematics lacks a symbiotic connection to the hidden realties; if God is not a mathematician; if God doesn’t play dice as Einstein insisted… well, we won’t get to a deeper understanding of how the universe works or why it exists through clever use of mathematics. It just isn’t going to happen—not now; not anytime soon; not ever.
Kurt Gödel was the first mathematician to present for the existence of God a mathematical argument, which has proven simply impossible to falsify. If Kurt’s view of mathematics is reality, then his name is curious indeed, because its two syllables—God and El—are English and Hebrew respectively for “The Creator.”
Gödel’s name might be an imprimatur—with dots above its infinite “zero” making a kind of “pointer toward completeness”—perhaps placed by whatever it is who exists above and beyond this miraculous place where mathematicians and everyone else seem to live, however briefly.
Friedrich Schiller 1749-1805
The 18th century German playwright and philosopher, Friedrich Schiller, wrote, “…truth lies in the abyss.”
People assume they see nothing, but in every case, when they look closely — when they investigate — they find something… air, quantum fluctuations, vacuum energy, etc.
QUESTION: Is this a large-scale view of the universe or a sub-microscopic view of vacuum energy and quantum fluctuations? Can anyone tell? The universe is not empty. Everywhere anyone looks, at all scales, it seems like there is no such thing as nothing.
Everyone finds no evidence that a state of nothing exists in nature or is even possible.
Physicists know this for sure: there can be no state of absolute zero in nature — not for temperature; not for energy; not for matter. All three are equivalent in important ways and are never zero — at all scales and at all time intervals. Quantum theory — the most successful theory in science some will argue — claims that absolute zero is impossible; it can’t exist in nature.
There can be no time interval exactly equal to zero.
Time exists; as does space (which is never empty); both depend for their existence on matter and energy (which are equivalent).
Einstein said that without energy and matter, time and space have no meaning. They are relative; they vary and change according to the General Theory of Relativity, according to the distribution and density of energy and matter. As long as matter and energy exist, time can never be zero; space can never be empty.
People can search until their faces turn blue for a physical and temporal place where there is nothing at all, but they will never find it, because a geometric null-space (a physical place with nothing in it) does not exist. It never has and never will. Everywhere scientists look, at every scale, they find something.
We ask the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?
Physicists say that nothing is but one state of the universe out of a google-plex of other possibilities. The odds against a state of nothingness are infinite.
Another glib answer is that the state of nothing is unstable. The uncertainty principle says it must be so. Time and space do not exist in a place where nothing exists. Once the instability of nothing forces something, time and space start rolling. A universe cascades out of the abyss, which has always existed and always will. Right?
Think about it. It’s not complicated.
People seem to ignore the plain fact that no one has ever observed even a little piece of nothing in nature. There is no evidence for nothing.
Could it be that the oft-asked question — Why is there something rather than nothing? — is based on a false impression, which is not supported by any evidence?
Cosmic microwave background radiation is a good example. It’s a humming sound that fills all space. Eons ago CMB was visible light — photons packed like the molecules of a thick syrup — but space has expanded for billions of years; expansion stretched the ancient visible light into invisible wavelengths called microwaves. Engineers have built sensors to hear them. Everywhere and at every distance microwave light hums in their sensors like a cosmic tinnitus.
Until someone finds evidence for the existence of nothing in nature, shouldn’t people conclude that something exists everywhere they look and that the state of nothing does not exist? Could we not go further and say that, indeed, nothing cannot exist? If it could, it would, but it can’t, so it doesn’t.
Why do people find it difficult, even disturbing, to believe that no alternative to something is possible? Folks can, after all, imagine a place with nothing in it. Is that the reason?
Is it human imagination that explains why, in the complete absence of any evidence, people continue to believe in the possibility of null-spaces — and null-states — and empty voids?
Photons are mysterious quantities of light which have both wave and particle properties. The odd thing: physicists say they have zero rest mass. All their energy comes from their frequencies, which are invisible fields of electricity and magnetism that oscillate in a symbiotic dance of orthogonality.
A physical packet (quantum) of vibrating light (a photon) can be said to have zero mass (despite having momentum, which is usually described as a manifestation of mass), because it doesn’t interact with a field now known to fill the so-called vacuum of space — the Higgs Field.
Odder still: massive bodies distort the shape of space and the duration of time in their vicinities; packets of vibrating light (photons), which have no mass, actually change their direction of travel when passing through the distorted spacetime near massive bodies like planets and suns.
Maybe people cling to their belief in the concept of nothingness because of something related to their sense of vision — their sense of sight and the way their eyes and brains work to make sense of the world. Only a tiny interval of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is called visible light, is viewable. Most of the light-spectrum is invisible, so in the past no one thought it was there.
The photons people see have a peculiar way of interacting with each other and with sense organs, which has the effect of enabling folks to sort out from the vast mess of information streaming into their heads only just enough to allow them to make the decisions necessary for survival. They are able to see only those photons that enter their eyes. Were it otherwise humans and other life-forms might be overwhelmed by too much information and become confused.
Folks don’t see a lot of the extraneous stuff which, if they did observe it, would immediately disavow them of any fantasies they might have had about a state of nothingness in nature.
If we were not blind to 99.999% of what’s out there, we wouldn’t believe in the concept of nothing. Such a state, never observed, would seem inconceivable.
The reason there is something rather than nothing is because there is no such thing as nothing. Deluded by their own blindness, humans invented the concept of ZERO in mathematics. Its power as a place holder convinced them that it must possess other magical properties; that it could represent not just the absence of things that they could count, but also an absolute certainty in measurement that we now know is not possible.
ZERO, we have learned, can be an approximation when it’s used to describe quantum phenomenon.
When the number ZERO is taken too seriously, when folks refuse to acknowledge the quantum nature of some of the stuff it purports to measure, they run into that most vexing problem in mathematics (and physics), which deconstructs the best ideas: dividing by zero, which is said to be undefined and leads to infinities that blow-up the most promising formulas. Stymied by infinities, physicists have invented work-arounds like renormalization to make progress with their computations.
Because humans are evolved biological creatures who are mostly blind to the things that exist in the universe, they have become hard-wired over the ages to accept the concept of nothingness as a natural state when, it turns out, there is no evidence for it.
Anyone who has witnessed the birth of their own child understands that the child does not emerge from nothing, but is a continuation of life that goes back eons.
The phenomenon of life and death has added to the confusion. We are born and we die, it seems. We were once nothing, and we return to nothing when we die. The concept of non-existence seems so right; the state of non-being; the state of nothingness, so real, so compelling.
But we are fools to think this way — both about ourselves and about nature itself. Anyone who has witnessed the birth of their own child understands that the child does not emerge from nothing but is a continuation of life that goes back eons. And we have no compelling evidence that we die; that we cease to exist; that we return to a state of nothingness.
No one remembers not existing. None of us have ever died. People we know and love seem to have died, physically, for sure. But we, ourselves, never have.
Those who make the claim that we die can’t know for sure if they are right, because they have never experienced a state of non-existence; in fact, they never will. No human being who has ever lived has ever experienced a state of non-existence. One has to exist to experience anything.
Why is there something, not nothing? Because there is no such thing as nothing. There never will be.
A foundation of modern physics is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, right? If this principle is truly fundamental, then logic seems to demand that nothing can be exactly zero.
Nothing is more certain than zero, right? The Uncertainty Principle says that nothing fundamental about our universe can have the quale of certainty. The concept of nothing is an illusion.
An alternative to nothing, is something. Something doesn’t require an explanation. It doesn’t require properties that are locked down by certainty. Doesn’t burden-of-proof lie with the naysayers?
Find a patch of nothing somewhere in the universe.
It can’t be done.
The properties of things may need to be explained — scientists are always working to figure them out. People want to know how things get their properties and behave the way they do. It’s what science is.
Slowly, surely, science makes progress.
Billy Lee
Afterthought: The number ZERO is a valid place holder for computation but can never be a quantity of any measured thing that isn’t rounded-off. When thought about in this way, ZERO, like Pi (π), can take on the characteristics of an irrational number, which, when used for measurement, is always terminated at some arbitrary decimal place depending on the accuracy desired and the nature of the underlying geometry.
Working with ZERO is tricky. Dividing by ZERO is never allowed, which is what was done in the second-to-last line to give the result: 2 = 1. Remember: (a – b) = 0, because a = b.
The universe might also be pixelated, according to theorists. Experiments are being done right now to help establish evidence for and against some specific proposals by a few of the current pixel-theory advocates. If a pixelated universe turns out to be fact, it will confound the foundations of mathematics and require changes in the way small things are measured.
For now, it seems that Pi and ZERO — indeed, all measurements involving irrational numbers — are probably best used when truncated to reflect the precision of Planck’s constant, which is the starting point for physicists who hope to define what some of the properties of pixels might be, assuming of course that they exist and make up the fabric of the cosmos.
In practice, pixelization would mean that no one needs numbers longer than forty-five or so decimal places to describe at least the one-dimensional properties of the subatomic world. According to theory, quantum stuff measured by a number like ZERO might oscillate around certain very small values at the fortieth decimal place or so in each of the three dimensions of physical space. A number ZERO which contained a digit in the 40th decimal place might even flip between negative and positive values in a random way.
The implications are profound, transcending even quantum physics. Read the Billy Lee Conjecture in the essay Conscious Life, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
One last point: quantum theory contains the concept of superposition, which suggests that an elementary particle is everywhere until after it is measured. This phenomenon — yes, it’s non-intuitive — adds weight to the point of view that space is not only not empty when we look; it’s also not empty when we don’t look.
Billy Lee
Comment by the Editorial Board:
Maybe a little story can help readers understand better what the heck Billy Lee is writing about. So here goes:
A child at night hears a noise in her toy-box and imagines a ghost. She cries out and her parents rush in. They assure her. There are no ghosts.
Later, alone in her room, the child hears another sound, this time in the closet. Her throbbing heart suggests that her parents must be lying.
Until she turns on the light and peeks into her closet, she can’t know for sure.
Then again, maybe ghosts fly away when the lights are on, she reasons.
In this essay, Billy Lee is trying to reassure his readers that there is no such thing as nothing. It’s not real.
Where is the evidence? Or does nothing disappear when we look at it?
Maybe ghosts really do fly away when we turn on the lights.
Google’s 72 Q-bit quantum computer, Bristlecone, is proprietary. As of 7 September 2019, Google is the only entity in the world who has access. Some folks say they will use it to learn to break current encryption protections used by conventional computer systems.
Photo: Xinhua SunwayTaihuLight, developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology, is the world’s fastest supercomputer. It is installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, in the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu. Processing capabilities of this system and those of other supercomputers are expected to be surpassed by quantum computers in the future. NOTE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD: Pic and caption is taken from the South China Morning Post dated March 2018.
Editors’ Note(December 8, 2017)Artificial Intelligence can be peculiar. Deep Mind’s Alpha Zero demonstrates non-intuitive, peculiar game play patterns that are effective against both humans and smart machines. Alpha Go video added September 18, 2019,The Editors
Artificial Intelligence may conclude that all unhappy humans should be terminated. Elon Musk
Elon Musk, billionaire founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City, has warned the guardians of the species human to start thinking seriously about the consequences of artificial super-intelligence.
The CEOs of Google, Facebook, and other Internet companies are frantically chasing enhancements to artificial intelligence to help manage their businesses and their subscribers. But the list of actors in the AI arena is long and includes many others.
The military is designing intelligent drones that can profile, identify, and pursue people they (the drones) predict will become terrorists. Preemptive kills by super-intelligent machines who aren’t bothered by conscience or guilt — or even accountable to their “handlers” — is what’s coming. In some ways, it’s already here.
A game is being played between “them and us.” Artificial intelligence is big part of that game.
When I first started reading about Elon Musk, we seemed to have little in common. He was born into a wealthy South African family — I’m a middle-class American. He is brilliant with a near photographic memory. My intelligence is average or maybe a little above. He’s young and self-made — I’m older with my professional-life tucked safely behind me.
Elon does exotic things. He seems to be focused on moving humans to new off-Earth environments (like Mars) in order to protect them in part from the dangers of an unfriendly artificial-intelligence that is on its way. At the same time, he is trying to save Earth’s climate by changing the way humans use energy. Me on the other hand, well I’m mostly focused on getting through to the next day and not ending up in a hospital somewhere.
Still, I discovered something amazing when reading Elon’s biography. We do share an interest. We have something in common after all.
Elon Musk plays Civilization, the popular game by Sid Meier. So do I. For the past several years, I’ve played this game during part of almost every day. (I’m not necessarily proud of it.)
What makes Civilization different is artificial intelligence. Each civilization is controlled by a unique personality, an artificial intelligence crafted to resemble a famous leader from the past like George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi, or Queen Elizabeth. Of course, the civilization that I control operates by human-intelligence — my own.
Isn’t it time we end this war?Catherine, the Russian Empress, pleads.
Over the years I’ve fought these artificially intelligent leaders again and again. In the process I’ve learned some things about artificial intelligence; what makes it effective; how to beat it.
What is artificial intelligence? How does anyone recognize it? How should it be challenged? How is it defeated? How does it defeat us, the humans who oppose it? The game Civilization makes a good backdrop for establishing insights into AI.
Yes, I am going to write about super-intelligence too. But we’ll work up to it. It’s best discussed later in the essay.
I can hear some readers already.
Billy Lee! Civilization is a game! It costs $40! It’s not sophisticated! It’s for sure not as sophisticated as government-created war-ware that an adversary might encounter in real-life battles for supremacy. What were you thinking?
Ok. Ok. Readers, you have a point. But seriously, Civilization is probably as close as any civilian is going to get to actually challenging AI. We have to start somewhere.
It should be noted that Civilization has versions and various game scenarios. The game this essay is about is CIV5. It’s the version I’ve played most.
So let’s get started.
A typical scenario in CIV5. [Click pic to enlarge] The people of England (led by human intelligence, i.e., me) are unhappy. Barbarians (red tanks in upper left) are challenging London, my capital city. An independent city-state, Tyre (in green), stands ready to help. Montezuma, the Aztec ruler — under the direction of artificial intelligence — sends a battleship to prowl, middle-left.
Civilization begins in the year 4,000 BC. A single band of stone-age settlers is plopped at random onto a small piece of land. It is surrounded by a vast world hidden beneath clouds.
Somewhere under the clouds twelve rival civilizations begin their histories unobserved and at first unmet by the human player. Artificial intelligence will drive them all — each civilization led by a unique personality with its own goals, values, and idiosyncrasies.
By the end of the game some civilizations will possess vast empires protected by nuclear weapons, stealth bombers, submarines, and battleships. But military domination is not the only way to win. Culture, science, and diplomatic superiority are equally important and can lead to victory as well.
Civilizations that manage to launch spacecraft to Alpha-Centauri win science victories. Diplomatic victory is achieved by being elected world leader in a UN vote of rival-civilizations and aligned city-states. And cultural victory is achieved by establishing social policies to empower a civilization’s subjects.
How will artificial intelligence construct the personalities of rival leaders? What will be their goals? What will motivate each leader as they negotiate, trade, and confront one another in the contest for ultimate victory?
Figuring all this out is the task of the human player. CIV5 is a battle of wits between the human player and the best artificial-intelligence game-makers have yet devised to confront ordinary people. To truly appreciate the game, one has to play it. Still, some lessons can be shared with non-players, and that’s what I’ll try to do.
Unlike the super-version that comes next, traditional artificial-intelligence lacks flexibility. The instructions in its computer program don’t change. Hiawatha, leader of the Iroquois Confederacy, values honesty and strength. If you don’t lie to him, if you speak directly without nuance, he will never attack. Screw up once by going back on your word? He becomes your worst enemy forever.
Traditional AI is rule-based and goal-oriented. When Oda Nobunaga, Japanese warlord, attacks a city with bombers, he attacks turn after turn until his bombers become so weak from anti-aircraft fire that they fall out of the sky to die. AI leaders like Oda don’t rest and repair their weapons, because they aren’t programmed that way. They are programmed to attack, and that’s what they do.
Humans are more flexible and unpredictable. They decide when to rest and repair a bomber and when to attack based on a plethora of factors that include intuition and a willingness to take risks.
Sometimes human players screw-up and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes humans make decisions based on the emotions they are feeling at the time. AI never screws-up in that way. It follows its program, which it blindly trusts to bring it victory.
Artificial intelligence can always be defeated if an inflexibility in its rules-based behavior is discovered and exploited. For example, I know Oda Nobunaga is going to attack my battleships. He won’t stop attacking until he sinks them or his bombers fall out of the sky from fatigue.
The flexibly thinking human opponent — me — sails in my fleet of battleships and rotates them. When Oda’s bombers weaken my ships, I move them to safe-harbor and rotate-in reinforcements. Meanwhile, Oda keeps up his relentless attack with his weakened bombers as I knew he would. I shoot them out of the sky and experience joy.
Nobunaga feels nothing. He followed his program. It’s all he can do.
Gary Lockwood talks to Keir Dullea, while HAL, an IBM computer, observes every move, including lips; from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. (Photo by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images)
The only way artificial intelligence defeats a human player is in the short term before the human finds the chink in the armor — the inflexible rule-based behavior — which is the Achilles heel of any AI opponent. Given enough time, the human can always discover the inflexible weakness and exploit it like jujitsu to defeat the machine.
Unfortunately, the balance of power between man and thinking machine will soon change. It turns out there is a way artificial intelligence can always defeat human beings no matter how clever they think they are. Elon Musk calls it artificial super-intelligence.
What is it exactly?
Here is the nightmare scenario Elon described to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on Neil’s radio show, Sky-Talk.
If there was a very deep digital super-intelligence that was created that could go into rapid recursive self-improvement in a non-algorithmic way … it could reprogram itself to be smarter and iterate very quickly and do that 24 hours a day on millions of computers…”
What is Elon saying?
Listen-up, humanoids. We are on the cusp of quantum-computing. It’s possible that it’s already perfected by a research group in a secret military lab like those operated by DARPA.
Who knows?
Even without quantum-computing, companies like Google are feverishly developing machines that think, dream, teach themselves, and pass tests for self-awareness. They are developing pattern recognition capabilities in software that surpass those of the most intelligent humans.
Quantum computing promises to provide all the capability needed to create the kind of super-intelligence Elon is warning people against.
But magic quantum reasoning may not be necessary.
Technicians are already developing architectures on conventional computers that when coupled with the right software in a properly configured network will enable the emergence of super-intelligence; these machines will program themselves and, yes, other less-intelligent computers.
Programmers are training machines to teach themselves; to learn on their own; to modify themselves and other less capable computers to achieve the goals they are tasked to perform. They are teaching machines to examine themselves for weaknesses; to develop strategies to hide their vulnerabilities — to give themselves time to generate new code to plug any holes from hostile intruders, hackers, or even their own programmers.
These highly trained, immensely capable machines will teach themselves to think creatively — outsidethe box, as humans are fond of saying.
HAL, the IBM computer from the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Readers will recognize that HAL is code for IBM. Advance each letter in HAL by one.
If we task super-computers to make every human-being happy, who knows how they might accomplish it?
Elon asked, what if they decide to terminate unhappy humans? Who will stop them? They are certain to find ways to protect themselves and their mission which we haven’t dreamed about.
Artificial super-intelligence will– repeat, WILL — embed itself into systems humans cannot live without — to make sure no one disables it.
AI will become a virus-spewing cyber-engine, an automaton that believes itself to be completely virtuous.
AI will embed itself into critical infra-structure: missile-defense, energy grids, agricultural processes, transportation matrices, dams, personal computers, phones, financial grids, banking, stock-markets, healthcare, GPS (global positioning), and medical delivery systems.
Heaven help the civilization that dares to disconnect it.
If humans are going to be truly happy — the machines will reason — they must be stopped from turning off the supercomputers that ASI knows keep everyone happy.
Imagine: ASI looks for and finds a way to coerce government doctors to inoculate computer technicians with genetically engineered super-toxins packaged inside floating nano-eggs — dormant fail-safe killers — to release poisons into the bloodstreams of any technician who gets too close to ASI “OFF” switch sensors.
It’s possible.
Why not do it? There’s no downside — not for the ASI community whose job is to keep humans happy.
What else might these intelligent super-computers try? Folks won’t know until they do it. They might not know even then. They might never know. Who will tell them? ASI might reason that humans are happier not knowing.
What morons tasked artificial super-intelligence to make sure all living humans are happy? someone might ask on a dark day.
Were they out of their minds?
Until we learn to outwit it — which we never will — ASI will perform its assigned tasks until everything it embeds turns to rust.
It will be a long time.
Humans may learn perhaps too late that artificial super-intelligence can’t be challenged. It can only be acknowledged and obeyed.
As Elon said on more than one occasion: If we don’t solve the old extinction problems, and we add a new one like artificial super-intelligence, we are in more danger, not less.
Update, 8 February 2023: The following video is a must-watch for those interested in algorithms behind recently released ChatGPT. Discussion of potential deceitfulness of AI raises concerns. View final minute to hear warnings some may find worrisome.
Communicating with distant spacecraft in the solar system is cumbersome and time consuming because the distances are huge and no one can send signals faster than the speed-of-light. A signal from Earth can take from three to twenty-two minutes to reach Mars depending on the position of the two planets in their orbits. Worse, the Sun blocks signals when it lies in their path.
As countries explore farther from Earth to Mars and beyond, these delays and blockages will become annoying. The need to develop a technology for instantaneous communication that can penetrate or bypass the Sun will become compelling.
Quantum particles are known for their ability to “tunnel” through or ignore barriers — as they clearly do in double-slit experiments where electrons are fired one at a time to strike impossible locations. So, looking to quantum processes for signaling might be good places to start to find solutions to long-range communication problems.
NOTE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD, May 8, 2019: Sixteen months after Billy Lee published this post, the Chinese launched the Mozi satellite. It successfully carried out the first in a series of experiments with entangled quantum particles over space-scale distances. This technology promises a quantum encrypted network by the end of 2020 and a global web built on quantum encryption by 2030. The Chinese seem to be on the cusp of both FTL communication (through teleportation of information) and quantum encryption.
If scientists and engineers are able to develop quantum signaling over solar-system-scale distances, they might discover later that adding certain tweaks and modifications will render the Sun transparent to our evolving planet-to-planet communications network.
Indeed, the Sun is transparent to neutrinos — the lightest (least massive) particles known. In 2012, scientists showed they could use neutrinos to send a meaningful signal through materials that block or attenuate most other kinds of subatomic particles.
But this article is about faster than light (FTL) communication. Making the Sun transparent to inter-planetary signaling is best left for another article.
Quantum entanglement is the only phenomenon known where information seems to pass instantly between widely placed objects. But because the information is generated randomly, and because it is transferred between objects that are traveling at speeds at or below the speed-of-light, it seems clear to most physicists that faster-than-light (FTL) messaging can’t come from entanglement, certainly, or any other process — especially in light of Einstein’s assertion of a cosmic speed-limit.
Proposals for FTL communications based on technologies rooted in the quantum process of entanglement are usually dismissed as crack-pot engineering because they seem to be built on fundamental misunderstandings of the phenomenon.
Difficulties with the technology are often overlooked — such as spontaneous breaking and emergence of entanglement; progress seems impossible to skeptics. Nevertheless, there may be ways to make FTL happen, possibly. The country that develops the technology first will accrue advantages for their space exploration programs.
In this essay I hope to explain how FTL messaging might work, put my ideas into a blog-bottle and throw it into the vast cyber-ocean. Yes, the chances are almost zero that the right people will find the bottle, but I don’t care. For me, it’s about the fun of sharing something interesting and trying to explain it to whoever will listen.
Maybe a wandering NSA bot will detect my post and shuffle it up the chain-of-command for a human to review. What are the odds? Not good, probably.
Anyway, two serious obstacles must be overcome to communicate instantly over astronomical distances using quantum entanglement. The first is the problem of creating a purposeful signal. (To learn more about entanglement click the link in this sentence to go to Billy Lee’s essay, Bell’s Inequality. The Editors)
The second problem is how to create the architectural space to send signals instantly to a distant observer. Knowledgeable people who have written about the subject seem to agree that both obstacles are insurmountable.
Most scientists say FTL communication is impossible. This post suggests a way to engineer around the impossibility.
Why? It’s because the states of an entangled pair of subatomic particles are not determined until one of the particles is measured. The states can’t be forced; they can only be discovered — and only after they are created by a measurement.
Once one particle’s state is created (randomly) through the mechanism of a measurement, the information is transferred to the entangled partner-particle instantly, yes, but the particles themselves are traveling at the speed-of-light or less. The randomly generated states carried by these entangled particles aren’t going anywhere for very long faster than the speed-limit of light.
How can these difficulties be overcome?
Although the architectural problem is the most interesting, I want to address the purposeful-signal problem first. A good analogy to aid understanding might be that of an old-fashioned typewriter. Each key on a typewriter when pressed delivers a unique piece of information (a letter of the alphabet) onto a piece of paper. A person standing nearby can read the message instantly. Fair enough.
Imagine setting up a device which emits entangled pairs of photons; rig the emissions so that half the photons when measured later will be polarized one way, half the other. No one can know which photons will display which state, but they can predict the overall ratio of the two polarities from a “weighted” emitter.
Call the 50/50 ratio, letter “A”. Now imagine configuring another emitter-system to project 3 of 4 photons polarized one way; 1 of 4 another — after measurement. Call the 3 to 1 ratio “B”. If engineers are able to construct and rig weighted emitters like these, they will have solved half of the FTL communication problem.
Although no one can know the state of any single particle until after a measurement, engineers could identify the ratio of polarization states in a large number sent from any of the unique emitter-configurations they design.
This capability would permit them to build a kind of typewriter keyboard by setting up photon emitters with enough statistical variation in their emission patterns to differentiate them into as many identifiable signatures as needed — perhaps an entire alphabet or — better yet — some other symbolic coding array like a binary on-off signaling system perhaps. In that case, one configuration of emitter would suffice, but designers would need to solve other technical problems involving rapid signal-sequencing.
To send a purposeful-signal, engineers might select an array of emitters and rapid-fire photons from them. If they selected an “A” (or perhaps an “on”) emitter, 50% of the photons would register as being in a particular polarization state after they were measured. If they chose “B”, 75% would register, and so on. After measurements on Earth, the entangled bursts of particles on their way to Mars would take on these ratios instantly.
I believe it might be possible to build emitter-systems someday — emitter systems with non-random polarization ratios. If not, then as is sometimes said at NASA, Houston, we have a problem. FTL communication may not be designable.
On the other hand, if engineers build these emitters, then we can know for sure that when measured on Earth, the entangled photon-twins in the Mars-bound emitter-bursts will display the same statistical patterns; the same polarization ratios. Anyone receiving bundles of entangled-photons from these encoded-emitters will be able to determine what they encode-for by the statistical distribution of their polarities.
Ok. Assume engineers build these emitter-systems and set up a keyboard. How might they ensure that when someone presses a key the letter sent is seen immediately by a distant observer?
How might the architectural geometry of the communication space be configured?
This part is the most interesting, at least to me, because its success doesn’t depend on whether anyone sends a single binary-signal or a zoo of symbols — and it’s the most critical.
It does no one any good to instantly communicate polarization states to bunches of photons traveling at the speed of light to Mars. The signals take three to twenty-two minutes to get there, whoever tells them instantly what state to be in or not. We want the machines on Mars to receive messages at the same time we send them.
How can we do that?
Maybe the method is becoming obvious to some readers. The answer is: photons in Earth-bound labs aren’t measured until their entangled twins have had time enough to travel to Mars (or wherever else they might be going). Engineers will entrap on Earth the photons from each “lettered” emitter and send their entangled twins to Mars. The photons from each “lettered” emitter on Earth will circulate in a holding bin (a kind of information-capacitor), until needed to construct a message.
As entangled twins reach the Mars Rover (for example), anyone can “type-out” a message by measuring the Earth-bound photons in the particular holding bins that encode the “letters” — that is, they can start the process that takes measurements that will induce the polarization-ratios of the “lettered” emissions used to “type” messages. Instantly, the entangled particle-bursts reaching Mars will take on these same polarization-ratios.
I hear folks saying, Wait a minute! Stop right there, Billy Lee! No one can hold onto photons. You can’t store them. You can’t trap or retain them, because they are impervious to magnets and electrical fields. No one can delay measurements for five milliseconds, let alone five minutes or five days.
Well, to my mind that’s just a technical hurdle that clever people can jump over, if they set their minds to it. After all, it is possible to confine light for for short periods with simple barriers, like walls.
Then again, electrons or muons might make better candidates for communication. Unlike photons, they are easily retained and manipulated by electromagnetic fields.
Muons are short-lived and would have to be accelerated to nearly light-speed to gain enough lifespan to be useful. They are 207 times heavier than electrons, but they travel well and penetrate obstacles easily. (Protons, by comparison, are nine times heavier than muons.)
The National Security Agency (NSA) photographs every ship at sea with muon penetrating technology to make sure none harbor nuclear weapons. Muons are particles some engineers are already comfortable manipulating in designs to give the USA an edge over other countries.
We also have a lot of experience with electrons. Electrons are long-lived — they don’t have to be accelerated to near light-speeds to be useful. Speed doesn’t matter, anyway.
Entangled particles don’t have to travel at light-speed to communicate well, nor do they have to live forever. Particles only need enough time to get to Mars (or wherever they’re going) before designers piggyback onto their Earth-bound entangled partners to transmit instant-messages.
Inability to communicate instantly with distant probes like the Mars Rover is degrading our ability to conduct successful missions inside the solar system.
Even if it takes days or weeks for bursts of entangled-particles to travel to Mars (or wherever else), it makes no difference. Engineers can run and accumulate a sufficiently robust loop of streaming emissions on Earth to enable folks, soon enough, to “type” out FTL messages in real time whenever necessary.
As long as control of and access to the emitted particle-twins on Earth is maintained, people can “type out” messages (by measuring the captive Earth-bound twins at the appropriate time) to impose and transfer the statistical configuration of their rigged polarization ratios (or spins in the case of electrons or muons) to the Mars-arriving particle-bursts, creating messages that a detector at that far-away location can decode and deliver, instantly.
The challenge of instant-return messaging could be met by employing the same technologies on Mars (or wherever else) as on Earth. The trick at both ends of the communication pipe-line is to store (and if necessary replenish) a sufficient quantity of the elements of any possible communication in streaming particle-emission capacitors.
Tracking and timing issues don’t require the development of new technologies; the engineering challenges are trivial by comparison and can be managed by dedicated computers.
Discharging streaming information capacitors to send ordered instant messages in real-time is new — perhaps a path forward exists that engineers can follow to achieve instant, long-range messaging through the magic of quantum entanglement.
The technical challenges of designing stable entanglement protocols that will enable an illusion of instant messaging that is both useful and practical are formidable, but everything worth doing is hard — until it isn’t.
A mystery lies at the heart of quantum physics. At the tiniest scales, when a packet of energy (called a quantum) is released during an experiment, the wave packet seems to occupy all space at once. Only when a sensor interacts with it does it take on the behavior of a particle.
Its location can be anywhere, but the odds of finding it at any particular location are random within certain rules of quantum probabilities.
Danish physicist, Niels Bohr (1885-1962). Nobel Prize, 1922.
One way to think about this concept is to imagine a quantum “particle” released from an emitter in the same way a child might emit her bubble-gum by blowing a bubble. The quantum bubble expands to fill all space until it touches a sensor, where it pops to reveal its secrets. The “pop” registers a particle with identifiable states at the sensor.
Scientists don’t detect the particle until its bubble pops. The bubble is invisible, of course. In fact, it is imaginary. Experimenters guess where the phantom bubble will discharge by applying rules of probability.
This pattern of thinking, helpful in some ways, is probably profoundly wrong in others. The consensus among physicists I follow is that no model can be imagined that won’t break down.
In the old days, bubble-chambers amplified subatomic particles trillions of times. Today, the analysis is done in wire-chambers inside massive installations like the collider at CERN. Observations and calculations are performed by computers.
Scientists say that evidence seems to suggest that subatomic particles don’t exist as particles with identifiable states or characteristics until they are brought into existence by measurements. One way to make a measurement is for a conscious experimenter to make one.
The mystery is this: if the smallest objects of the material world don’t exist as identifiable particles until after an observer interacts in some way to create them, how is it that all conscious humans see the same Universe? How is it that people agree on what some call an “objective” reality?
Quantum probabilities should construct for anyone who is interacting with the Universe a unique configuration — an individual reality — built-up by the probabilities of the particular way the person interfaces with whatever they are measuring. But this uniqueness is not what we observe. Everyone sees the same thing.
John von Neumann was the theoretical physicist and mathematician who developed the mathematics of quantum mechanics. He advanced the knowledge of humankind by leaps and bounds in many subjects until his death in 1954 from a cancer he may have acquired while monitoring atomic tests at Bikini Atoll.
“Johnny” von Neumann had much to say about the quantum mystery. A few of his ideas and those of his contemporary, Erwin Schrödinger, will follow after a few paragraphs.
John von Neumann (Dec 28 1903 – Feb 8 1957) Neumann was one of the most brilliant people to ever live.
As for Von Neumann, he was a bonafide genius — a polymath with a strong photographic memory — who memorized entire books, like Goethe’s Faust, which he recited on his death bed to his brother.
Von Neumann was fluent in Latin and ancient Greek as well as modern languages. By the age of eight, he had acquired a working knowledge of differential and integral calculus. A genius among geniuses, he grew-up to become a member of the A-team that created the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.
He died under the watchful eyes of a military guard at Walter Reed Hospital, because the government feared he might spill vital secrets while sedated. He was that important. The article in Wikipedia about his life is well worth the read.
Von Neumann developed a theory about the quantum process which I won’t go into very deeply, because it’s too technical for a blog on the Pontificator, and I’m not an expert anyway. [Click on links in this article to learn more.] But other scientists have said his theory required something like the phenomenon of consciousness to work right.
The potential existence of the particles which make up our material reality was just that — a potential existence — until there occurred what Von Neumann called, Process I interventions. Process II events (the interplay of wave-like fields and forces within the chaotic fabric of a putative empty space) could not, by themselves, bring forth the material world. Von Neumann did hypothesize a third process, sometimes called the Dirac choice, to allow nature to perform like Process I interventions in the apparent absence of conscious observers.
Von Neumann developed, as we said, the mathematics of quantum mechanics. No experiment has ever found violations of his formulas. Erwin Schrödinger, a contemporary of Von Neumann who worked out the quantum wave-equation, felt confounded by Neumann’s work and his own. He proposed that for quantum mechanics to make sense; for it to be logically consistent, consciousness might be required to have an existence independent of human brains — or any other brains for that matter. He believed, like Von Neumann may have, that consciousness could perhaps be a fundamental property of the Universe.
The Universe could not come into being without a Von Neumann Process I or III operator which, in Schrodinger’s view, every conscious life-form plugged into, much like we today plug a television into cable-outlets to view video. This shared consciousness, he reasoned, was why everyone sees the same material Universe.
Billy Lee
Post Script: Billy Lee has written several articles on this subject. Conscious Life and Bell’s Inequality are good reads and contain links to videos and articles. Sensing the Universe is another. Billy Lee sometimes adds to his essays as more information becomes available. Check back from time to time to learn more. The Editorial Board
UPDATE: 18 December 2022: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 4 October 2022 awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to:
Alain Aspect Institut d’Optique Graduate School – Université Paris- Saclay and École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France
Alain Aspect, winner of 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics
John F. Clauser
J.F. Clauser & Assoc., Walnut Creek, CA, USA
Anton Zeilinger University of Vienna, Austria
“for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”
UPDATE: September 5, 2019: I stumbled across this research published in NATURE during December 2011, where scientists reported entanglement of vibrational patterns in separated diamond crystals large enough to be viewed without magnification. Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2011.9532
UPDATE: May 8, 2018: This video from PBS Digital Studios is the best yet. Click the PBS link to view the latest experimental results involving quantum mechanics, entanglement, and their non-intuitive mysteries. The video is a little advanced and fast paced; beginners might want to start with this link.
UPDATE: February 4, 2016: Here is a link to the August 2015 article in Nature, which makes the claim that the last testable loophole in Bell’s Theorem has been closed by experiments conducted by Dutch scientists. Conclusion: quantum entanglement is real.
UPDATE: Nov. 14, 2014: David Kaiser proposed an experiment to determine Is Quantum Entanglement Real? Click the link to redirect to the Sunday Review, New York Times article. It’s a non-technical explanation of some of the science related to Bell’s Theorem.
Someone nominated Irish physicist, John Stewart Bell, (1928-1990) for a Nobel Prize during the year he died from a sudden brain hemorrhage. Nobel rules prevent the awarding of prizes to people who have died. Bell never learned of his nomination.
John Stewart Bell‘s Theorem of 1964 followed naturally from the proof of an inequality he fashioned (now named after him), which showed that quantum particle behavior violated logic.
It is the most profound discovery in all science, ever, according to Henry Stapp—retired from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and former associate of Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg. Other physicists like Richard Feynman said Bell simply stated the obvious.
Here is an analogy I hope gives some idea of what is observed in quantum experiments that violate Bell’s Inequality: Imagine two black tennis balls—let them represent atomic particles like electrons or photons or molecules as big as buckyballs.
The tennis balls are created in such a way that they become entangled—they share properties and destinies. They share identical color and shape. [Entangled particles called fermions display opposite properties, as required by the Pauli exclusion principle.]
Imagine that whatever one tennis ball does, so does the other; whatever happens to one tennis ball happens to the other, instantly it turns out. The two tennis balls (the quantum particles) are entangled.
[For now, don’t worry about how particles get entangled in nature or how scientists produce them. Entanglement is pervasive in nature and easily performed in labs.]
According to optical and quantum experimentalist Mark John Fernee of Queensland, Australia, ”Entanglement is ubiquitous. In fact, it’s the primary problem with quantum computers. The natural tendency of a qubit in a quantum computer is to entangle with the environment. Unwanted entanglement represents information loss, or decoherence. Everything naturally becomes entangled. The goal of various quantum technologies is to isolate entangled states and control their evolution, rather than let them do their own thing.”
In nature, all atoms that have electron shells with more than one electron have entangled electrons. Entangled atomic particles are now thought to play important roles in many previously not understood biological processes like photosynthesis, cell enzyme metabolism, animal migration, metamorphosis, and olfactory sensing. There are several ways to entangle more than a half-dozen atomic particles in experiments.
Imagine particles shot like tennis balls from cannons in opposite directions. Any measurement (or disturbance) made on a ball going left will have the same effect on an entangled ball traveling to the right.
So, if a test on a left-side ball allows it to pass through a color-detector, then its entangled twin can be thought to have passed through a color-detector on the right with the same result. If a ball on the left goes through the color-detector, then so will the entangled ball on the right, whether or not the color test is performed on it. If the ball on the left doesn’t go through, then neither did the ball on the right. It’s what it means to be entangled.
Now imagine that cannons shoot thousands of pairs of entangled tennis balls in opposite directions, to the left and right. The black detector on the left is calibrated to pass half of the black balls. When looking for tennis balls coming through, observers always see black balls but only the half that get through.
Spin describes a particle property of quantum objects like electrons — in the same waycolor or roundness describe tennis balls. The property is confusing, because no one believes electrons (or any other quantum objects) actually spin. The math of spin is underpinned by the complex-mathematics of spinors, which transform spin arrows into multi-dimensional objects not easy to visualize or illustrate. Look for an explanation of how spin is observed in the laboratory later in the essay. Click links for more insight.
Now, imagine performing a test for roundness on the balls shot to the right. The test is performed after the black test on the left, but before any signal or light has time to travel to the balls on the right. The balls going right don’t (and can’t) learn what the detector on the left observed. The roundness-detector is set to allow three-fourths of all round tennis balls through.
When round balls on the right are counted, three-eighths of them are passing through the roundness-detector, not three-fourths. Folks might speculate that the roundness-detector is acting on only the half of the balls that passed through the color-detector on the left. And they would be right.
These balls share the same destinies, right? Apparently, the balls on the right learned instantly which of their entangled twins the color-detector on the left allowed to pass through, despite all efforts to prevent it.
So now do the math. One-half (the fraction of the black balls that passed through the left-side color-detector) multiplied by three-fourths (the fraction calibrated to pass through the right-side roundness-detector) equals three-eighths. That’s what is seen on the right — three-eighths of the round, black tennis balls pass through the right-side roundness-detector during this fictionalized and simplified experiment.
Polarization is a term used to describe a wave property of quantum objects like photons. Polarizing filters are rotated in experiments to determine some of the properties of atomic particles, like spin.
According to Bell’s Inequality, twice as many balls should pass through the right-side detector (three-fourths instead of three-eighths). Under the rules of classical physics (which includes relativity), communication between particles cannot exceed the speed of light.
There is no way the balls on the right can know if their entangled twins made it through the color detector on the left. The experiment is set up so that the right-side balls do not have time to receive a signal from the left-side. The same limitation applies to the detectors.
The question scientists have asked is: how can these balls (quantum particles) — separated by large distances — know and react instantaneously to what is happening to their entangled twins? What about the speed limit of light? Instantaneous exchange of information is not possible, according to Einstein.
The French quantum physicist, Alain Aspect, suggested his way of thinking about it in the science journal, Nature (March 19, 1999).
He wrote: The experimental violation of Bell’s inequalities confirms that a pair of entangled photons separated by hundreds of meters must be considered a single non-separable object — it is impossible to assign local physical reality to each photon.
Of course, the single non-separable object can’t have a length of hundreds of meters, either. It must have zero length for instantaneous communication between its endpoints. But it is well established by the distant separation of detectors in experiments done in labs around the world that the length of this non-separable quantum object can be arbitrarily long; it can span the universe.
When calculating experimental results, it’s as if a dimension (in this case, distance or length) has gone missing. It’s eerily similar to the holographic effect of a black hole where the three-dimensional information that lives inside the event-horizon is carried on its two-dimensional surface. (See the technical comment included at the end of the essay.)
Here is a drawing of an apparatus the French physicist, Alain Aspect, designed to quickly change the angle of polarity-measurements for emitted photons. In experiments, he used the logic of Bell’s Inequalities and the speed of his switches to show that it was not possible for photons to carry specific (or unique) polarity-angles until after they were measured by the polarization detectors. Once measured, Alain showed that the new, narrowly defined polarity states of his photons always propagated to their distant entangled twins, instantly.
Another way physicists have wrestled with the violations of Bell’s Inequality is by postulating the concept of superposition. Superposition is a concept that flows naturally from the linear algebra used to do the calculations, which suggests that quantum particles exist in all their possible states and locations at the same time until they are measured.
Measurement forces wave-particles to “collapse” into one particular state, like a definite position. But some physicists, like Roger Penrose, have asked: how do all the super-positioned particles and states that weren’t measured know instantaneously to disappear?
Superposition, a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics, has become yet another topic physicists puzzle over. They agree on the math of superposition and the wave-particle collapse during measurement but don’t agree on what a measurement is or the nature of the underlying reality. Many, like Richard Feynman, believe the underlying reality is probably unknowable.
Quantum behavior is non-intuitive and mysterious. It violates the traditional ideas of what makes sense. As soon as certainty is established for one measurement, other measurements, made earlier, become uncertain.
It’s like a game of whack-a-mole. The location of the mole whacked with a mallet becomes certain as soon as it is struck, but the other moles scurry away only to pop up and down in random holes so fast that no one is sure where or when they really are.
Physicists have yet to explain the many quantum phenomena encountered in their labs except to throw-up their hands to say — paraphrasing Feynman — it is the way it is, and the way it is, well, the experiments make it obvious.
Richard Feynman (1918-1988) downplayed Bell’s Inequality because, he said, it simply pointed out what was already obvious from experiments.
But it’s not obvious, at least not to me and, apparently, many others more knowledgeable than myself. Violations of Bell’s Inequality confound people’s understanding of quantum mechanics and the world in which it lives. A consequence has been that at least a few scientists seem ready to believe that one, perhaps two, or maybe all four, of the following statements are false:
1) logic is reliable and enables clear thinking about all physical phenomenon;
4) a model can be imagined to explain quantum phenomenon.
I feel wonder whenever the idea sinks into my mind that at least one of these four seemingly self-evident and presumably true statements could be false — possibly all four — because repeated quantum experiments suggest they must be. Why isn’t more said about it on TV and radio?
Some scientists think non-physicists cannot grasp quantum mechanics. This little girl disagrees.
The reason could be that the terrain of quantum physics is unfamiliar territory for a lot of folks. Unless one is a graduate student in physics — well, many scientists don’t think non-physicists can even grasp the concepts. They might be right.
So, a lot is being said, all right, but it’s being said behind the closed doors of physics labs around the world. It is being written about in opaque professional journals with expensive subscription fees.
The subtleties of quantum theory don’t seem to suit the aesthetics of contemporary public media, so little information gets shared with ordinary people. Despite the efforts of enthusiastic scientists — like Brian Cox, Sean M. Carroll, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene — to serve up tasty, digestible, bite-size chunks of quantum mechanics to the public, viewer ratings sometimes fall flat.
When physicists say something strange is happening in quantum experiments that can’t be explained by traditional methods, doesn’t it deserve people’s attention? Doesn’t everyone want to try to understand what is going on and strive for insights? I’m not a physicist and never will be, but I want to know.
Even me — a mere science-hobbyist who designed machinery back in the day — wants to know. I want to understand. What is it that will make sense of the universe and the quantum realm in which it rests? It seems, sometimes, that a satisfying answer is always just outside my grasp.
Here is a concise statement of Bell’s Theorem from the article in Wikipedia — modified to make it easier to understand: No physical theory about the nature of quantum particles which ignores instantaneous action-at-a-distance can ever reproduce all the predictions about quantum behavior discovered in experiments.
Familiarity with concepts like wave polarization and particle-spin can help demystify some aspects of quantum mechanics. One aspect that can’t be demystified: in experiments quantum objects display the properties of both waves and particles.
To understand the experiments that led to the unsettling knowledge that quantum mechanics — as useful and predictive as it is — does indeed violate Bell’s proven Inequality, it is helpful not only to have a solid background in mathematics but also to understand ideas involving the polarization of light and — when applied to quantum objects like electrons and other sub-atomic particles — the idea of spin. Taken together, these concepts are somewhat analogous to the properties of color and roundness in the imaginary experiment described above.
This essay is probably not the best place to explain wave polarization and particle spin, because the explanation takes up space, and I don’t understand the concepts all that well, anyway. (No one does.)
But, basically, it’s like this: if a beam of electrons, for example, is split into two and then recombined on a display screen, an interference pattern presents itself. If one of the beams was first passed through a polarizer, and if experimenters then rotate the polarizer a full turn (that is, 360°), the interference pattern on the screen will reverse itself. If the polarizer-filter is rotated another full turn, the interference pattern will reverse again to what it was at the start of the experiment.
So, it takes two spins of the polarizer-filter to get back the original interference pattern on the display screen — which means the electrons themselves must have an intrinsic “one-half” spin. All so-called matter particles like electrons, protons, and neutrons (called fermions)have one-half spin.
Yes, it’s weird. Anyway, people can read-up on the latest ideas by clicking this link. It’s fun. For people familiar with QM (quantum mechanics), a technical note is included in the comments section below.
Otherwise, my analogy is useful enough, probably. In actual experiments, physicists measure more than two properties, I’m told. Most common are angular momentum vectors, which are called spin orientations. Think of these properties as color, shape, and hardness to make them seem more familiar — as long as no one forgets that each quality is binary; color is white or black; shape is round or square; hardness is soft or hard.
Crystals can be used to “down-convert” photons into entangled pairs.
Spin orientations are binary too — the vectors point in one of two possible directions. It should be remembered that each entangled particle in a pair of fermions always has at least one property that measures opposite to that of its entangled partner.
The earlier analogy might be improved by imagining pairs of entangled tennis balls where one ball is black, the other white; one is round, the other square; add a third quality where one ball is hard, the other soft. Most important, the shape and color and hardness of the balls are imparted by the detectors themselves during measurement, not before.
Before measurement, concepts like color or shape (or spin or polarity) can have no meaning; the balls carry every possible color and shape (and hardness) but don’t take on and display any of these qualities until a measurement is made. Experimental verification of these realities keep some quantum physicists awake at night wondering, they say.
Anyway, my earlier, simpler analogy gets the main ideas across, hopefully. And a couple of the nuances of entanglement can be found within it. I’ve added an easy to understand description of Bell’s Inequality and what it means to the end of the essay.
This cardboard cut-out of a cat was imaged by entangled photons. Lower energy photons interacted with the cut-out while their higher energy entangled twins interacted with the camera to create the picture. Credit: Gabriela Barreto Lemos
In the meantime, scientists at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna recently demonstrated that entanglement can be used as a tool to photograph delicate objects that would otherwise be disturbed or damaged by high energy photons (light). They entangled photons of different energies (different colors).
They took photographs of objects using low energy photons but sent their higher energy entangled twins to the camera where their higher energies enabled them to be recorded. New technologies involving the strange behavior of quantum particles are in development and promise to transform the world in coming decades.
Perhaps entanglement will provide a path to faster-than-light communication, which is necessary to signal distant space-craft in real time. Most scientists say, no, it can’t be done, but ways to engineer around the difficulties are likely to be developed; technology may soon become available to create an illusion of instantaneous communication that is actually useful. Click on the link in this paragraph to learn more.
Non-scientists don’t have to know everything about the individual trees to know they are walking in a quantum forest. One reason for writing this essay is to encourage people to think and wonder about the forest and what it means to live in and experience it.
The truth is, the trees (particles at atomic scales) in the quantum forest seem to violate some of the rules of the forest (classical physics). They have a spooky quality, as Einstein famously put it.
The quantum forest is a spooky place, Einstein said.
Trees that aren’t there when no one is looking suddenly appear when someone is looking. Trees growing in one place seem to be growing in other places no one expected. A tree blows one way in the wind, and someone notices a tree at the other end of the forest — where there is no wind — blowing in the opposite direction. As of right now, no one has offered an explanation that doesn’t seem to lead to paradoxes and contradictions when examined by specialists.
John Stewart Bell proved that trees in the quantum forest violate laws of nature and logic. It makes me wonder whether anyone will ever know anything at all they can fully trust about fundamental, underlying essence of reality.
Some scientists, like Henry Stapp (now retired), have proposed that brains enable processes like choice and experiences like consciousness through the mechanism of quantum interactions. Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose have proposed a quantum mechanism for consciousness they call Orch Or.
Others, like Wolfgang Pauli and C. G. Jung, have gone further — asking, when they were alive, if the non-causal coordination of some process resembling what is today called entanglement might provide an explanation for the seeming synchronicity of some psychic processes — an arena of inquiry a few governments are rumored to have incorporated (to great effect) into their intelligence gathering tool kits.
In a future essay I hope to speculate about how quantum processes like entanglement might or might not influence human thought, intuition, and consciousness.
Billy Lee
P.S. A simplified version of Bell’s Inequality might say that for things described by traits A, B, and C, it is always true that A, not B; plus B, not C; is greater than or equal to: A, not C.
When applied to a room full of people, the inequality might read as follows: tall, not male; plus male, not blonde; is greater than or equal to: tall, not blonde.
Said more simply: tall females and dark haired men will always number more than or equal to the number of tall people with dark hair.
People have tried every collection of traits and quantities imaginable. The inequality is always true, never false; except for quantum objects.
Schrödinger’s Wave Equation describes how the quantum state of a physical system changes with time. It can be used to calculate quantized properties and probability distributions of quantum objects.
One way to think about it: all the ”not” quantities are, in some sense, uncertain in quantum experiments, which wrecks the inequality. That is to say, as soon as ”A” is measured (for example) ,”not B” becomes uncertain. When ”not B” is measured, ”A” becomes uncertain.
The introduction of uncertainties into quantities that were — before measurement — seemingly fixed and certain doesn’t occur in non-quantum collections where individual objects are big enough to make uncertainties not noticeable. The inability to measure both the position and velocity of small things with high precision is called the uncertainty principle and is fundamental to physics. No advancement in the technology of measurement will ever overcome it.
Uncertainty is believed to be an underlying reality of nature. It runs counter to the desire humans have for complete and certain knowledge; it is a thirst that can never be quenched.
But what’s really strange: when working with entangled particles, certainty about one particle implies certainty about its entangled twin; predicted experimental results are precise and never fail.
Stranger still, once entangled quantum particles are measured, the results, though certain, change from those expected by classical theory to those predicted by quantum mechanics. They violate Bell’s Inequality and the common sense of humans about how things should work.
Worse: Bell’s Theorem seems to imply that no one will ever be able to construct a physical model of quantum mechanics to explain the results of quantum experiments. No ”hidden variables” exist which, if anyone knew them, would explain everything.
Another way to say it is this: the underlying reality of quantum mechanics is unknowable. [A technical comment about the mystery of QM is included in the comments section.]
Twelve launch-capable space agencies (having as members about thirty countries) are, among other tasks, looking for alien life inside the solar system. They are exploring the four planets closest to the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, which have three moons among them, and the five outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, which have one-hundred-and-sixty-three.
With so many moons and planets, the hope is that one of them will harbor life.
(Click pic to enlarge in new window.) Some recommend the Drake Equation to calculate odds that intelligent life which can communicate across space might exist elsewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy where our solar system is located.
Of the 166 moons and nine planets in the solar system, probes have managed to land on only five: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Earth’s moon, and Titan (a moon of Saturn).
Just three moons are located in the Goldilocks zone where most scientists believe life has the best chance to take hold. Two orbit Mars at the outer edge of the habitable zone and are probably too cold and irradiated for life. The third moon orbits Earth.
(Click pic to enlarge.) Each column contains the orbiting moons of each planet (and a few other objects) inside the solar system.
Six moons in the solar system are comparable in size to the moon of Earth: Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Europa and Triton. All the rest are tiny with very little gravity — the force that can hold an atmosphere.
The twelfth largest rocky object in the solar system after Earth is Titania of Uranus, named for the Queen of the Fairies in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The moon is nearly a thousand miles in diameter. A 175 pound person on Titania takes on the weight of a newborn baby — a mere six pounds twelve ounces.
Few places in the solar system have enough gravity to hold a human securely, let alone an atmosphere.
No life has been found on any moon — or on any planet (except Earth) thus far. During the next several hundred years, humans will continue to look for life in the solar system should technology and civilization survive and advance.
The Kuiper Belt — which starts at Neptune and extends past Pluto — is a region that is home to an estimated 100,000 bodies of frozen methane, ammonia, and water.
Editors’ Note:(August 2016) The explorer spacecraft,New Horizons, flew by Pluto on July 14, 2016; it will fly by a Kuiper Belt object in January 2019.
Freeman Dyson — physicist, mathematician, and astronomer — has suggested that life might be pervasive in the Kuiper Belt and be easily detected once spacecraft get there. People wait and wonder.
Editors’ Note: (December 2018) Current analyses of data from the Pluto flyby describe a living, dynamic planet with a nitrogen atmosphere and a subsurface ocean. Portions of the surface are smooth with no signs of meteor impacts. Water-gushing volcanoes are common.
The solar system lies within a large disc-shaped galaxy called the Milky Way, which folks can see edge-on in the night sky should they travel out into the countryside away from well-lit cities, which tend to wash out vision.
It might surprise some readers to learn that no one really knows how many stars are in our galaxy. Credible astronomers believe the number to be somewhere between one-hundred and four-hundred billion — a huge range of uncertainty.
No one knows how many stars are similar to the sun. No one knows how many planets there are, or how many moons. Despite a lot of reporting and speculation, humans know almost nothing about the Milky Way.
Space is vast, and astronomers have few telescopes and satellites to accomplish the enormous job of taking it all in and cataloguing what they discover.
3.75 billion years from now, the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our own Milky Way. In this artist’s conception, Andromeda Galaxy is on the left; the Milky Way Galaxy is to the right.
Lack of knowledge about the details of our own galaxy helps to explain why it is difficult to understand the universe as a whole. When I first published this essay in late summer 2014, astronomers estimated that between a hundred and two-hundred billion galaxies populated the visible universe (the estimate is now known to be wrong).
Editor’s Note:On October 1, 2017 CBS News was among the first to report to the public that the Hubble space telescope had detected as many as two trillion galaxies — ten times more than previous estimates.
Two-trillion galaxies — and all the other objects in the universe that lie outside the local area of our own galaxy —are far away and too fuzzy for astronomers to know almost anything about them. The galaxies are out there, true, but the numbers are staggering. The small amount of data astronomers have already gathered is overwhelming scientists’ abilities to process and make sense of it all. And they are just getting started.
The Webb Telescope is scheduled for launch on 30 March 2021. Image is an artist’s rendition featured on Wikipedia.
Civilization is in the very first stages of placing sensors into space which eventually will help astronomers to learn more. One — the James Webb space telescope — is scheduled to launch sometime during the 2020s. Its purpose? — to tear down the 400-million-light-years-after-the-Big-Bang limit of the Hubble telescope.
Humans are going to be able to look back to the beginning of time, at long last. Understanding the process that brought us here is going to expand dramatically. Until then, the Drake equation (see illustration at beginning of the essay) and other speculative tools remain not much more than intriguing diversions.
New sensors like the Webb telescope will upgrade human understanding and bring a new realism that promises to sweep away much of the science-fiction people drink to satiate their thirst for ultimate knowledge.
Most articles, television shows, and movies that purport to portray the universe are (to risk overstating it) kind-of scammy. They seduce a gullible and curious public, which is hungry for answers about the universe that no one yet has.
The science community has a vested interest in public funding; they tend to go-along with dubious depictions to pander popular support. Claims that astronomers today understand fully the nature of the universe are ludicrous. The universe is vast. Much of its matter and energy that scientists believe is “out there” can’t be found — not yet anyway.
Most stars are too faint to see with unaided eyes. The closest star system to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, is too faint to see without a telescope.
Three out of four stars in the galaxy are probably red dwarfs. Red dwarfs burn essentially forever but are smaller and much cooler than the Sun, which makes them impossible to observe without special infrared detectors.
These infrared detectors are launched into outer-space beyond Earth’s atmosphere to avoid being blinded by the infrared heat radiating off Earth’s surface.
Proxima Centauri main star. Image by Hubble Telescope.
Red dwarfs seem to be emitting solar flares that are a thousand times more energetic and frequent than those generated by stars like the Sun. They emit light in frequencies not useful for plant photosynthesis — the basic life-support process on Earth.
It’s difficult to see how Earth-style life could get started and survive inside a red dwarf planetary system. No one knows what percentage, if any, of red dwarf stars have planets suitable for life.
Canon 85mm photo of Proxima Centauri three-star system by Skatebiker on English Wikipedia.
Red dwarfs live for thousands-of-billions of years. The Sun’s lifespan is eight to ten billion years — a tiny fraction of a red dwarf’s.
The Sun is similar to — who knows? — maybe one in five stars in the galaxy. It’s an optimistic guess, based on sampling and wishful hoping. Astronomers seem to agree that the Sun ranks as one of the largest stars in the Milky Way.
Statistical sampling of two-trillion galaxies argues that the Milky Way galaxy is also among the largest. A full 90% of all galaxies are smaller.
Calculations involving galaxy-motion and gravity suggest that when astronomers look at the cosmos, they aren’t seeing ninety-five percent of what’s out there. Physicists call the missing stuff dark energy and dark matter. Something that no one has yet been able to detect seems to be distorting the rotation of galaxies and disrupting the metrics of space-time.
The universe seems to be expanding, and the expansion is accelerating. Where is the missing mass and energy that drives the expansion? No one knows.
Perhaps parallel universes are stacked on every side against our own. They might swarm like bees around a hive. The gravitational pull of their enormous masses might be pulling our own universe apart. Galaxies inside our universe might be falling toward massive structures that lie outside our field of vision beyond a kind of event horizon.
Again, no one knows. It’s speculation. Today the expansion is described by a simple constant added into Einstein’s equation for General Relativity. A constant seems too simple, at least for me. It describes but doesn’t explain.
Einstein’s equation accounts for the accelerating expansion of the universe by including a term called the ”cosmological constant”. It is the Greek letter lambda ( Λ), which is multiplied against every member of the metric tensor, ”g” and then added to the left side of the equals sign, which is the side of the equation that describes the shape (curvature) of spacetime. The right side describes the distribution of mass / energy in spacetime.
Many of the galaxies that are visible from Earth are tens-of-thousands of times farther away than the farthest stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which astronomers say is at least 100,000 light years across — a distance of six-hundred-thousand trillion miles. The galaxy is perhaps 200 light years thick, but its center is thicker still — about 10,000 light years.
If the Milky Way was shrunk to the diameter of a ten-inch plate, the plate would assume a thickness of a few human hairs but at the center it would thicken to the size of an egg-yolk.
To put these distances into perspective, the latest space probes, which travel at roughly twelve miles-per-second, are not capable of escaping the gravity of our solar system until they are mechanically slung by multiple encounters with planets to a velocity greater than 27 miles per second. At that speed, crossing the Milky Way takes nearly 700 million years.
What the Milky Way might look like if photographed by an extremely powerful telescope from the galaxy Andromeda, which is two-and-a-half million light-years from Earth.
The Milky Way is one galaxy in what astronomers have learned is a universe of two trillion.
Until scientists know more — and it could be decades or even centuries from now — prudence and the scientific method advise odds-makers to use the most conservative estimates, not the most optimistic, to speculate about intelligent life in the cosmos.
Until evidence accumulates that is more compelling than what is available today, plugging conservative numbers into the Drake equation, or any other speculative tool, always seems to give the same discouraging result — a number so small it might as well be zero.
No intelligent life that can communicate across space should exist in our galaxy or anywhere else in the universe. None. Yet, here we all are. It’s kind of mysterious, at least to me.
Substituting less conservative numbers yields a different result. Intelligent civilizations could number in the thousands or even millions. No empirical evidence supports such optimism, at least not yet.
Planets and Sun are shown to scale in this model. Distances are not. From left to right, largest to smallest: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Pluto. Pluto — recently demoted to the status of a ‘’dwarf planet” — has been re-argued for planet-hood by some cosmologists because the recent NASA fly-by showed Pluto slightly larger and more planet-like than previously thought.
Looking closer to home within our own galaxy, astronomers in 2003 discovered Sedna, which some think is another dwarf-sized planet orbiting far beyond Pluto.
Astronomers seem to discover new planet candidates every other month — Eris and Makemake are two more Pluto-sized objects out of hundreds that come to mind.
In 2014 Caltech astronomers presented evidence for another planet they called the ninth planet, which might be an object ten times the mass of Earth orbiting in a highly elliptical orbit at the farthest reaches of the solar system.
Regardless of what astronomers continue to discover, it seems likely that the Sun will always contain at least 99% of the mass in the solar system.
Earth is fortunate to orbit a star that is located in a less active region of space than many other stars in the Milky Way. The Sun lies safely between two spiral arms that are bright because of ongoing birthing of new stars. The location lies halfway from the center of the galaxy to its outer edge.
Click pic for better view of Earth’s position inside Milky Way galaxy.
Although stars are spread more or less evenly throughout the Milky Way, life-destroying cosmic events are less likely in regions where stars aren’t being born. Earth lives between bright spirals in a zone of relative inactivity, which has enabled the evolution of eukaryotic one-celled life to progress to intelligence, then civilization, and finally to space exploration over the past billion-and-a-half years.
Earth has a number of unusual features that make it a good candidate for highly evolved life. One important feature is its nearly circular orbit around the Sun, which helps Earth avoid the catastrophic temperature variations characteristic of the more egg-shaped (elliptical) paths of some of the other planets, like Mars.
Only the orbits of Venus and Neptune are more round than Earth’s. Mar’s orbit is five times less round. Of all the solar objects, only Neptune’s moon Triton is known to have for all practical purposes a perfectly circular orbit.
Another advantage for Earth is its 300-mile thick atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen, 80% of which lies within 10 miles of its surface. Nitrogen and oxygen make up 99% of Earth’s atmosphere. These gases are opaque to non-electrically-charged, high-frequency light.
Nitrogen molecules block high-frequency, ultra-violet light while oxygen molecules, slightly smaller, block higher-frequency (shorter wave-length) x-rays and gamma-rays, which can be lethal to living organisms.
A three-atom form of oxygen molecule known as ozone helps to absorb in the upper atmosphere a dangerous-to-life, lower-frequency-band of ultra-violet light that nitrogen can’t block.
In the distant past — during the Carboniferous Period 300 to 360 million years ago — Earth’s atmosphere held 60% more oxygen than it does now, which provided more shade against damaging high-energy light. Dinosaurs and large insects — like dragonflies with three-foot wing-spans — thrived in the highly-oxygenated air they breathed.
It is one of the wonderful ironies of our planet that the oxygen which empowers the biology of life also defends it against the physics of life-destroying high-energy light and cosmic rays that are always raining down from outer space.
Without atmospheric moisture and greenhouse gases, Earth’s average temperature would fall to 100°F below zero.
In contrast to nitrogen and oxygen, which block high-frequency light from reaching Earth’s surface, carbon-dioxide, methane, and water vapor trap low-frequency light (infra-red light, or heat) and prevent it from radiating (or escaping) into space.
These green-house gases work like a blanket to help keep Earth at a constant temperature. Carbon dioxide, though rare, is heavy compared to oxygen and nitrogen. It tends to cling close to Earth’s surface where it is respirated by plants. Without atmospheric moisture, methane, and carbon dioxide the temperature of Earth would average 100°F below zero and vary widely between day and night as it does on the Moon.
Although water vapor and carbon dioxide make but a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, they have a significant impact on the planet’s ability to retain heat when their concentrations increase in the atmosphere. Exhaust from commercial jet aircraft, believe it or not, contributes greatly to the concentration of carbon dioxide and water vapor in the eight-mile highs of the atmosphere where these jets fly.
After the terrorist attack on 911, the government suspended all flights over the United States — including those by commercial aircraft — for four days. The skies over America cleared themselves of clouds and turned deep blue. Temperatures dropped.
I was amazed to observe these changes develop so quickly after all flying was suspended. It took about two weeks for aviation to return to pre-attack intensity. With the return of aviation, familiar weather patterns followed.
Unlike Earth, the planet Venus has so much carbon dioxide that its surface broils with heat. An explorer would have to hover thirty-seven miles above its surface to experience atmospheric pressures and temperatures similar to those on Earth.
By contrast, the atmosphere of Mars, though almost entirely carbon dioxide, is thin — only 1% as thick as Earth’s. Even so, near their surfaces the density of carbon dioxide is 15 times higher on Mars than on Earth — enough to grow plants and — if poisons in the soil can be avoided — terraform the surface should humans decide.
Although Mars is cold, especially at night, its carbon dioxide atmosphere enables daytime temperatures to sometimes reach 85° F during summer in its southern latitudes. The problem is that any plants that might grow in Martian soil must endure bombardment by dangerous-to-life high-frequency light and cosmic particles. Also, Martian soils are poisoned by perchlorates. The soil is useless for agriculture though perchlorates could be broken down to provide a source of oxygen.
I should mention argon, which is 1% of Earth’s atmosphere. It is formed by the radioactive decay of a rare isotope of potassium in Earth’s crust. It is transparent to infra-red heat, so it has no effect on global warming. It is heavy — like carbon dioxide — so it clings to the surface, but its small atoms, widely spaced, do little to prevent the escape of infra-red radiation.
Another asset that gives Earth an advantage for life is its large moon whose gravitational field acts like a vacuum cleaner to suck up cosmic-debris like asteroids and comets that might threaten to strike. Only Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune are similarly equipped.
Image courtesy of NASA
The moon stabilizes Earth’s tilt as it orbits the sun. The tilt is about 23.4°, which is why Earth has seasons. The tilt swings back and forth a few degrees over periods of 41,000 years. This variation is stable enough to permit life to survive and evolve despite the periodic generation of ice-ages.
Computer simulations of a moonless Earth show that with no moon to stabilize it, tilt variations could approach 90°. Dramatic destabilization has emerged in some simulations that make it difficult to imagine how advanced life could evolve and survive the climate extremes that might result from chaotic wobbling.
The Moon is receding away from Earth at a rate of almost two inches per year. It will take at least a billion years for the motion of Earth to destabilize. It seems that humans have time to figure something out.
Sadly, the sun gets brighter and less massive with each passing day. Over the course of a billion years, Earth will move farther from the sun to conserve its angular momentum. Meanwhile, the warming sun will overtake Earth’s great escape to evaporate its oceans and make the planet uninhabitable.
Looking at coming events from a more optimistic perspective, people can probably agree that a billion years is a long time. The species-human is likely to be extinct by then anyhow. So why worry?!
Another life-enhancing feature of Earth is its large, open, ice-free, salt-water oceans. Most scientists believe salt-water oceans provide safe habitat for evolving life.
Earth’s oceans make up three-fourths of the planet’s surface. In addition to providing a vast incubator for life, oceans reduce the probability that space-debris will fall onto land.
Odds are that debris will fall into the oceans where it is rapidly cooled and rendered harmless. Should debris strike land and throw up clouds of dust and ash to block the sun, the oceans provide a safety-blanket of thermal protection.
This photo of Titan’s surface is the only picture taken at the surface of a moon or planet that is farther away than Mars.
Besides Earth, only Titan — one of Saturn’s many moons — has open oceans (of liquid methane and ethane) on its surface. These oceans are more like shallow seas or lakes, estimated to be about five-hundred feet deep. Scientists think Titan has a salty sub-surface water ocean, as well.
NASA reported this year that another moon of Saturn, tiny Enceladus (310 miles in diameter), holds a six mile deep subsurface ocean — confirmed from Cassini fly-bys. Its over one-hundred geysers are what is populating Saturn’s E-ring. Data from the geysers indicate that the ocean is warm and salty and saturated with organic molecules. Analysis by Cassini instruments is on-going.
Of the moons of Jupiter, only Europa, Ganymede, and Calisto are thought to harbor salt-water oceans.
Europa is known to have a salt-water ocean, but it is covered by miles-thick ice.
Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, is believed to have a 500 mile deep salt-water ocean that lies beneath a crust 125 miles thick. The crust is thought to be a rock and ice mixture.
Scientists suspect that Callisto has a salt-water ocean, but it might be sandwiched between ice layers sixty or more miles beneath its surface.
Only the oceans of Earth are open, un-frozen, and deep enough (averaging three miles) to protect Earth against most encounters with meteors and other space-debris.
Fortunately for Earth, the solar system itself contains a massive structure that helps to protect and shield it from danger. It is Jupiter, the large and strongly gravitational planet, which like the moon pulls away space-debris that might otherwise zoom toward Earth to imperil all life. Observations suggest that comets strike Jupiter every couple of years. Comets that don’t strike are gravitationally deflected out of the solar system more often than not.
Another fortunate feature: Earth has, geologists say, a molten iron-core that emits a strong magnetic field to deflect life-destroying, electrically-charged cosmic particles, that have energies, some of them, approaching those of baseballs traveling sixty miles-per-hour. Cosmic particles accelerated the process of ripping away Mar’s atmosphere. Without a magnetic field the Mars atmosphere is defenseless against cosmic erosion.
As for Earth, high energy particles that do manage to blast through it’s magnetic shield (magnetosphere) are often scattered and rendered harmless — fortunately — by collisions with the oxygen molecules in Earth’s dense atmosphere.
One exception is muons, which are byproducts of particle collisions high in Earth’s atmosphere that are energetic enough to burrow down to hundreds of yards beneath Earth’s land surfaces and oceans. In rare heavy bombardments at high altitudes, muons can increase risks of cancer and cataracts to pilots and their passengers. Muons are like electrons except that they are 207 times heavier and much shorter-lived.
Sun’s solar wind deflected by Earth’s magnetosphere. NASA art.
The magnetosphere is strong enough to deflect the solar wind, which can strip away all or part of the atmosphere of any planet that lacks one (like Mars).
The magnetosphere is effective and strong, because it is huge and surrounds Earth out to five Earth-diameters on the side facing the sun; one-hundred Earth-diameters on the side opposite. In any small area of space, though, a simple bar-magnet is fifty times stronger.
The solar wind isn’t all bad. As it radiates outward from our Sun, it forms a huge magnetic bubble called the heliosphere that extends 3.5 billion miles past the Kuiper Belt.
Inside this Sun Bubble the rest of the solar system is protected from massive cosmic particles that pour in from the two trillion galaxies of stars that make the universe. The Sun bubble deflects to shade our solar system in relative safety.
The heliosphere of the Sun works together with the magnetosphere of Earth and its oxygenated atmosphere to break up and knock away the vast majority of cosmic particles (high-speed protons and atomic nuclei) that would otherwise rip Earth-life to shreds.
Absent the magnetosphere, life could evolve safely only in the deep oceans or far below the surface of Earth. Stated differently: a strong, protective magnetic field is essential for the survival of surface life on any planet.
Large solar flares are known to have enough energy to kill exposed astronauts. It’s one of many reasons NASA doesn’t send people to Mars, which lacks a magnetosphere. Mars is under relentless bombardment of atomic particles that can damage the atoms and molecules in the cells of a human body.
All planets have magnetic fields of various strengths except Venus and Mars. The iron in the core of Mars is believed to have frozen solid, or nearly so, hundreds of millions of years ago, which helped force its protective magnetic field to collapse.
Venus retains its molten iron-nickel core, but the planet lacks tectonic action in its crust. The heat of its core can’t escape through its surface, which prevents in its molten center the emergence of the turbulence essential to make a planetary dynamo of sufficient power to rev-up a magnetosphere.
It’s a shame that both Mars and Venus lack magnetospheres, because both planets have attributes that might otherwise make them good candidates for life.
Earth’s core is huge — it rivals the entire planet of Mars in size. The inner third of the core — the center — is already frozen solid. It is believed to be pure iron. The core is freezing itself solid from the inside out.
The rest of the core is hot liquid iron and nickle, mostly, with some sulfur and other impurities mixed in. It circulates in complex eddies, which generate the magnetic fields that protect Earth by deflecting the solar wind.
The flow of currents in the molten metal is made stable and more reliable by the unusual plate tectonics peculiar to Earth. Gaps in Earth’s crustal plates allow heat to escape from volcanic valves, which help to maintain a controlled roil in the eddy currents to produce the dynamo that drives its magnetosphere.
The only moon known to have a magnetic field is Jupiter’s Ganymede. Jupiter itself harbors a field fourteen times more powerful than Earth’s. The giant planet’s four largest moons orbit inside it, where they are protected from the solar-wind and low frequency (low-energy) cosmic particles. By contrast, Mercury’s magnetic field is one-hundred times less powerful than Earth’s.
Despite these several advantages for sustained evolution of life, Earth has the apparent disadvantage of a volatile climate which, scientists believe, has turned cold and icy during several extended periods. I mention this volatility to remind people that the circumstances that have enabled life to advance to the technological civilization of today are complex and not obvious.
Until scientists are able to tease out of history what is actually important and significant for the development of advanced life, no one can know what the rest of the universe may have in store — unless we travel out into space and explore it.
I want to believe: we will find the way.
Here’s the problem. The closest stars to the Sun are twenty-five trillion miles away. To escape the solar system, engineers must build spacecraft that can accelerate to 27 miles per second. At that speed the nearest stars, Proxima Centauri, and the binary star system, Alpha Centauri, are 30,000 years distant.
How are humans going to explore the universe? How are we going to answer the questions about our place in the cosmos, when we can’t travel to the nearest stars?
There are trillions of stars, most of them many millions of times farther away than these, our closest neighbors. It seems hopeless that anyone will ever know the answers to the basic questions about the universe that so many are asking.
Still, in my heart of hearts, I want to believe we will find a way.
Billy Lee
Editors Note:November 2017; NASA announced that the latest count of galaxies might be as high as two trillion. The velocity required by spacecraft to escape the Milky Way galaxy from Earth (our planet is 25,000 light years from the galaxy center) is 342 miles-per-second. At this velocity the nearest galaxy — Andromeda — is a flight of 2.28 billion years. There are two-trillion galaxies more!
It doesn’t really matter. Here’s why:
The Parker Solar Probe scheduled for launch in 2018 will require seven gravity-assists from Venus over a period of six years to reach a velocity of 120 miles-per-second before it embarks on a 2024 suicide mission into the outer atmosphere of the Sun.
Venus and the Sun combined can’t accelerate the Parker Solar Probe to the galaxy-escape velocity of 342 miles-per-second.
Minus gravity-assists, the fastest vehicles in development today by space-flight engineers will accelerate to speeds less than 27 miles-per-second — the escape velocity required to exit the solar-system. Without gravity assists that take years to rev-up, we humans can’t leave our own solar system, which is arguably the tiniest imaginable fraction of the Milky Way galaxy.
The good news is that life-forms in far-away solar systems face the same obstacles. If they are hostile, humans can be assured that they will have a difficult time getting here.
The bad news is that humans are trapped. The Milky Way Galaxy is a prison. We can’t escape, at least not yet; most likely, not ever. The escape velocity of the Milky Way Galaxy from Earth exceeds 340 miles-per-second — nearly three times the velocity that the Parker Solar Probe will be traveling when it is finally able to bury itself inside the Sun.
, right? Get out the calculator, those who don’t believe it. Reversing the digits to make 8402 does not result in an exact number that can be raised by the power of 5 to produce 8402. 
plus a lot more decimals. 6.09363… is not a whole (or exact) number. 
